#37 – Decorated permutations of conscious agents: an interview with Donald Hoffman

In episode 37 of the quantum consciousness series, Justin Riddle takes a deep dive into Donald Hoffman’s conscious agent model and relates it to the leading theories of quantum consciousness. The structure of this episode is an introduction to Hoffman’s model of conscious agents, then an interview with Don Hoffman in November 2022, and finally some reflections on the implications of this model. Hoffman begins by describing the interface theory of perception: we have mistaken the external “physical” world to be fundamental reality. But this external world that we see around us is an evolved interface that was created through billions of years of evolution and cannot be trusted. The world you experience is like a video game – with icons, side quests, and abstract motivations to win victory points. The “real” world is not directly accessible to us through our perceptual systems and there is a great illusion at play. Hoffman then proposes his Conscious Agents theory, in which the universe is comprised of conscious beings interacting with each other. He describes these conscious agents as Markov Chains – probabilistic systems that move through a set of possible experience and action states while learning from their interactions with the world at large. Finally, he proposes that conscious agents are composed of conscious agents resulting in a fractal nested hierarchy of beings from the scale of the entire universe down to the Planck scale. This nested hierarchy is fundamental and now just needs to be mapped into modern particle physics in order to complete his theory of everything. Here, he introduces “decorated permutations” which are a way to map the Markov Models of his conscious agents into geometric structures. With this mapping, he claims to connect his agents to fundamental geometric forms at the core of reality, such as the amplituhedron, and then that amplituhedron can derive space-time, particle physics, and quantum mechanics. His theory is very Platonist in its essence and relies on a geometric depiction of reality. At the end of the episode, I praise the ability of Hoffman’s theory to connect the nested hierarchies of beings into a substrate for mathematical forms to arise, but also caution that his model throws away the physical world and mental world to some degree to focus exclusively on the Platonic world of forms. Living within a hyperdimensional geometric form may result in the same nihilistic conclusions that our lives are just unfolding as sub-projections of this universal form. Can we salvage the human spirit from unmoving crystalline geometry? I hope you enjoy!