ENEMIES: From War to Wisdom Episode 35: Taking a Look at the Illusion of Reality: The Work of Donald Hoffman Part 2

In part two of this episode, we will talk about the theory offered by contemporary cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman to explain why our natural desires and fears do not lead us to insights about “reality.” We will review some of Hoffman’s model and approach which are still very much a work-in-progress. We are taking up Hoffman’s work on this podcast because we feel it offers an extraordinarily promising view of our human predicament in regard to our own self-protection and can help us sort out confusion about our “survival fitness” (experienced as our success in protecting ourselves and promoting ourselves). Along the way, we encounter the Buddhist view of reality (the Marks of Existence) that can be succinctly summarized as “It’s not perfect, it’s not permanent and it’s not personal.” We take a leap and compare it to what Hoffman is developing. Notably, we talk about how our current spacetime continuum cannot work in any of our contemporary scientific theories and must be changed. We also talk about how our personal experience of space-time is related to what psychologists call “emotional object constancy” – a necessary human development that begins around 18 months with the birth of the self-conscious emotions. We hope this conversation opens some new doors for thinking about why we currently embrace the notion that we have to “put on our own oxygen mask before we put on another’s.”