Donald Hoffman (UCI): 'Conscious Agents, Decorated Permutations, and the Construction of Spacetime'
Most physicalist and panpsychist theories of consciousness assume that spacetime is fundamental. Most physicists do not, noting that spacetime has no operational meaning beneath the Planck scale. Beyond spacetime, physicists find geometric structures—positive Grassmannians, amplituhedra—which project to spacetime and simplify computation of scattering amplitudes. Behind these structures they find decorated permutations, which encode most of the invariant physical information. In this talk I present a theory of conscious agents, beyond spacetime, whose dynamics projects to decorated permutations. This projection gives a dynamical interpretation of amplituhedra, and a path by which conscious agents can construct spacetime as a user interface for their interactions. Evolution by natural selection agrees that spacetime is not fundamental. I discuss how the dynamics of evolution may arise as a projection of the dynamics of conscious agents.
