Thinking outside of space and time
Some thoughts after listening to an interview with Donald Hoffman
I recently listened to one of the most thought provoking interviews I’ve heard in a while, an interview with Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist/evolutionary psychologist who seems to be opening up a whole new way of approaching the hardest problems in physics and neuroscience by questioning the foundation of space and time itself.
Hoffman picks up on the renegade idea that “Space-time is doomed”, first proposed by the theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed around 2010, which proposes something more fundamental than Einstein’s space-time is needed to explain the nature of reality. From this starting point, Hoffman pivots to his own fields of study in neuroscience and evolution to apply this theory in two directions.
First, if space-time is not fundamental why does everyday reality seem to exist in space and time? The answer for Hoffman here is evolution using game theory to support his argument.1 In other words, evolution molded our perception in a certain way to see the world within space and time to help us survive. For Hoffman, space-time is just a data structure that organizes the world, not fundamental, a position that he states was somewhat anticipated by Kant. If we saw reality as it really is, we may not have survived as a species (I’m thinking the Lotus Eaters here from The Odyssey). To illustrate this point, he compares our perception to a computer’s UI (User Interface). We see images and words on a screen which lets us read, email, search, etc. on a computer, but if instead we were looking at the physical architecture of a computer, these everyday functions would be nearly impossible to perform.
The second point is that if space-time is not fundamental to the universe, then what is? To this question Hoffman proposes consciousness. Again returning to the brain, shifting the fundamental structure of the universe to consciousness would tackle the “hard problem”2 of neuroscience which has attempted to explain, so far unconvincingly, how consciousness emerged from a physical brain. By making consciousness fundamental, Hoffman and his collaborators propose turning physics and neuroscience on their head. Instead of applying a reductionist approach to the physical world which has been the approach since the Enlightenment, the new paradigm would be forming a science to explain how space, time and all the laws of physics emerge from consciousness.
The interview with Hoffman is well worth with the 3 hour listen and while he does go into some of the math and experiments behind the theories its still spoken for the lay audience. I’ve thought about some of the ideas he presents and, as he admits, they do seem to resonate with many spiritual traditions which speak of consciousness or spirit as something more fundamental to the universe than what we perceive. If this theory gains some traction, it could result in revisiting some of the mystical traditions as well as the Idealist tradition of philosophy , from Berkeley to Bergson3, in a different light. It could result in a complete paradigm shift, similar to the move from Newtonian to Einsteinian science, as defined by Thomas Kuhn.
For now, without going into the arguments for and against Hoffman and Arkani-Hamed, the idea does present some fabulous thought experiments. Thinking outside of space and time, what would that look like? Could technology be developed outside space-time? Do the experiments with patients using psychoactive substance which seem to hint at worlds outside space and time point to a reality or gateway beyond just personal psychological accounts?
Even within our normal reality, space-time does not always seem absolute. There are times when a morning seems to fly by or sometimes when each minute seems to endure for long stretches of time. Twentieth century philosophers have tended to treat this phenomena as a quality of human experience, but what if there is something deeper and it somehow exists with consciousness that is outside our brains?
Another thought was whether a theory like this could possibly shed some light on the UAP phenomenon that’s been reported in the past couple years by the Navy. Objects spotted on military radar that seems to defy the laws of gravity and physics but also seem to have some psychic ability to anticipate or read the thoughts of the pilots that see them in the air.
While some of these ideas may seem farfetched or out of touch with reality, one takeaway I felt was the immense complexity of the universe, that our existing theories of the universe are probably only scratching the surface, and the one of the greatest mysteries in the universe is our very own consciousness which could help us tap into a greater understanding of ourselves and reality itself.
I guess time will only tell… unless time is not fundamental in which case it may have already been told and we just need to learn to remember.
This is the subject of his book, The Case against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes.
This is the problem first proposed by David Chalmers in 1995 which has inspired various theories in philosophy of mind and neuroscience ever since.
I mention Bergson here because, despite his popularity at the time, Einstein regarded his philosophy on time and memory as nonscientific.