 Let's play a little bit on the telos. I just wanna play on this for a bit. Given the fact that we're talking about simulation tech, we're given AI VR tech emerging, what's being unleashed with quantum computation. So ultimately it seems as though the way that a tree drops seeds and those become trees and the way that a zygote makes a human and humans procreate make more humans, the same way that a big bang makes a civilization and we make more big bangs. Do you see the recursion as the telos? Do you see this as a quine in a sense? By telos, do you mean some kind of like purpose to the whole thing? Yeah. Yeah, I think, I mean, I guess my view, recursion comes in the kind of self-referential nature of things comes in with life and with it's crucial for consciousness with, you know, because we're kind of self-starting creatures where there is no, we're both the puppeteer and the puppet, you know, of ourselves. But I see, I think I see, that's actually really interesting prompt because I would say that I see the evolution of the universe starting at the big bang as rather than a kind of recursive process as quite a kind of linear process, like a kind of like a radial process of like a flower blooming or something where you have a big bang and then you have physics becoming, coming chemistry, becoming biology, becoming life and just increasing complexity. And it's, but this is very, I don't know, aesthetically, I like it as well. It makes me feel very like reassured that the world is just moving in one direction and it makes it things feel less loopy and complicated than the kind of quine picture because when you start getting interested in consciousness you really can't tumble down, you know, holes of solipsism and, you know, not knowing where the kind of floor is a reality. But I would say, yeah, actually, when it comes to, so when it comes to reality itself, there's a sense in which we kind of touched on earlier, you know, Newton had this idea that the universe is made of little separate things, little separate bricks that are truly separate. And then with quantum mechanics, we now know it's far more like an interwoven tapestry or like a house of cards where every kind of piece is dependent on all the other pieces. And consciousness is like that as well. I think this is how you can get consciousness arising out of a physical system because it's not like it introduces a new substance into existence, but at the level of information, a system can hold that the world is one way as opposed to another way. It can hold that something is hot versus cold but then there are correlations with like, well, hot things tend to be more red and yellow. There's like long wavelengths of light rather than kind of blues and greens. In this kind of self-referential process, you build up consciousness, you get this kind of house of cards of more this, less of that. And this is kind of touched on the Buddhist concept of emptiness. When you, in the West, we have ideas of qualia, the idea that redness is a thing, like the idea of qualia was supposed to be like an atom of consciousness, which I think should sound like a kind of nonsense idea. Red is only red with respect to everything else in consciousness. You can't isolate it and have just red. And so this is the Buddhist concept of emptiness. If you really look at red for long enough, it loses any sense of any intrinsic essence. It's all just this kind of mirage of relative change. So I'd say in that sense, I don't know if that's precisely in the way you mean this kind of self-referential structure, but I think, yeah, everything emerges in this way. And it's a feature of a holistic picture of things, a holistic nature of consciousness and the holistic nature of the physical world as well. Inevitably, it's going to happen with the West becoming more and more. And even China, you know, Japan is a canary in the coal mine in many ways with humans passing. I don't know if you've seen the husk, but the husk is the contraption now for the ultimate unit where you're literally just, you know, you've got your bed, you've got your computer, you've got your controller, you've got your whole setup. And soon it's just, you know, it's right in. It's connected directly in. And if you don't put on VR and use it for 30 minutes and then take it off and think to yourself, how am I not already in VR? Then you don't know. But if you do have that process, you take it off and you make the self-inquiry and you go, how is this not already VR? Then you know. And I think that that is the essence of where the modernized world is pushing and that the modernized world is going to triangulate on the exact same realization that 5,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, from everywhere across the world, to perennial spiritual wisdom has been triangulating on. So we'll see. And I do think that John Smart's Transition Hypothesis has a lot of potential as well. We've hit on so many awesome things. I want to talk about this for a bit. I think that you've had incredible guests on your show already. I highly recommend you guys to go and check out James's podcast. He's crushing it. Check out his YouTube channel. Kristoff Cock episode was so good. So was Donald Huffman, both such great episodes. If we take Huffman's perspective for a little bit, we were talking about this a bit before we started. It seems like a multimodal user interface and the video game analogy we were just talking about a moment ago. Those are basically anyone that has, anyone that goes through that process of self inquiry we were just talking about, inevitably comes to the realization that they themselves have a user interface that they are, they're in a reality. They have this user interface. There are fitness functions. You know that if you eat a bucket of ice cream, you're gonna feel like shit and that you're gonna feel like shit the next day and that you're probably shaving, could be shaving a day or two or even a week off of your longevity. And now versus if you eat a salad, you're gonna feel great. You'll feel great tomorrow. You might have an extra week on. So there are these understandings of what you do in this reality is going to inevitably make you more peaceful, more happy, a better mate, more knowledge about truth, more a better mate for procreation. So I'm also curious where living mirrors theory could potentially synthesis with the multimodal user interface because in a sense that's what the cell does have. The cell has a ledger and an understanding of the world and then it's constantly updating that based on fitness. So do you see a synthesis of Hoffman and you and in a sense as well? We can see your head nodding. Yeah, so I think that's a really, really important point. So yeah, I would say when I was an undergrad, when I first was kind of introduced to psychology and neuroscience, it was taught that it was kind of a fact or almost a point of definition that colors are not out there in the world. Beauty is not out there in the world. Things are not objectively colorful, objectively beautiful. Those are qualities that exist in consciousness. And this was just like daily one of like talking about perception, let's get our definitions straight. If leaves are not green, you perceive them to be green, but that's in consciousness, right? So when I first saw Donald Hoffman's theory, it took me a while to understand what he was saying was radical because when he says a case of reality as the name of his book and he was saying the world isn't actually full of these colors, I was like, well, that's a fact basically. Like I think if you're thinking about the world the right way, that's something, yeah, that's true. But then it turns out he's saying something far more radical that like, you know, the moon isn't there when you're not looking at it, that kind of thing. I think there's something, even though it's not, it doesn't have the same appearance, like appearances happening in consciousness, I think there's some structure out there in the world that persists when we're not looking at it. But yeah, so this idea that the contents of consciousness are absolutely, and I would basically only tied to fitness payoffs is the term that Hoffman uses. But like, so there's structure in the world and you perceive, you know, when you're hungry you perceive certain food to be appetizing and delicious. And when you're not hungry, you know, if you eat too much chocolate, then the same thing can now appear disgusting, right? Like your conscious perception, the attribute of the thing in the world has changed. Yeah, it's not like physicists have to account for some, you know, some atom that decays from like nice atom to disgusting atom, you know, that's not how we think about the kind of disgustingness or appetizingness of the chocolate being out there in the world. Same's true for color, same's true for all these other things, which is, you know, that was the way I was thinking about consciousness when I came up with my theory because in my theories it's absolutely entirely tied up with the organism survival and the contents of consciousness are completely tied up with what you might call fitness payoffs. And also, I think to just get a feeling of this kind of the fact that what you perceive is an interface for the world, you know, like if you perceive, you know, based on your history and your kind of genetics and stuff, you might perceive certain foods to be appealing because of that history and because it makes sense for you. And in the same way, like, you know, imagine if, as well as us becoming this intelligent, technologically advanced civilization, imagine if slugs had as well. And you had, you know, slug Hollywood celebrities who all the slugs agreed with the most beautiful, perfect, you know, things and they thought they were like objectively beautiful. I don't think I would be agreeing that the slug Hollywood celebrities are objectively beautiful, right? And that's a way of seeing that the perception, the conscious perception of beauty is not out there in the world. And as weird as it sounds, it's true for all of our senses. And we saw this with the hysteria around that dress that went viral, the complex. Can I talk to you about it? Beautiful. Good, thank you for that. It's a perfect example. I was very excited about that. I came up because I was like, this is what I'm interested in and this points to something fascinating about the nature of reality. Exactly. Like you're poised on understanding something, but then the media kind of took it in a far more like, no, no, it's just this, this kind of, you know, some more kind of a less radical kind of ways. It's like the biggest metaphysical thing. Exactly, exactly. And it's what you can do from that point. And the same thing was with that, that sound clip of Yanny versus Laurel. People heard it as these two different words, right? What you can realize that is that what you're seeing is not, perception is not like you're looking out of these transparent eyeballs to a freestanding world. James, just one quick thing on that is that you can change your perception on the Laurel Yanny, but you, because you can go back and forth like the Reuben vase or the Necker cube, but on, you can go back and forth, but on the dress, you can't, at least from what I've tested with people, they can't go back and forth between golden white and black and blue, which that I think is the most profound part of it. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting in its own, right? I think it might be to do with the fact that like with the vase face illusion where it kind of changes, there's some structure there that you can scan your attention around and you can, you have some model in your head of the two things and you can, you can kind of actively engage with the process, same with the Yanny Laurel, you can really try and focus on the high notes that sound like Yanny and all the low notes on the Laurel. With the dress, it's more, I think the thing that seems to account for which way you go is, is if you think you're discounting blue light or yellow light, I read one thing that's, I don't know if it was actually real data or if it was just speculation, but there was the speculation that men would see it as, I think it was black and blue, oh no, sorry, yellow and golden white because they played more computer games with blue lights. So their brain is used to being like, oh, like the room's drenched in blue light. I better discount some blue and then it pushes it in that direction. But yeah, I mean, I don't know if that's, that's what it's actually proven, but that's, I think that might be why it moves that way. But yeah, so what it shows you though is that this is not a pre-given world that looks the way it looks. There is a screen of consciousness and there's all these weird appearances inside it and you are, you are just another one of these appearances. You know, when I'm looking at my hand, it feels like this hand is inside me, but actually it's appearing in consciousness. It's visually continuous with the rest of the background. And that's when you can, your kind of sense of self can blink out of existence and there can just be this kind of light of consciousness and a bunch of phenomena happening. And you can realize that fundamentally that's what's going on. And there's a delusion when you take this bundle of perceptions and you say, this is me, these appearances of hands are me. And I'm saying there is an organism, but the organism is not the same thing as the concept of the self. And it's the concept of the self that all of our suffering is fed through. This was the kind of Buddha's insight that neuroscience is now kind of showing to be true as well, right? So it could be fair to say that there is a, within the living mirror theory, there is a, the living system has it's a coupling with the environment. And in that process, the multimodal user interface is what the living system uses. So there's that, that's kind of what the synthesis could be. Yeah. And I would say it's kind of important to, the interface idea is actually important because consciousness is not like you're being aware of the thing out there. What it is, is the thing out there is utterly beyond your boundary. You're here is this kind of bounded physical system. Photons might fall on your retina, but your insides, your brain, everything else is just utterly in the dark. And so consciousness is this active, creative, generative, kind of hallucinatory process. And when you understand that the world doesn't have an appearance, it kind of gives you an appreciation as to why it's possible for consciousness to exist because it's not like there's a thing and I have a symbol for the thing and how does my symbol become conscious? That's how a lot of people think about this stuff. They, you know, it's the kind of computer analogy. It's like there's some symbol over here and there's some real thing over here. Like say that there's a green object and there's a symbol saying green. Why does this symbol become conscious? Whereas in a computer it doesn't. Why doesn't the word green when I write it down? Why doesn't that become conscious? Whereas I'm saying no, like there is no green thing. There's patterns and then your consciousness is this fundamentally you're generating, yeah, like a simulation, generating an interface of beliefs about the way the world is that is this kind of house of cards of like saying it's this way as opposed to this way. So it's entirely generated within the organism. Well, through interacting with this environment but it's not, each percept is only cashed out in reference to all the other percepts. So this is like relativistic framework. I've really appreciated a way of perceiving it regarding when you're at an event where you're at whether it does literally just take any sports or music style event in a stadium and you're gonna have a different point of view than somebody sitting across the stadium. And when you also register that, you're gonna get that at a deeper level that it's not some, you gotta play game. I feel like you gotta, if you really dive in, like we didn't have the tool of games. We had it, but we didn't have, this is the game changer is that when you, it's literally the screen, like the screen as an analogy, the game as an analogy to this is exactly what makes us realize that when I go into the first person perspective and I'm playing the game and I'm walking around in the simulated world and I have this, the relationship between me as a living system and my environment and my interface and all of the stuff that I have in my parcel that I'm carrying around with me and that I have these quests and these objectives and that the more that you kind of follow that train of thinking, the more that you're gonna realize that James is also a player and James also has his little world that James is playing in as well and James is going to see things like you, is that it, is that your girlfriend or is that the fiancee or wife? What level are you? Yeah. Wife, okay. Wife, what's her name? Hi, Rebecca. Rebecca, so that you have a wife, you have a wife, you have Rebecca, like you have that in your life. I don't have like a wife. So like my, like the fact that we, like that you have a wife and I don't, like that is like a significant reality changer. And so like that's something to like keep in mind, like somebody that's living in a completely different country is basically on, in a sense, their reality has a significantly different, like you're mostly in London and in the mountains of Portugal. And so you're, you're inevitably going to have a different map than California in the Midwest and stuff like that. So, but, but, but there's also, there's some, there's a synthesis between if we don't break it down into, there's a synthesis where it's like in order for us to have the zoom call, we have to respect the objectivity of the science that is occurring, that is enabling the computation, the electromagnetic communication. So you have a synthesis that's going on. If we want to agree that the H2O molecule looks a specific way or that the cellular respiration and the oxygen cycle on the planet happens a specific way for, for, for every person that inhales the, the O2. I think that that there's going to be a synthesis between those, those individual gamers and their worlds with the fact that all of those gamers are inhaling O2 and their hearts are beating 100,000 times a day, stuff like that. Yeah. I think that's the idea of being the kind of gamer with the headset on. You mentioned earlier the kind of simulation stuff which obviously is the name of the podcast as well. So maybe it's relevant to touch on that. But yeah, I think, I think it's interesting that I guess it's not something I've fallen very much because I think it's the thing we spoke about before where we're saying like as a scientist it's like I'll map out what's within my domain. Like, so before the Big Bang, we might be, you know I mentioned earlier ways of thinking about why anything's happening at all. And I'm happy to speculate about that. But then, you know, like what happened for the Big Bang is just kind of outside of my window what happens in the future is as well. So I think like, I guess I see scientists mapping out this little space we're in now and most people think it's the entire space, right? They think Big Bang, this thing and that's it. I suspect there's, you know like why wouldn't there be vast amounts of stuff going on outside of our window? I see no reason why you wouldn't think whether you wanna call it multiverses or simulations within simulations within simulations. For me, that seems absolutely, you know if not plausible likely, you know that something weird is happening. Before, I think before certain psychedelic experiences I would have said there's no reason to speculate. Like it's just speculation. It's like saying, am I a solipsist? And then you can have experiences where you seem to wake up from the simulation and that definitely gives you that kind of strange loop idea of like, wait like is this some, is this simulations all the way down and you know, you can kind of tumble through them through in some way. But I think I ultimately come back to kind of knowing my place as a scientist and thinking, I'm gonna, if this is a simulation it's a beautiful, pretty complex simulation that's really relevant for our day to day living. So I'm gonna try and understand this what as best as I can. If at the end I wake up, take my headset off and go, wow, I can't believe that was a game. I don't think I'll feel like I've wasted my time in trying to understand the game. Yeah, and which plays very beautifully into what we mentioned earlier on infinity making a infinite amount of illusory affinity and that plays into the multiverse perfectly. There's just, and it also plays perfectly in the sense of if you believe in yourself as infinite potential that there is every single possibility of you and is happening right now. And also every single possibility in a non anthropocentric way is also happening. So when you see all of these designer worlds that the video game artists are making all of those are happening as well. And we ourselves are going to become more and more like designers of worlds. And we ourselves are going to come to the realization more and more of what infinity truly is. I think that thing you said about nature is infinite possibility. Like I've been reflecting recently on I've not tried to put this into words, but there's a, so I don't believe I believe that kind of organism level to use that term, libertarian free will the idea that we can really choose exactly what we want to do with no prior causes kind of causing it. I think that's an illusion and it's trying to kind of make ourselves feel comfortable in our feeling of separation. But if you look at the kind of the freedom of the totality of existence and you consider the way that particles interact and anything happens from that perspective everything, the way that things interact is the perfect choice given what they are. Like this is kind of what a scientific picture of the world is. It's like a lawful thing. Given these things and their forces and what they are in themselves they will, the universe is utterly free to do exactly what is the most like lawful or most appropriate thing for it to do. So you can think of when you identify with all of reality as there being this kind of ultimate freedom, ultimate creative fulfillment of the process just moving forward in terms of what it is and what's best for what it is. Which is another way of discriminant determinism which is a weird thing to say is that like that from one side, from the human idea of separation the idea of the universe deciding everything is like, oh no, that seems scary. That seems like, I don't like that idea. But the idea of the universe being ultimately free and therefore manifesting what is most within its own nature is I think is a really, yeah, to me it gives a scientific way is maybe it's the scientific language adding to what you just said about identifying that kind of infinite potential identifying with that. And you're spot on too and I'm glad that you made content again everybody check out James' channel. I'm glad that you made content specifically about your entheogenic experiences. I think that's extremely important. The more that people feel like they are comfortable it's almost like we're having a species coming out of the closet. In a sense, around the use of unleashing the divine within via these sacred secretions of the planet. And it's extremely important. I'm glad that you've made content about it. You've been vulnerable about it. I think it's very important. And that's also going to triangulate right on that same nature of reality.