“she's got a book called thus spoke the plant i love the title by monica gagliano”
Books mentioned in The Case Against Reality — Professor Donald Hoffman
From The Tim Ferriss Show · 2022-04-13
All matched books in this episode
“he points out that thinking is not a very deep intelligence compared to the the realm of our reality beyond thought so in these spiritual traditions one of the things you do in meditation is you let go of thought completely right any thoughts that come up you don't fight them but you don't give them any engagement space the illegal let them go and and the the point that they make is that as you do that and it may take you years to really be able to do that you are getting in touch with an infinite intelligence that is much much deeper than any thought intelligence and in fact is the source of all intelligence that comes through our thoughts and so so if that's right that that also makes sense from from this girdles and completeness theorem point of view that i've been taking on this that is that consciousness there's no description of it including any conceptual thought description that we can give that even scratches the surface of the depths that girdles incompleteness theorem says is there so so i see this correspondence again between letting go of thought so there's this really interesting thing we need thought without words we wouldn't have this this conversation right hard to podcast very difficult hard to podcast with so so it's not like words are bad and concepts are bad the question is how what is the relationship between conceptual systems and this intelligence that transcends any conceptual system that's the really interesting now the spiritual traditions will say it's a pointer relationship where i'm using the word aware as a pointer of course the word aware don't take it too seriously you can also call it consciousness whatever but don't take the point or too seriously and then some pointers are really bad right so we have this notion of good and bad pointers well so as a scientist i'm going now that's really interesting what is what do we mean mathematically by a good pointer versus a bad pointer can we actually take these ideas and make them more rigorous so for example i'll just give a really simple concrete idea of kind of thing that i'm talking about the real numbers the real line you know from minus infinity to infinity right so that's a lot of numbers how about the integers i'm the mathematician but it sounds like a lot of numbers it's a lot of numbers right and now just now just the integers from minus infinity to infinity well right there's between zero and one there's a whole bunch of real numbers right so there's there's a sense in which the integers aren't a very good approximation to the real numbers right there's so many real numbers between 0 and 1 0 is not really telling me anything about the integers between 0 and 1. so so you could say that the integers are a pointer to the real numbers but it's a really bad pointer but now take the rational numbers a rational number is an integer divided by an integer so you just take any two integers you get a ratio those are called the rational numbers and and it turns out that the rational numbers are what or what mathematicians call dents in the real numbers you can approximate a real number as close as you want with rational numbers but not with integers now it turns out there's just as many rational numbers as there are integers this sounds crazy i just so the number of integers equals the number of rational numbers the integers are a bad pointer to the real numbers but the rational numbers are a good pointer to the real numbers yeah they can approximate them so this is the kind of thing that i see can we take the spiritual idea that what we are is an infinite intelligence that cannot be captured by any finite conceptual system language for example speech thought we have this notion of good bad and worst pointers can we make this idea which has been for thousands of years in the spiritual traditions can we now you know dust it off and and and make it serviceable in a more rigorous way can we actually take spirituality and turn it into a scientific discipline again which is not to desiccate it and deprive it of of its life but to make it precise and make it actually serviceable actually make predictions i would love i mean my father was a minister in a protestant fundamentalist church here's what i would love to the sermon the guy gets up and his sermon is guess what we just discovered mathematically about spirituality this week you won't believe it here's here's this new theorem about spirituality uh sign me up i would love to go to a church like that where they're telling you the new discoveries you know where rigorous discoveries about good pointers to you know here's here's how to think about consciousness here's a better way to do your meditation and we now have this mathematics to explain why you should do it this way and not that way i would just love that kind of thing and i think that science and spirituality eventually could collaborate”
“he points out that thinking is not a very deep intelligence compared to the the realm of our reality beyond thought so in these spiritual traditions one of the things you do in meditation is you let go of thought completely right any thoughts that come up you don't fight them but you don't give them any engagement space the illegal let them go and and the the point that they make is that as you do that and it may take you years to really be able to do that you are getting in touch with an infinite intelligence that is much much deeper than any thought intelligence and in fact is the source of all intelligence that comes through our thoughts and so so if that's right that that also makes sense from from this girdles and completeness theorem point of view that i've been taking on this that is that consciousness there's no description of it including any conceptual thought description that we can give that even scratches the surface of the depths that girdles incompleteness theorem says is there so so i see this correspondence again between letting go of thought so there's this really interesting thing we need thought without words we wouldn't have this this conversation right hard to podcast very difficult hard to podcast with so so it's not like words are bad and concepts are bad the question is how what is the relationship between conceptual systems and this intelligence that transcends any conceptual system that's the really interesting now the spiritual traditions will say it's a pointer relationship where i'm using the word aware as a pointer of course the word aware don't take it too seriously you can also call it consciousness whatever but don't take the point or too seriously and then some pointers are really bad right so we have this notion of good and bad pointers well so as a scientist i'm going now that's really interesting what is what do we mean mathematically by a good pointer versus a bad pointer can we actually take these ideas and make them more rigorous so for example i'll just give a really simple concrete idea of kind of thing that i'm talking about the real numbers the real line you know from minus infinity to infinity right so that's a lot of numbers how about the integers i'm the mathematician but it sounds like a lot of numbers it's a lot of numbers right and now just now just the integers from minus infinity to infinity well right there's between zero and one there's a whole bunch of real numbers right so there's there's a sense in which the integers aren't a very good approximation to the real numbers right there's so many real numbers between 0 and 1 0 is not really telling me anything about the integers between 0 and 1. so so you could say that the integers are a pointer to the real numbers but it's a really bad pointer but now take the rational numbers a rational number is an integer divided by an integer so you just take any two integers you get a ratio those are called the rational numbers and and it turns out that the rational numbers are what or what mathematicians call dents in the real numbers you can approximate a real number as close as you want with rational numbers but not with integers now it turns out there's just as many rational numbers as there are integers this sounds crazy i just so the number of integers equals the number of rational numbers the integers are a bad pointer to the real numbers but the rational numbers are a good pointer to the real numbers yeah they can approximate them so this is the kind of thing that i see can we take the spiritual idea that what we are is an infinite intelligence that cannot be captured by any finite conceptual system language for example speech thought we have this notion of good bad and worst pointers can we make this idea which has been for thousands of years in the spiritual traditions can we now you know dust it off and and and make it serviceable in a more rigorous way can we actually take spirituality and turn it into a scientific discipline again which is not to desiccate it and deprive it of of its life but to make it precise and make it actually serviceable actually make predictions i would love i mean my father was a minister in a protestant fundamentalist church here's what i would love to the sermon the guy gets up and his sermon is guess what we just discovered mathematically about spirituality this week you won't believe it here's here's this new theorem about spirituality uh sign me up i would love to go to a church like that where they're telling you the new discoveries you know where rigorous discoveries about good pointers to you know here's here's how to think about consciousness here's a better way to do your meditation and we now have this mathematics to explain why you should do it this way and not that way i would just love that kind of thing and i think that science and spirituality eventually could collaborate”