Niffe Hermansson

Mathemagician doing research at the Trace institute. Boundless love for nature and curiosity about experience.

[Niffe Hermansson @Niffe]

@alieninsect @michaelshermer @donalddhoffman Thank you for this excellent, detailed, thoughtful response to the post.

I think you hit the nail exactly on the head here.

[Niffe Hermansson @Niffe]

@superspeeg @alieninsect I've read the rest of the thread in more detail now, and get your objection. The identification with DecPOMDP is not bad as far as it goes, but you're missing the central idea of Conscious Realism. It's not a materialist model, so shoehorning in materialism is not helpful.

[Niffe Hermansson @Niffe]

@superspeeg @alieninsect Depends on what you mean by "coming from". Ultimately, the fitness cues, and their relationship with structures in W, are evolved properties of the particular conscious agents. So in that sense they "come from" evolution by natural selection. Not sure that's what you are asking?

[Andrew Gallimore @alieninsect]

For years, DMT entity encounters have been dismissed as hallucinations...

Donald Hoffman @donalddhoffman and I are exploring a more fundamental possibility: that DMT temporarily restructures the human perceptual interface, enabling the perception of traces of conscious agents that normally lie beyond the reach of ordinary experience...

A new collaboration between myself, @noonautics, and the newly-founded Trace Institute:

https://t.co/mkamVn1uZI

[Niffe Hermansson @Niffe]

@superspeeg @alieninsect Good question. Inasmuch as there is object permanence (or persistence), it's because the structure in W that the object in x provides fitness cues regarding persists. The object re-emerges because the requirements for its emergence are fulfilled again.

Objects aren't arbitrary.

[Donald Hoffman @donalddhoffman]

I’m pleased to share that we’ve launched the TRACE Institute.

A new research effort bringing together physicists, mathematicians, biologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers on a key question in science: what are observers, and how are they related to spacetime and reality?

[Gaspard W Giroud @gaspardwgiroud]

Yesterday, in Southern California, we launched the Trace Institute, a new research effort formed around the pioneering work of Professor @donalddhoffman .

Scientists, mathematicians, AI engineers, and entrepreneurs are coming together to build a rigorous science of the observer, with implications for physics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and new paths of discovery.

https://t.co/9bWiJJjrqA

🔭⚡

[Niffe Hermansson @Niffe]

@prncevincecares @donalddhoffman @alieninsect Thanks @prncevincecares! I'm very excited to be part of this work, and to be exploring these important and complicated questions with rigor and precision.

It's very easy to be dismissive, but I don't think that is usually how we learn new and beautiful things.

[Jesse Michels @AlchemyAmerican]

🚨BREAKING: A cognitive scientist from MIT has mathematically proven that evolution guarantees we see zero percent of true reality, that most consciousness in the universe exists without a body, and that non-human intelligences with a wider window on reality than ours can reach in and manipulate it the way a programmer manipulates a video game.

Donald Hoffman (@donalddhoffman) is a cognitive scientist at UC Irvine who has spent 40 years building a mathematical theory of the observer. His work was cited by John Wheeler in the "It From Bit" paper. He studied under Marvin Minsky at MIT, spent two decades secretly meeting with Francis Crick to study consciousness, and has nine specific mathematical conjectures on the table that would derive general relativity, quantum field theory and the Big Bang from a single framework. The top high-energy physicists in the world, Nima Arkani-Hamed and Nobel laureate David Gross, are already saying spacetime is doomed. Hoffman thinks he knows what replaces it.

This interview is the first time he has publicly laid out what his mathematical model explains about alien life, embodiment and the structure of reality.

It already derives time dilation and quantum wave functions directly from differences in observer window size. Physics has spent a century failing to solve the measurement problem because it has been looking in the wrong place. The observer has to come first, and no physicalist framework can get you there.

A consciousness with a larger observer window has access to the underlying structure of our reality in ways we can't perceive or counter. A craft going Mach 40 instantaneously in our headset could be a leisurely maneuver in theirs.

The implications for UAP and alien life are immense.
Embodiment, being locked into a body with fingers and toes as your only interface with the world, is a probability zero anomaly in the full space of possible minds. He also says current large language models are dumber than cucumbers. His new framework, the recursive trace logic, is a completely different architecture, and some of the biggest names in frontier AI have already come to him about it.

The framework has no ceiling, and the implication is a single unified consciousness exploring itself through an unbounded number of perspectives, each one capable of waking up.

Death, in this framework, is just the closing of an icon on the desktop.

Full conversation is live now.

[Niffe Hermansson @Niffe]

This preprint is one of the first manifestations of the Trace Institute.

We propose a method for exploring the question about the reality of DMT-entities utilizing an experimental program resting on the Conscious Agent Theory.

Check it out!

[Donald Hoffman @donalddhoffman]

“We propose that DMT induces a profound perturbation of our perceptual interface, expanding the accessible region of experience space and allowing consciousness to reach regions with entirely different dynamical regimes”

https://t.co/gPw6OrTdav

[Niffe Hermansson @Niffe]

“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.”
— Frank Herbert, Dune

Whether we have got the balances right or not the Trace Institute is now official, and I am so excited!

[Donald Hoffman @donalddhoffman]

We will never know the full truth of reality, but we aim to get closer than anyone has before.

https://t.co/T7NXkJ7Vr7

[Donald Hoffman @donalddhoffman]

“evolution shaped us not to perceive objective reality directly, but to experience a simplified survival interface … space-time may function more like a navigational dashboard than objective reality itself”

https://t.co/hj5Ex5cFRR

[Andrew Gallimore @alieninsect]

Don gets it. 👽

[Niffe Hermansson @Niffe]

@punk_utopian Wonderful! Sounds like a lovely conference. Please send my regards to the amazing people I am yet to meet.

Looking forward to hearing all about it when you get back home.

[Niffe Hermansson @Niffe]

@gnopercept I would be at least as likely to duel someone over maths as any other reason.

[Niffe Hermansson @Niffe]

@gfkraay Interesting... I wonder whether that is with or against, the work presented in the M & his E. The thesis there is that they are fundamentally different, but not at all in the way people think. So far ut has lined up remarkably well with experience.

Please send the link.

[Niffe Hermansson @Niffe]

Currently reading the Master and his Emissary.

It might be time to learn tell left from right, so that I can actually integrate the incredible knowledge this book has to offer.

[Niffe Hermansson @Niffe]

@neats29 That concentration practice when done diligently (and with the right view) leads to states of bliss and well-being even off the cushion that surpasses anything most of us have ever experienced (including on drugs etc).

[Niffe Hermansson @Niffe]

@gnopercept Weird that this isn't the norm, isn't it?