Conscious agents form the fundamental ontology
Reality, at its base, is composed of interacting conscious agents, not particles, fields, or spacetime points.
A research initiative investigating whether consciousness is fundamental, and how spacetime, matter, and physical law might emerge from it.
Modern physics treats spacetime and matter as fundamental. The Trace Institute investigates the opposite hypothesis: consciousness is fundamental, and what we experience as the physical world is the interface through which conscious agents perceive and interact with each other.
Our work is mathematical and grounded in the peer-reviewed literature. The Institute brings together scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers of science developing a formal framework, Trace Logic, in which quantum mechanics and general relativity are conjectured to be recoverable as emergent features of conscious-agent dynamics.
Eight formal conjectures direct the Institute's work. Together they describe a path from conscious agents to the standard models of physics and biology.
Reality, at its base, is composed of interacting conscious agents, not particles, fields, or spacetime points.
Space and time are not the stage on which physics unfolds. They are projections of the dynamics between conscious agents.
The mathematics of quantum mechanics is recoverable as a limit of the formal dynamics of conscious agent networks.
Gravity and the curvature of spacetime arise as large-scale features of the same underlying logic governing agent dynamics.
Cognitive Scientist · UC Irvine
Mathematician · Cal State San Bernardino
Philosopher of Science · Cognitive Sciences
Institute architect
Neurobiologist · Pharmacologist
Biologist · Tufts University
Donald Hoffman's appearances across podcasts, conferences, and lectures, alongside an expanding library of original work from the Institute.
The Institute is privately supported. Help fund the work, follow the research, or join us as a collaborator.