Erik Hoel: Why we have lost our ability to dream; Author of "The Revelations"

About this episode

Neuroscientist-turned-novelist Erik Hoel joins Vance to discuss his viral essay "Enter the Super Sensorium" and his novel "The Revelations." The core argument: modern entertainment consumption (streaming, gaming, infinite content) mirrors the supermarket's effect on food — infinite low-cost calories/content our biology never evolved to self-regulate around, producing a kind of "junk fiction" obesity of the mind. Hoel wants a scientific (not just aesthetic/moral) basis for distinguishing good art from junk entertainment, and finds it in his "overfitted brain hypothesis": dreams exist because organisms that learn too well from repetitive daily life become "overfit," like an over-trained neural network, and need out-of-distribution hallucinatory input (dreams) to generalize. He extends this to fiction — repetitive, stereotyped content (e.g., formulaic superhero films with clean heroes/villains) reinforces overfitting, while more novel, complex art helps cognitive generalization, giving an evolutionary/computational justification for aesthetic hierarchy that resists postmodern "all taste is just power/class signaling" critiques (citing Pierre Bourdieu). They discuss his novel deeply — a murder mystery among young consciousness researchers that uses close third-person perspective-switching to give readers access to interiority no film can replicate — and dig into the hard problem of consciousness itself: why is there any subjective experience associated with neural firing at all, illustrated via anesthesia awareness cases and Zeno's paradox as an analogy for bad "consciousness is an illusion" arguments. Vance and Hoel also range into Bitcoin/crypto as a genuinely novel technological development in Hoel's lifetime, his "digital commonwealth" concept (on-chain proto-governments), and a striking cultural parallel: just as "nerd culture" became mainstream once nerds got rich from computers, crypto's early "weird" adopters (political outliers, sex workers, libertarians) might reshape mainstream culture as crypto wealth grows — tying to René Girard's mimetic desire. The conversation closes on psychedelics: Hoel, cautious about overreaching beyond his expertise, argues hallucinogens aren't scientifically necessary to studying consciousness (a dog's pain and a Burning Man vision are equally mysterious to current neuroscience) even while conceding an "overfitting" argument for occasional radical experience could apply.

“Maybe you shouldn't watch Justice League. Maybe you should watch Lawrence of Arabia, and you're actually gonna get something more out of watching Lawrence of Arabia than you are from just watching this CGI slug fest.”

“Evolution invented fictions, it invented dreams... maybe if you can come up with a good theory for why we dream, you can come up with a good theory for why we consume fictions and why we should or shouldn't consume various types of fictions.”

“It used to be that you had your milkman, you had your baker, you had your butcher... all of that was condensed into a supermarket... once you have a screen, you have like a supermarket for experiences. You have a super sensorium where you can just experience almost anything.”

Key moments

• ~4-9%: The supermarket/obesity analogy for entertainment saturation, and the art-vs-entertainment distinction (Lawrence of Arabia vs. Justice League).
• ~13-15%: The overfitted brain hypothesis explained — dreams as anti-overfitting mechanism, giving a scientific basis for an "objective aesthetic spectrum."
• ~20-24%: What novels uniquely do (direct access to another consciousness) vs. film/TV, and how The Revelations is structurally built around perspective-shifting.
• ~36-45%: The hard problem of consciousness — anesthesia awareness, Zeno's paradox as an analogy for "consciousness is an illusion" arguments, and why dog pain is as mysterious as psychedelic visions to current science.
• ~47-54%: Bitcoin/crypto as the one genuinely novel technology of Hoel's lifetime, his "digital commonwealth" concept, and the nerd-culture-mainstreaming parallel to crypto culture.
• ~56-60%: REM rebound and the "dream drive" as a literal biological hunger, reframing TV-watching-after-work as a failed attempt to get artificial dreaming.
• ~64-67%: Psychedelics and the limits of what they can tell us about consciousness science, despite Silicon Valley's fascination with them.

Notable quotes

“Maybe you shouldn't watch Justice League. Maybe you should watch Lawrence of Arabia, and you're actually gonna get something more out of it than just this CGI slug fest.”

“If you prevent people from dreaming, they will dream more the next night... we have a dream drive... maybe [after work] people are like, please artificial dream, help me, help me.”

“It used to be that you had your milkman, you had your baker, you had your butcher... all of that was condensed into a supermarket... once you have a screen, you have like a supermarket for experiences.”

“There's a fact of the matter about whether or not you're experiencing pain regardless of if you're paralyzed and can't report it... [anesthesia awareness].”