This theory posits that our lives don't *create* subjective experiences (qualia). Instead, our lives are the emergent result of a fundamental consciousness cycling through a sequence of possible qualia, dictated by probabilistic, Markovian rules.

Today's AI models are powerful but lack a true sense of causality, leading to illogical errors. Unconventional AI's Naveen Rao hypothesizes that building AI on substrates with inherent time and dynamics—mimicking the physical world—is the key to developing this missing causal understanding.

Current AI can learn to predict complex patterns, like planetary orbits, from data. However, it struggles to abstract the underlying causal laws, such as Newtonian physics (F=MA). This leap to a higher level of abstraction remains a fundamental challenge beyond simple pattern recognition.

Modern science almost exclusively investigates the 'efficient cause' (the agent that brought something about). It largely ignores the other three causes defined by Aristotle: the material cause (what it's made of), the formal cause (its form or shape), and the final cause (its purpose or 'telos'), thus providing an incomplete picture.

While a world model can generate a physically plausible arch, it doesn't understand the underlying physics of force distribution. This gap between pattern matching and causal reasoning is a fundamental split between AI and human intelligence, making current models unsuitable for mission-critical applications like architecture.

Reductionism—understanding things by breaking them into smaller parts—has been successful because we were only studying our "headset." However, this approach hits a hard limit. Physics shows that at the smallest scales (Planck length), the concept of "smaller" ceases to make sense. Spacetime dissolves, meaning the foundation of reductionism is an illusion.

Physicists are finding structures beyond spacetime (e.g., amplituhedra) defined by permutations. Hoffman's theory posits these structures are the statistical, long-term behavior of a vast network of conscious agents. Physics and consciousness research are unknowingly meeting in the middle, describing the same underlying reality from opposite directions.

Experiments testing quantum theory have conclusively proven that "local realism" is false. This means physical objects, like electrons, do not possess definite properties such as a specific position or spin until the moment they are actually measured or observed, challenging our classical intuition about reality.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that spacetime and physical objects are a "headset" or VR game, like Grand Theft Auto. This interface evolved to help us survive by hiding overwhelming complexity, not to show us objective truth. Our scientific theories have only studied this interface, not reality itself.