A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Consciousness & The Illusion of Reality | Joscha Bach

0:00 The world that you and me experience really is the dream.

0:02 It's a dream generated in our respective brains.

0:05 It's really a fiction that you are producing to make sense of reality.

0:08 Consciousness is actually a dream state.

0:10 If this is a dream reality,

0:12 what would be the steps to be waking up from that dream reality?

0:15 I suspect that very very few people actually do this.

0:18 Most people act on their instincts and their life is a show.

0:21 As a child, I read the fairy tales of all the cultures I could get my hands on.

0:25 Africans, Japanese, Chinese, Russian.

0:27 What's really fascinating is that they have so much in common.

0:30 If we take out of body experiences for example, don't take this verbatim.

0:34 The reason why you have this suffering is typically because you care.

0:39 Everything is changing too fast.

0:40 We don't really have a strong belief in the future

0:42 anymore because we have difficulty to picture ourselves in it.

0:45 But tough luck.

0:46 This is just how you made it.

0:47 The reason why I'm optimistic about this is ultimately our life

0:51 gets meaning by identifying things that you would sacrifice yourself for.

0:55 And this is what we call the secret.

1:03 Yosha, thank you for being here.

1:05 Can you explain in layman terms the relationship

1:08 between mind and matter from your perspective?

1:11 Well, in absolute layman term, you could say that mind is a causal pattern.

1:16 Basically, something that has a structure that can cause effects in the world.

1:22 And this causal structure itself is not mechanical.

1:26 It's not something that's made directly out of atoms,

1:29 but instead it's a pattern inscribed on the atoms.

1:32 And this pattern is controlling, possessing a part of the physical universe.

1:39 And the old word for such a self-organizing possessive pattern

1:43 that can reproduce itself by moving matter around is spirit.

1:48 And the modern word for this is called software.

1:52 When we think of software,

1:53 we often think about what people are doing when they're programming.

1:56 They use a programming language and they use uh computers

2:00 um made out of silicon semiconductors or um other circuitry.

2:05 And this is not necessary for software to exist.

2:08 software.

2:09 What's necessary for software is that it is in some sense

2:12 an abstraction over what the substrate is doing and it's able

2:16 to do the same things over a wide range of possible substrates

2:20 as long as they have the necessary conditions to run the software.

2:24 And the software that we find in nature is not written by humans,

2:27 but instead it has sparked itself into existence together with the origin

2:33 of life because life is actually about this possessive software.

2:37 And since then it's growing and evolving.

2:40 And so we could say that in some sense Darwin's perspective,

2:44 the origin of species and evolution as the competition between species has been

2:50 supplanted later by the perspective of genetics

2:54 by Dawkins who basically puts the gene

2:56 in the center and says that evolution is actually about these weird molecules

2:59 that use phenotypes to reproduce themselves

3:01 and it's not so much about the phenotypes.

3:04 And I would say from this last perspective,

3:06 it's actually about software agents that are reproducing themselves

3:11 by beating matter into shape into cells into organisms made

3:15 out of many cells into groups of individuals made

3:18 of many organisms or into civilizations made out of many groups.

3:23 So we have many many layers of organization and all

3:25 these layers can in some sense be described as self-organizing software agents.

3:30 And so I would say spirit, this old word means self-organizing software agent.

3:36 I call this position a little bit tongue and cheek cyber animism because

3:39 it's basically getting us full circle to the beliefs of our ancestors and all

3:45 other cultures outside of western science

3:47 that spirits actually do exist that they're intrinsically

3:50 agentic that they're able to control

3:52 the future and there's nothing magical about them.

3:55 They don't require us to rethink physics.

3:57 They are basically patterns within physics inscribing

4:00 themselves onto particles onto molecules and their dynamics.

4:07 So can you then give your distinction of how you think

4:10 about the shortcomings of the physicalist

4:14 idealist and pansyist notions of consciousness.

4:17 how from the physicalist view,

4:21 non conscious material could develop complexity at a point

4:24 in which it would need to become aware

4:25 of itself um versus the consciousness understanding is

4:30 a more physical or fundamental substrate of the universe.

4:32 How do you think and and where

4:34 do they fundamentally fall short in their assumptions?

4:37 To me, the greatest shortcoming is is when we

4:39 pick a belief despite being unable to prove it, right?

4:43 As long as there are logical alternatives

4:45 to the a certain belief to a worldview,

4:48 we must acknowledge this and remain agnostic and we can maybe

4:53 in some sense quantify our agnosticism based on evidence that we have.

4:57 But as long as something cannot be logically ruled out, it's possible.

5:01 And so we cannot simply say, well,

5:03 it's possible and I don't see a logical reason against it,

5:05 but I don't uh believe in it because I like this view better.

5:09 Right?

5:10 as as long as you don't have a good reason

5:12 to trust your particular taste in this because it points

5:15 maybe to something deeper that you're not yet able to fully

5:18 rationally comprehend uh you should be super skeptical of it.

5:21 And so ultimately the question is when you have a certain

5:25 idea or certain belief that you think is is the case,

5:28 can you walk me through the steps of how you get there?

5:30 How how you establish that this is true?

5:33 In a sense, I think that for instance,

5:35 the really terrifying thing about astrology is not

5:38 such uh only that astrologers are positing an implausible

5:42 mechanism that would string celestial events and the time

5:45 and date of your birth and your fate together, but that they would know, right?

5:50 For medieval astrologer to know this, they would have

5:53 had to collect the biographies of millions of people,

5:56 which back then was basically impossible.

5:58 and they would have to use mathematical tools that they had

6:00 no chance to learn because these statistical tools were not developed yet.

6:04 So they could not have done

6:05 the necessary mathematics to actually derive these things.

6:08 So there was no way that the astrologer could walk you

6:11 through the steps that would actually justify the idea that they have.

6:15 Now if we go back to pensychism or idealism

6:18 um the beliefs for instance that matter itself is conscious.

6:22 How in on earth would you establish this right?

6:25 How would you see this?

6:27 And um I suspect for a lot of people

6:29 well it came to them in a dream for instance

6:32 they meditated on it or they had a spiritual experience

6:35 or they use psychedelics and experience that everything is conscious.

6:38 But what does this experience refer to?

6:41 It refers to a mental state, a dream state.

6:43 Right?

6:44 It's in the same way as we dream physical reality around us.

6:47 And it's not the physical reality that we dream,

6:49 but some abstraction in which we see people and expressions

6:52 and colors and sounds and have emotions about all those things.

6:56 Right?

6:57 This is a game engine that our mind is producing.

6:58 It's not the physical world.

7:00 But um the beliefs that we get

7:03 in this dream do not necessarily correspond to the ground

7:07 truths to the reality that contains us and that produces us and makes us happen.

7:12 And physicalism is a particular hypothesis.

7:14 And this hypothesis says that there is

7:17 a causally closed mechanical lowest layer to reality.

7:21 Something that exists without intentions.

7:25 something that exists only in the dynamics of atoms,

7:28 molecules, elementary particles and so on.

7:30 And this all this stuff just plays out as as some kind of automatic game.

7:35 And the second part of physicalism is that we directly supervene on this level.

7:39 Which means the dynamics, the patterns that emerge in this physical

7:43 reality contain us and make us possible.

7:46 Instead of there being another layer and it

7:48 like imagine there would be um a parent universe

7:52 that contains some server farm and we are

7:54 run as a simulation in that server farm, right?

7:56 Then we would not be in base reality but in some

7:58 kind of simulated reality and that could still be physicalism.

8:01 It could still be that our parent universe is

8:03 the physical one but we can never visit it.

8:06 We can never know because our computer simulation insulates us from it.

8:09 So physicalism has these two components.

8:11 One is the universe is basically self-contained closed mechanical and second we

8:17 directly supervene on this layer

8:19 and this hypothesis makes certain predictions for instance

8:23 that events largely play out without our intentions on the lowest level

8:28 for instance whether you win the lottery and so on has very little

8:31 to do with your intentions and uh if you keep winning

8:35 the lottery what you typically find is the people who win the lottery

8:38 in very improbable way they happen to know somebody who is working

8:42 at the lottery and uh right so there is some kind of intentional act

8:47 going on that where a mind is messing with matter in a way

8:51 that is actually compatible with physicalism

8:54 somebody's actually interfacing interfering with reality

8:58 there are some weird phenomena for instance uh when people are performing

9:02 rituals and so on where uh it's tempting to think that maybe there

9:07 is also mental structure outside of brains that It's possible to mess

9:11 with reality by basically influencing the vibes and uh we we know

9:17 that some of these vibes exist for instance in perceptual empathy between people

9:20 and you have some person that you are um resonating with very much.

9:25 You can often experience the emotion and what happens

9:28 is that you basically building a feedback loop through

9:30 the mind and the body of the other and you

9:32 can experience states together that you couldn't experience alone.

9:36 And if we imagine that these networks between organisms form something like

9:40 a giant biological internet with lots and lots of distributed agents on them,

9:44 who knows what's possible, right?

9:46 So we don't need to leave physicalism to account for the idea of telepathy.

9:52 This doesn't mean that telepathy is real,

9:54 but physicalism itself does not prevent us from uh from exploring it

10:00 or from considering it possible because it is not in no way precluding it.

10:06 The alternative to physicalism, I think,

10:08 would mean that we live in some kind of simulation environment,

10:11 some kind of conspiracy that only make it looks like everything is

10:15 mechanical and physical like the dice

10:17 are running falling because of mechanical laws.

10:20 Instead, you exist in some kind of meta dream and the dream

10:24 of a larger agent in which you are just an idea.

10:28 And I think what makes the whole affair so confusing is

10:32 that the world that you and me experience clearly is a dream.

10:36 It's a dream generated in our respective brains.

10:39 But it's a dream world.

10:41 The world in that you experience is one in which

10:43 miracles are possible because you can be hypnotized into experiencing them.

10:47 Your mind can have glitches.

10:49 Your mind can construct arbitrary experiences

10:52 for you and you can witness those experiences.

10:56 And uh and our culture is mostly pretending

10:58 that the world that we see is the physical universe.

11:00 And this makes it very confusing, right?

11:02 Instead, the physical universe is a parent

11:05 reality that we cannot actually visit.

11:07 It's the world that was described

11:09 with arcane mathematics and foundational physics.

11:12 And it's very hard to understand.

11:13 It's not the world that we experience.

11:15 It's not the world in which we are conscious.

11:17 The world in which we are conscious is a psychological one.

11:20 It's a dream world.

11:21 Consciousness is actually a dream state.

11:24 I heard you mention and I quote,

11:27 "At some point it became apparent to me that we obviously do live in a dream,

11:31 but that this dream would have been dreamt by some

11:33 kind of mind on a higher plane of existence,

11:36 probably via some mechanical function." So,

11:38 I'm curious how that realization arose to you,

11:40 whether it was through conceptual um inquiry, whether it was experiential,

11:45 you know, transpersonal experience that was in there or something.

11:48 I'm curious.

11:49 No, it's mostly that I was trying to take

11:52 stock of the causal mechanisms that I observe

11:55 in my environment and I found that the world

11:57 that I inhabit is largely explainable through mechanical interactions.

12:02 Some of these are very difficult to understand like radio waves.

12:06 But um radio waves themselves are not super mystical, right?

12:10 It's it's just a structure that you

12:13 have to mathematically understand and understand

12:15 how it interacts with the particle universe in which we are in.

12:18 And so at some point as children we might start uh building a radio and then we

12:22 see that radio waves are real and we

12:24 notice when our hand gets close to the antenna

12:26 of our little radio that the oscillator uh

12:29 changes its frequency and you can hear your hand

12:31 coming close because the uh water in your hand

12:35 is distorting the electric field around the antenna.

12:38 And then uh my father made an experiment once.

12:41 He wanted to find a water pipe between two houses to dig it up.

12:45 And so he decided uh to try us to do dowsing.

12:49 My father was not esoteric and did not necessarily

12:52 believe in these things but he was an artist

12:54 and he also did not necessarily believe in the scientific

12:57 institutions which tell us that dowsing doesn't work.

12:59 So he just tried and he tried by getting his two children independent of each

13:04 other walk down the street with an improvised

13:06 dowsing rod from two pieces of welding wire.

13:09 And we were told when you walk down

13:11 the street and you walk over this um water pipe,

13:14 we don't know where it is, these two rods will start touching each other.

13:19 And it was clear to me I have to make

13:21 some kind of subconscious movement when this is happening.

13:23 And then when I was walking down the street were both with my sister and me.

13:27 These droids indeed were moving and we're starting to touch each other.

13:32 And I didn't think that was very mysterious.

13:34 I thought this can be explained in the same way as the radio

13:38 is picking up my hand moving close to the antenna, right?

13:42 Because if the water in my hand can

13:44 change the magnetic or electric field around the antenna,

13:47 maybe my body can act as an antenna and pick up the change

13:52 in the electric field of the water pipe when I walk over it.

13:55 Right?

13:56 And um there is no primaasia reason to think that is not the case.

14:00 We actually know that cells are responsible

14:02 to electromagnetic fields plays a big role.

14:05 For instance, in morphogenesis when the organism forms its shape,

14:09 the individual cells are reacting to this.

14:11 And when you manipulate the EM field,

14:13 Mike Leven has made experiments in this regard.

14:16 You can change the way in which the body is developing.

14:19 So there is some sensitivity there.

14:20 And now imagine that your cells are talking

14:22 to each other and they amplify the signal.

14:24 So maybe it's possible that this is happening.

14:27 What I also found that I had no conscious experience of this happening, right?

14:32 Which seems to me that my nervous system probably wasn't involved.

14:35 And so the really mysterious thing for me in this experience was how

14:38 does my body know what to do if my conscious mind does not?

14:42 How does my body conscious understand that it's

14:46 supposed to move the rods when this is happening?

14:48 So that was a bit mysterious.

14:51 It's nothing that forces me to break reality and so on.

14:54 And I found that most of the paranormal phenomena in which I tried to look

14:59 because I was interested in all the um

15:02 border case like um extra sensory perception, precognition and so on.

15:08 All the stuff that I found and looked

15:09 into seemed to be explainable with either psychosis which

15:13 means people making things up because their mind is

15:15 not working straight or a little bit of telepathy.

15:19 And so I suspect that we will have to explain

15:23 the world in in these terms that it's largely mechanical

15:26 and there is a little bit of telepathy a little

15:28 bit of cross talk across minds and that probably can be

15:31 explained in normal physical ways maybe with our bodies as antennas

15:35 uh maybe also working across plants and whatnot right we

15:38 know that there is complex communication going on in the ecosystems

15:42 and we have not really studied all these channels yet.

15:45 Yeah.

15:46 Um the alternative to this physicalist worldview in which everything is

15:49 mechanical would be one in which we live in a dream.

15:52 And so when I read uh the different interpretations that exist for instance

15:56 say Blavatsky Gordfs they largely do not believe in a physicalist universe.

16:04 They think that we live in a world that is completely pliable in which magic

16:08 is able to get full right access

16:10 on the structure of in fabric of reality itself.

16:14 And this is very radical because we need now to explain why

16:17 the world largely is not bending to my will and my imagination.

16:21 Why can I not can I not just dream a different reality?

16:25 I would have to explain this to maybe the activities of many

16:28 many minds of believing in boring

16:30 physicalism and stabilizing reality in this way.

16:33 But I suspect that the theory is not very convincing.

16:37 As it pertains to that, I'm curious

16:39 when people have a transpersonal or mystical experience,

16:42 how would one effectively distinguish and discern what is genuine contact

16:47 to a real structure beyond

16:48 the self versus an internally generated hallucination?

16:53 Yeah.

16:53 The thing is as soon as we accept the possibility

16:56 of hallucination of telepathy uh to some degree, right?

17:00 Even if it's just a few bits that you are getting

17:02 from the other person via using your body as an antenna,

17:06 it means that your mind is not entirely yours anymore.

17:09 Instead, it becomes a slightly distributed entity.

17:13 Alan Turing in his 1950 paper in which he describes

17:16 the Turing test asked the question whether telepathy would make AI impossible.

17:22 Right?

17:22 and uh he's going through all the counter arguments against AI

17:26 back then in this paper and he captures most of the current

17:29 arguments still it's already in this early paper and I found it

17:33 interesting that most of the biographers of Turing and the people who

17:36 read this paper ignored this section why Turing was interested in telephys

17:41 and even considered the possibility some argued that maybe he read

17:45 this study from the 1930s that was not properly evidenced and peer

17:49 reviewed but I don't think that touring believed in peer very much.

17:52 These were the 1950s.

17:54 Peer review was really a thing that was much more popular.

17:56 60s7s into now back then the world was made by smart individuals who

18:02 basically constructed reality that by themselves

18:04 and by talking to each other rather than

18:06 by submitting ideas to peer review and hoping that the peers are getting

18:09 it right on average and it's it's a different way to construct the world.

18:12 So I suspect that Huing considered telepathy to be a distinct

18:16 possibility even though he might not even have been sure about it.

18:19 Right?

18:20 But if telepathy was possible,

18:21 if you basically can have an antenna that is attuning you to other minds

18:26 that you're resonating with, then uh there

18:29 will be distributed minds in the world.

18:30 And maybe there will be minds at the level of the entire biosphere, right?

18:35 So maybe it turns out that Lovelock's GIA theory that there's

18:39 basically a mind at the planetary level could be literally correct.

18:43 I don't personally believe that, but we could not rule it out, right?

18:46 And it would would still not uh invalidate the possibility of AI.

18:51 Maybe AI would just be more disconnected and autistic

18:54 than uh the minds that are interconnected in this way.

18:58 Or maybe we can build interfaces for um this for these biominds.

19:04 Maybe we can build empathetic AI

19:05 that is actually able to resonate with organisms

19:08 and maybe we can make GIA real in a much higher degree than she is now.

19:12 H it makes me think about especially when you were giving

19:17 the example with the sticks above the water pipes how through the various

19:21 studies our body give or take up to 20 something seconds making

19:25 decisions before our conscious awareness and I'm

19:27 curious your thoughts on the process

19:29 of how consciousness plays a role if it's a participator if

19:33 it's an observer if we are making decisions before we are consciously

19:36 aware of having made a choice um and what that says about

19:40 the nature of free will and choice voice in consciousness in general.

19:44 Yeah, I personally don't think that consciousness

19:46 is the thing that makes the decisions.

19:48 I think consciousness is the thing

19:49 that dreams reality and the decision-m is happening

19:53 in the nervous system on very different

19:55 time scales and in a very distributed way.

19:58 You can test this if you look

19:59 at conditions like the restless leg syndrome syndrome.

20:03 I had this after surgery.

20:05 I had uh sometimes an urge to get up and move around and it felt like

20:08 this is a conscious decision but it's something

20:10 that was decided in the periphery of my body

20:13 and subjectively it was more like an itch but it still felt like this scratching

20:19 this itch walking up and down uh was uh in getting up was a conscious decision.

20:25 It was just something that I could not decide against, right?

20:28 And it was sometimes very impractical because could happen when

20:31 I was sitting in class in university and I was forced

20:33 to sit still and be quiet and I could not combat

20:36 the urge to get up and uh walk down the aisle.

20:40 Right?

20:40 This was quite embarrassing and I I I realized

20:42 basically these are the boundaries of my free will.

20:45 Why I have the impression that I'm free to decide what I do but I'm doing

20:49 the thing that I actually don't want to do because of a condition in my spine.

20:53 Right?

20:53 It's very interesting observation and so I think what happens is that our mind

20:58 is constructing a model of what is the origin of the action.

21:03 Is this a glitch that happens in your nervous system

21:05 or is it something where your nervous system cannot detect a glitch?

21:08 And if there is no glitch, it assumes that some part had the proper authority

21:13 to trigger this action and therefore you actually wanted this.

21:16 and you as a construct over all

21:18 these different behaviors that integrate with each

21:20 other that tells itself a story about the reasons why you did this.

21:24 And it's trying to come up with the best possible reasons so

21:26 you can learn from them and improve your behavior in the future.

21:29 But it's not always the case.

21:30 And we notice this when we have compulsive behavior like this restless

21:34 leg syndrome or when people have eating disorders or addictions and so on.

21:38 They notice that they do things that actually don't want to do where

21:41 they are acting against their rational intentions

21:44 about the things that they can reflect.

21:46 I think that free will is not

21:48 something that is happening by an outside interference

21:51 of the mind into the world from a parallel universe in which your mind resides.

21:55 Instead, it's a representation inside of your mind

21:58 that you're making a decision for the first time.

22:00 So, you cannot predict it.

22:03 The decision itself takes a long time to to play out.

22:06 And so what you refer to where your you can observe in your brain

22:11 um the precursors of the actual behavior

22:13 a long time before you consciously notice this.

22:16 This is because it takes a long time

22:18 for your brain to actually run these processes.

22:20 And so when you would uh measure the state of your brain

22:25 while you are performing um cognitive tasks that leads to a decision,

22:30 you can statistically see with a certain probability that whether you're going

22:33 to push the right or the left button before you know it.

22:36 But this when you know it is written into the protocol

22:40 at the point or close to the point uh where the actual event happens.

22:45 So you can associate it for the purpose of learning.

22:48 And so it's a construct that you're making.

22:50 It's really a fiction that you are producing to um

22:54 make sense of reality and of yourself in it.

22:59 So this being the no life self podcast,

23:01 we like to explore the themes around the self and how we typically have

23:04 a presumption of a solid individualistic separate

23:08 self that has this locust of thought

23:10 and emotion somewhere kind of crouching behind

23:12 our eyes that we navigate the world

23:14 and we self- author and create and design our life from that place.

23:18 Uh but when you start to examine the dreamlike nature and reality

23:23 in which we live and the mechanism in which mind is playing out,

23:27 it kind of destabilizes at least for me

23:29 and I know many people our worldview and our strongly

23:32 held beliefs and notions around what it means

23:34 to be a human and have human perception.

23:37 And so I'm curious what is in your perception the self and how could we if

23:43 this is a dream reality what would be

23:45 the steps to be waking up from that dream reality?

23:48 Well I suspect if we could fully wake up from it

23:50 we would not experience anything because consciousness itself is a trans state.

23:55 The experience of the self being real is an entrancement with a representation.

24:01 And we can test this idea by transcending the self.

24:04 For instance, during meditation,

24:05 we can get to states where we notice that we see the self from the outside.

24:09 And when I am in a state like

24:11 this, I suddenly notice I'm actually not Yoshabach.

24:15 Yoshabach is just a story that exists inside of my mind.

24:18 And I run on Yoshabarak's brain,

24:20 but I'm just this consciousness that observes the fact that I'm running there.

24:24 And I know this biography of that guy

24:27 and his proclivities and goals and embedding in the world.

24:30 and I have a weird relationship to him, but I'm actually not him.

24:34 He's just a construct that is being told uh or created to tell a story

24:38 for the purpose of learning and making sense

24:41 of the embedding of this organism in the world.

24:44 And a large part of that story are fiction simplifications, approximations,

24:49 constructs that are doing a poor job at describing what's actually going on.

24:54 We can also bind oursel to different objects, right?

24:57 We can in meditation or in dreams experience that uh

25:01 what the world looks like from the perspective of a cell

25:04 or from the perspective of a tribal god

25:07 or from the perspective of a family or a nation state.

25:11 And when we take these perspectives,

25:13 we observe that the self again is a construct that exists

25:16 at a uh as an messenger in a world model and has certain affordances,

25:22 certain things that it can do and so on and certain things that it cares about.

25:25 And by taking this vantage point, we experience ourselves to be that thing.

25:31 If we take out of body experiences for example,

25:33 out of body experiences are sometimes spontaneously emerging.

25:37 Sometimes they are happening to people as a result of accidents uh in which

25:41 uh oxygen to the brain gets diminished

25:44 or also near-death experiences can sometimes trigger this.

25:48 Yeah.

25:48 Injury to the default mode network.

25:50 There's many.

25:51 Yeah.

25:51 Yeah.

25:51 And so what happens is I think a dissociation

25:55 where parts of your mind that are constructing

25:58 uh the world from a certain vantage point

26:00 and the parts of your mind that are uh figuring

26:03 out where exactly in the space you are get

26:05 disconnected and start to drift with respect to each

26:08 other and as a result what happens is

26:10 that you experience the world from outside of your body.

26:14 Right?

26:14 So you start to hallucinate the world not

26:16 from behind your eyes and this hallucination gets

26:18 kept on track by sensory data that invalidates

26:22 it as soon as you hallucinate the wrong things.

26:24 And when you drift out this this invalidation

26:26 doesn't work anymore because your direction

26:28 of your eyes is no longer aligned with what

26:30 you're uh what you believe you are seeing.

26:33 And so as a result your mind fills in details

26:36 that it cannot disprove because your eyes are not looking there.

26:40 And uh I noticed this um phenomenon in a paper by Sam Parna who was

26:47 at the time working at the University of Nottingham

26:50 in a hospital and he had a lot

26:52 of people in his ER who described uh

26:54 near-death experiences because they had heart attacks and were

26:57 put into the ER as a result and some of them had out- out of body experiences.

27:01 And so he affixed boards over their beds

27:04 with writing on top of the board in the hope

27:06 that maybe one day somebody is going to drift

27:08 up there and can't read what's written on the board.

27:11 And he found that nobody was a able to read it.

27:14 Right?

27:14 Some people were actually able to drift up

27:16 there and saw the boards from the upside, but nobody noticed the writing.

27:20 And so I think that's compatible or or points

27:23 to the fact that this out-of- body experience is actually

27:27 a fiction in in a sense that this you

27:30 also don't actually observe the world from behind your eyes.

27:33 Right?

27:33 It's a construct that is trying to interpret the data in the best possible way.

27:37 But when this interpretation is no longer possible because

27:39 part of your brain is not working as it should,

27:42 then your brain is tricking itself by constructing it from a different vantage

27:45 point and you so you start to dream the world from a different angle.

27:48 But you're not getting information yet you're

27:50 not supposed to get because you your senses,

27:53 your organs are not directed on this information, right?

27:57 And would be surprising it would be otherwise because if you could just

28:00 gather information by dislodging your mind

28:03 from your body and putting it elsewhere,

28:05 why go to the trouble of creating eyes and and uh a visual cortex that is

28:11 directly connected to the eyes and evaluates

28:13 these data that comes in from the eyes, right?

28:16 Why would the organism need to go to all

28:18 these lengths to uh to build all these biological systems?

28:23 How does that practically change how you orient yourself

28:27 towards the sensations of physical reality that you perceive?

28:31 Like if you if you take on the notion

28:33 that we are essentially assimulating our own reality that there is

28:36 a that we are perhaps hallucinating a novel vantage point that we

28:42 are Yosha and Andre are looking through gaining a unique perspective.

28:47 Um, and you sort of wake up beyond the story of a self

28:51 that is playing out like you realize that you are not Yosha,

28:54 you are not Andre, you are this thing

28:57 perhaps animating a story called Andre or Yosha.

29:00 Uh, how does that change how you relate to life in a practical sense?

29:05 It doesn't change anything.

29:07 It's uh sometimes unfortunate that I cannot take

29:10 this at will because I'm unable sometimes to drop out

29:14 of myself or to drop into myself because I'm not

29:17 always able to configure myself the way I want to.

29:20 But uh there is no alternative to me being a construct because when you

29:26 look at me with scientific instruments what you will see is that I don't exist.

29:32 Right?

29:32 What exists is a bunch of cells that talk to each other.

29:35 a few trillion cells that form a shambling mount of flesh

29:38 that is being kept together by communication between the cells.

29:41 And in the patterns of the communication of the cells,

29:44 there needs to be a model of what it would be like if all

29:46 these cells were one single agent that has

29:49 a unified set of goals, unified actions.

29:52 So one hand is not contradicting what the other hand is doing.

29:56 All the muscles are coordinated in such

29:58 a way that you have one single coherent being.

30:01 I think of consciousness as the process

30:03 that creates this coherence that facilitates it,

30:06 that makes it happen.

30:07 And my self model is a tool in making

30:09 me coherent in my interactions with the world.

30:12 But it's a model.

30:13 It's not reality itself.

30:14 It's a representation of what it would be like if I existed.

30:19 And to experience means to interact with this representation.

30:23 There is no way to interact with reality as such.

30:26 You can only interact with things that are written down in some kind

30:29 of mental language that are written down in some kind of intercellular language.

30:34 And so I'm an object written in this language that experiences

30:37 a world that is also written down in this language.

30:40 And uh since there is no other way to make this happen,

30:43 it's not really surprising if I at some point

30:45 in my life get into states where I realize

30:47 oh what I sus theoretically suspect is actually true

30:51 and now I experience myself not being a person.

30:55 It wasn't um in some sense very impressed that I can experience it in this way,

31:01 but it doesn't change anything because at some rational

31:03 level I already knew that to be the case.

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32:18 back to the show.

32:21 Well, I would say there is, at least in my experience,

32:24 a stark difference between the rational

32:26 realization and the ontological realization.

32:28 uh like the prolonged subjective experience of waking

32:32 up and putting the content of your experience

32:35 in a larger context of awareness realizing like

32:38 the elucory nature of self for me radically changes how

32:43 I orient towards life because I'm no longer

32:46 uh strongly identified with the notion of being

32:49 a doer which would affect my reaction and compulsive

32:53 behavior towards how this perceived self is responded to.

32:57 Um, so I'm curious why you Yeah, I was actually a bit surprised when you when

33:01 you said that nothing really kind of changed or changes.

33:05 Well, why would it?

33:07 I mean, there is a certain disidentification that happens.

33:10 I find that if I am depersonalized,

33:13 it's very difficult to have sentences that start with I.

33:17 Instead, the sense is more like uh instead of I am thirsty,

33:22 I need to drink something.

33:23 It's it's more like wouldn't it be good if

33:25 there was more liquid in this volume of space?

33:30 Well, I agree in the fact that there is that having a construct

33:33 of a self is very useful and necessary for navigating in the world.

33:37 But I almost think of it analogous to becoming lucid in the dream

33:40 state to where you still you know you're in a dream.

33:43 You're still in the dream, but you know you have awareness that you're in it.

33:46 Would you would you transfer that analogy towards

33:49 waking up from the self in our day-to-day life?

33:52 I'm not sure if it would be uh useful if

33:55 I would completely wake up from myself in my day-to-day life.

34:00 I sometimes get u messages from people who have

34:03 this happening to them involuntarily and in a prolonged way.

34:07 And many of them find it deeply disturbing and try

34:10 to do therapy and to get rid of it and go

34:13 back into this normal state because they find it hard

34:16 to engage with their life in that dissociated depersonalized state.

34:22 And so I suspect that having this representation is actually helpful.

34:26 It might uh reduce your suffering if you

34:29 disidentify from yourself and the plightes of the self.

34:32 But the reason why you have the suffering

34:34 is typically because you you care and you care

34:38 because you are it serves the organism if you

34:41 care and you could say oh f the organism.

34:44 uh this organism has called me into existence me little poor

34:48 consciousness and I didn't sign up for this and I don't

34:51 want actually to be enslaved and shackled by an organism and I

34:55 think that's fair but you could also say that while you

34:58 are identified like this you have responsibilities right you have friends

35:03 loved ones missions in this world and from this perspective if you

35:08 realize oh I'm if I'm completely disidentified I will no longer

35:12 care about my loves I will no longer care about my children,

35:14 no longer care about my friends,

35:16 no longer care about what's just and fair in the world and so on.

35:19 Is this actually a good thing?

35:21 Right?

35:21 And there is no absolute vantage point in the identified vantage point.

35:25 You would say, "Oh my god,

35:26 this would be terrible because you take the perspective of say

35:29 your partner who realizes my my partner is gone, right?

35:32 He's he's now enlightened uh and is not suffering anymore

35:36 but uh he could as well be a vegetable or he is

35:40 just going to go now on a journey of self fulfillment

35:44 through the world and is no longer taking care of the family.

35:47 That's a disaster.

35:48 Right?

35:49 So it's difficult to um have an absolute answer to this.

35:53 You could say that from the perspective of the Buddha that he

35:56 left his family he to become the Buddha and became completely enlightened.

36:01 And uh maybe this was the right thing to do.

36:03 It it really depends on the mind that you are

36:06 and nothing actually matters except the perspective of a mind that cares.

36:11 Uh-huh.

36:12 Do you think that meaning is inherently selfprocedured or is that have some

36:16 sort of existential uh reality outside of a self that that makes it?

36:22 I think that there is meaning above the self.

36:25 The self is a model of this local organism

36:27 and this local organism is set up in such a way

36:30 that it serves larger patterns of meaning and these larger

36:34 patterns of meaning are the structures that we are participating in

36:37 like emergent self-organizing systems that

36:41 yeah emergent agency is for instance the causal structure of your family

36:45 is an agent itself and your family by you serving

36:47 the family becomes an an agent that uh you can take

36:51 this perspective then you ask yourself what is Is it that me,

36:55 this little person needs to do from the perspective of this larger,

36:58 more important thing that you are serving, right?

37:01 And uh ultimately our life gets meaning

37:03 by identifying things that you would sacrifice yourself for.

37:07 And this is what we call the sacred, right?

37:09 Sacredness is purposes above the ego, above the self.

37:13 And so we are constructing a self that is

37:16 seeing itself as a servant to more important things.

37:19 And if we scale up this um these agentic structures that we

37:24 are co-creating by serving sacredness and go to a global optimum

37:29 of agency this we call this God right and so in some

37:32 sense when we ask ourselves about what should I be doing

37:35 the question that I ask myself is what does God want

37:40 me to do and the idea is not that God is some

37:42 kind of entity that is talking through me through a priest

37:46 or through an oracle and just possesses a part of the world

37:50 but it's a thing that I'm co-constructing where I ask myself

37:53 from the perspective of the best possible agent that can be part

37:56 of what is the thing that I should be doing and so

38:00 in this sense I believe that there is meaning above the self

38:03 but of course you can transcend this your connection to God

38:06 in the same way as you can transcend your connection to the self

38:11 you can drop into different layers of enlightenment Jeffrey Martin had

38:15 these ideas of grades of enlightenment in his P the NSE paper

38:20 the persistent non- symbolic uh states uh he talks about four

38:25 grades but you can experiment with this in meditation where you basically

38:31 go to a level where you're no longer reactive to the world

38:33 and uh where the arisings that are happening in you for instance

38:38 if somebody cuts you off in traffic don't lead to a reaction

38:40 anymore or uh anxiety can no longer get you and only

38:45 love exists and everything that you do is instrumental to love

38:48 but you and also transcend the sense of love and you only

38:51 have aesthetics left in the state you only look for structure

38:54 in the world and it's not that the structure is good

38:57 or bad anymore it's just interesting or boring and if you transcend

39:01 looking for structure I find that I fall asleep I just space

39:05 out if I don't make this effort of paying my neurons

39:08 for discovering structure there's just no point and then if I in meditation

39:12 state go to this level where I relax this particular part

39:16 this aesthetic part then I find myself coming to 20 minutes later.

39:20 Yeah, I think that at least you know Alan

39:26 Watts has this great voice uh voice over audio

39:30 where he talks about if the human if you

39:31 could dream any dream you would start by having

39:33 all these fantastical creations and live all this extravagant

39:37 life and and you would eventually come to at towards

39:40 the end of dreaming the exact dream that you

39:42 were dreaming right now because there is an inherent

39:46 coherent uh structure to the way that we are

39:49 living a dream for the purpose perhaps of a greater

39:51 meaning beyond the self or however you want

39:53 to say I think that there is there is

39:56 this juvenile perception of transcendence being correlated to negation

40:01 of the human experience because in the way that you

40:04 were describing things it it makes me feel like

40:06 we of course are here to have a deeply human

40:09 experience and transcending or I suppose waking up

40:12 to uh to more of our true nature doesn't doesn't

40:16 remove our involvement from it and so I think

40:20 that if it's approached in a way that maintains

40:22 your sanity which it can be quite destabilizing

40:25 in the in thea in the cases where there's psychosis

40:28 or something but yeah do you have any thoughts

40:30 in regards to that I think it's possible to transcend it

40:34 but it's risky I suspect that people like Steve

40:36 Jobs have at some point transcended part of what

40:40 held them back and turned into this immense scalable

40:44 thing or if you think of Jeff Bezos who

40:47 at some point seems to have had an epiphany

40:49 that turns him into a universal uh scalable service platform

40:54 that he just then implemented in the world and layer

40:58 by layer builds all these structures and services, right?

41:02 So you basically get these Napoleons,

41:04 people who are programming themselves from being this local

41:07 entity that is uh trying to find some stable cycle

41:11 in which it can live into this linearly evolving thing

41:14 that is always growing and is going to disrupt reality massively.

41:18 How much have you studied masters and teachings

41:22 from the far east as opposed to the western?

41:25 You know, Bezos and Jobs are an example of an area

41:28 of a certain level of organizational coherence

41:31 that bears fruits in a huge enterprise.

41:34 I'm curious, I suppose,

41:35 how you think about intelligence and how it manifests differently from somebody

41:39 who becomes very successful in the world

41:41 objectively externally versus somebody who

41:44 uh has an immense amount of weight in their presence that you

41:49 can feel and um how you relate and and discern between the two.

41:54 I suppose

41:56 I did read the Vic scriptures and um I read uh writings of Buddha and so

42:01 on but uh I don't have a very deep

42:04 understanding of them because they're not my culture and I

42:08 also didn't have a great affinity to the schools

42:10 as largely because I was personally repulsed

42:13 by the way in which Buddhists experienced me to learn

42:16 that that's maybe a shortcoming of my own mind how they wanted you to learn.

42:20 Yes, I'm fiercely independent.

42:21 I want to be able to criticize everything.

42:23 So in the way in which I approach philosophy

42:27 and science is much more like uh K and Aristotle.

42:31 So when I read them I find there is this critical guy who doubts everything.

42:35 He is reading all the related stuff uh

42:37 that other people have written but he doesn't believe it.

42:40 He's trying to disinfect it,

42:42 sanitize it and put it together into his own worldview.

42:45 And to me this is a very natural way to do whereas

42:48 Buddhists uh typically the people I met expected me to accept their stuff.

42:53 And why?

42:53 Because their teacher told them to.

42:55 And I feel this is a recipe for a disaster epistemologically

42:59 because it does not give me a chance to decide what's true.

43:02 Right?

43:03 Instead, I become their inheritor.

43:04 I get possessed by their minds.

43:06 And so I cannot really be part of a school in which

43:10 I'm expected to have a certain facial expression while I receive the truth.

43:15 And uh instead I need to be able to have my own independent mind.

43:19 So what's happening?

43:20 I read these texts and I try to translate them into a world that I understand.

43:24 But uh as long as I don't understand it very deeply

43:27 and I don't understand the mindset of the people who wrote this text,

43:30 I'm bound to make mistransations.

43:32 And I have a very strong sense that a lot of the translations of Buddhist texts

43:38 into western writing are mistransations where basic groups

43:43 of people thought they have understood the metaphysics but instead

43:46 they just had their own preconception of the metaphysics

43:49 and then they basically map alien concepts into uh

43:52 their own worldview and think they they already

43:55 understood what the other side was going to express.

43:58 I completely agree and I have a deep allergy towards the assumptions we make

44:02 based off extrapolating somebody who died

44:05 a couple thousand years ago that got translated

44:07 over hundreds of years throughout different languages

44:09 and we're supposed to assume that there's

44:11 one even an accurate representation of what

44:13 they actually said and two that we are

44:16 we are perceiving it and interpreting it in the way that they would

44:19 have intended and I'm just curious what

44:21 do you attribute to your epistemic orientation

44:24 in this way because it's very unique

44:25 in your ability to pinpoint point truth seek

44:28 in a way that maps to your own model of the world that you've created.

44:33 Well, I would say that I'm unsistatically basian.

44:36 So basically I start out with a prior that is what

44:41 reasonable people seem to be working with and that works for them.

44:45 For instance, the scientific worldview is, I think,

44:47 a pretty good prior because it contains

44:50 a lot of people who very critically and systematically

44:52 and dispassionately try to reproduce the ideas of others

44:56 via experiments and be uh doubting about it.

45:00 I distrust sometimes institutionalized beliefs.

45:03 So when there is a complicated issue where there's a consensus,

45:07 we notice that this consensus tends to change from time to time.

45:10 And so I don't trust the this consensus because I suspect if

45:14 you have a consensus that changes from time to time there are

45:16 political mechanisms by which people arrive

45:18 the consensus rather than people having

45:20 really done all the experiments and really evaluated beyond a reasonable doubt.

45:24 So I uh I still have to defer to the consensus

45:29 opinion very often because I don't have anything better to offer.

45:32 But uh in the back of my head as I'm always on the lookout for uh the next

45:37 change in the way in which we see nutrition

45:39 or uh in the way in which we see gender

45:43 or sexuality or genetics uh and the influence of genetics

45:47 on our behavior and so on because I see

45:49 that the consensus is changing and changing with certain

45:52 fashions right that that that is one of the issues.

45:55 The other one is uh I look at reports that exist

45:59 and that describe phenomena that seem to be somewhat invariant across cultures.

46:04 For instance, as a child I read the fairy tales

46:07 of all the cultures I could get my hands on.

46:10 African fairy tales, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, French, right?

46:14 And uh what's really fascinating is that they have so much in common

46:17 because they all have for instance have spirits that live in the forest.

46:20 They all have a version of fairies

46:22 or several versions of them or ecosystem of them.

46:25 And uh why is that?

46:26 Why do they all have the same archetypes?

46:28 Is it because u human minds tend to come up with the same superstitious

46:32 dreams because of some quirk in the way

46:34 in which you process concepts and perception?

46:37 Or is it because there is uh stuff that the scientific worldview

46:40 has closed itself off to prematurely and we have to account this.

46:44 So file this in a back door in the basement and say for further observation.

46:49 There were all these stories and accounts that people

46:51 had and that get echoed in fairy tales.

46:54 So uh you don't take this verbatim but uh maybe

46:58 there is stuff waiting for us to discover and look at.

47:03 Do you think those archetypal symbolic like uh imagery or like you think

47:11 that they potentially have an existential reality

47:14 to them and not like I'm curious.

47:16 Oh clearly.

47:16 Yeah.

47:16 So one one thing for instance that I had

47:18 difficulty to understand for a long time were gods.

47:21 Gods.

47:22 gods because I live in a world largely without gods.

47:25 Not only is it secular in a sense that people

47:28 don't believe in the authority of religious institutions to explain reality

47:33 and the entities that the religious texts describe are seen

47:37 as superstition or as allegorical or metaphorical instead of being real.

47:41 But from time to time, I've been running into uh people who talk to angels or uh

47:48 have the voice of God in their head and or talk to Jesus.

47:51 And uh these people are not necessarily stupid, right?

47:55 Some of them are uh high ranking engineers or CEOs and uh smarter than me.

48:01 And so I asked myself, how is their mind compatible with these delusional states

48:05 or uh why do they believe in these things?

48:08 or how did my ancestor Jan Sebastian Bach

48:11 believe in God and he's clearly smarter than me.

48:14 Uh he doesn't see it seem to be a big nerd

48:16 not somebody who is picking his beliefs because of his environment.

48:20 Why was he so deeply religious and at some point I realized that gods

48:25 are psychological realities in the same way

48:28 as the self is a psychological reality.

48:30 Right?

48:30 So if myself is able to have a voice in my head

48:33 and a monologue then other things can also have a voice

48:36 in my head and this means that gods are just as real

48:40 as personal selves and when people say that uh gods don't exist that's pretty

48:46 tall talk from somebody who is just a voice in a head

48:49 right and I so accepting that gods are just as real as selves

48:55 was very important step for me and to have gods that have

48:59 agency They need to be able to exist across a number of minds.

49:04 So gods are basically multi-mindelves that find

49:06 ways to possess not just one individual

49:08 like your personal self or my personal self but they are able to possess

49:12 groups of people and for some reason um in the circles in which

49:17 we are operating in our society we have mostly gotten rid of these entities.

49:22 So we are alone and with our personal self in our heads but in other

49:26 cultures uh people share their mind with multiple uh selves that are not

49:31 personal selves but multi-mind selves and they call them gods and so this mere

49:36 fact that we don't learn this in school and you have to figure this out

49:39 yourself and I also didn't learn

49:42 this from Buddhists uh but it's absolutely essential

49:44 to understand a lot of the religious texts that gives me pause why don't

49:48 we learn what gods are why don't we learn what selves are why don't

49:51 we learned that selves are fictions and gods are fictions on the same level.

49:55 But agentic fictions, fictions that by existing make bodies do things

50:00 in the same way as your personal self is a fiction,

50:02 but by existing it makes you behave in particular ways

50:05 that you wouldn't behave in if you didn't have that self.

50:08 How would you explain then what is real?

50:13 Well to be real in my world view is to be implemented which means there is some

50:18 causal pattern that makes that stuff actually happen

50:22 right as opposed to you just believe in it.

50:26 Of course by believing in things in a particular way they become real.

50:31 So for instance the meaning of words is real by because it is a belief.

50:36 So when you say uh the meaning of plus is addition

50:39 and addition is this kind of mechanism that you do with numbers

50:42 then uh this belief makes it real but this is

50:46 a technical way in which the belief is happening and the belief

50:49 is tied to the implementation of how addition is operating

50:52 in your mind when you are computing numbers and you can

50:55 make this explicit and build machines that implement this belief

50:58 in the same way without the machine believing it but realizing it.

51:01 So in this sense even addition can be real.

51:04 The other thing is the experience of realness.

51:07 And the experience of realness that you experience, oh my god,

51:10 I'm looking at this glass and this glass is real.

51:13 This is a feature that my mind is

51:15 producing to distinguish certain objects from other objects.

51:19 Right?

51:19 Some objects are ideas.

51:21 For instance, uh the idea of say a a giant

51:25 vase of glass that is standing between us right now, right?

51:28 We can have this idea, but this doesn't make it real, right?

51:32 And we don't experience it as real.

51:33 We would say if one of us

51:35 experiences is they are delusional or they're hallucinating.

51:38 And this one is real because it's a construct that explains sensory

51:42 data on my retina and on my skin when I touch this thing.

51:45 And uh it's basically the best explanation that my brain can come up with.

51:49 It's still a simplification because it's an object

51:52 in a game engine that my mind is creating.

51:54 It's not describing the actual physics that are going on here,

51:57 but it's something that allows me to interact with it and make

52:00 predictions about its past and future

52:02 behavior that are pretty accurate and useful.

52:04 And uh because that thing is sensory validated, my mind takes it at real.

52:10 And so this realness is a feature dimension that my mind adds to it.

52:14 And when you're dreaming at night, this feature dimension can be attached

52:17 to ideas almost randomly or even on psychedelics.

52:20 So people can experience an object that they imagine and suddenly the object is

52:25 real and that's simply because in these states uh this feature of of realness

52:30 can get assigned randomly and to be real means to be as real

52:35 as the self that observes it right and the self is a fiction.

52:39 If you're able to transcend yourself then nothing will be real

52:41 that the self is experiencing because you just see it from the outside.

52:44 But as long as you take yourself to be real,

52:46 as as long as this vantage point is real,

52:48 then everything that your mind represent at the same level

52:51 of realness is going to be a reality to you.

52:55 Yeah, it sounds like there's perhaps levels to being real.

52:58 Like there's you can something could be relatively

53:01 real within our subjective conscious awareness or imaginative experience.

53:06 There is the best theory that I I can see.

53:11 There is some kind of mathematics that is so elementary

53:15 that it doesn't need to be derived that it just exists

53:18 by itself because it's possibility in includes some necessity and that is

53:26 giving rise to this object that we are in this universe.

53:30 So this mathematical object that the universe is emerging over

53:34 is what I believe the old Greeks called the logos.

53:37 It's basically a set of mathematical rules that are self-evident.

53:42 And um Steven Warframe calls this thing the rouiad and the way

53:47 in which I currently see it is it's probably the superposition of all finite

53:53 automatter that basically lead to this evolving

53:57 universe and we it's basically creates

53:58 something like an evolving fractal and in this fractal in in some corner

54:03 of it we have the present experience of reality that is being

54:07 produced by the interaction of patterns that give rise to um um particles

54:14 and quasi particles and the interactions

54:16 between them and then eventually to molecules

54:18 and cells and the interaction between cells

54:20 and v communication patterns between the cells.

54:24 Well, have you watched the show called Pantheon?

54:26 Yes.

54:26 Uh not completely because I find the characters too

54:29 annoying and uh also the story is too predictable.

54:32 I find it's mostly good in a sense that they don't botch the things

54:37 in the story except for minor things like the fights in the VR are

54:41 not really plausible because they're too much like anime fights and not what I

54:45 would be doing in a VR if I was an agent that could do whatever.

54:49 But uh they need to tell a story somehow

54:51 and but my problem is that uh most of the characters are insufferable.

54:57 Well, you haven't made it to the end

54:59 of the second season where it gets quite quite good,

55:02 I think, but that's subjective personal opinion.

55:05 I'm curious because

55:06 there's a couple themes that I mean is why I brought that up,

55:10 but just also the understanding from Girdle's perspective

55:13 from different theories of how it may very well be

55:18 the fact that an organism nested within a system

55:21 cannot make clear observations from outside the system objectively.

55:26 Um, and I'm curious what you think about that and the futility of us being able

55:29 to try to create our understanding of how

55:32 this all works while being nested within it.

55:34 Yeah.

55:35 So, the reason why I'm optimistic about this is I think

55:38 that good ran into uh the his proof from the wrong side.

55:46 Mathematics is in some sense an attempt to generalize

55:49 thinking beyond what the human mind can do.

55:52 It's the set of all formal languages.

55:54 all the ways in which you can create meaning and there

55:58 were some way problems in the way in which mathematics was defined

56:01 in classical mathematics and this became apparent um in things like

56:06 for instance Hilbert's hotel's hotel is a hotel with infinitely many rooms

56:11 and Hbert's hotel is was fully booked one day and uh

56:16 a new person arrived and instead of being turned away the guy

56:19 who was running the hotel had an idea and told everybody just

56:22 move one room to the right and you got a free room.

56:25 So, uh then uh came uh an entire bus with people and he said, "Okay,

56:31 just everybody just move 72 rooms to the right and we

56:33 can fit this bus in." And then came infinitely many buses.

56:36 And then the owner of the hotel had the idea,

56:38 everybody move in the room with twice the room number.

56:41 And as a result, they got infinitely free rooms.

56:44 And uh if you think this is a a feature, I'm not sure.

56:48 I suspect it's a bug, right?

56:50 How uh can such a hotel exist that is full and yet it still has free rooms?

56:56 And in practice a problem is this?

56:58 At some point the numbers get so large that you will not be

57:01 able to read your room number anymore before the sun burns out, right?

57:05 And so you cannot multiply it by two because you

57:07 could also not represent the room number in your brain

57:10 anymore because there are not enough particles in the universe

57:12 to build a brain that could represent that number, right?

57:15 So at some point this whole thing is going to break down.

57:17 And it turns out that at the core of mathematics,

57:21 classical mathematics, there are exumes.

57:22 And an exom is a black box that has written

57:25 on the outside what the black box is supposed to do.

57:28 But you don't necessarily have to put something meaningful into the black box.

57:32 You just need to make sure that the exumes don't contradict each other.

57:35 And in the world of the computer where I grew up,

57:38 you don't have s such black boxes.

57:40 You need to make sure that everything actually works from the ground up.

57:43 Right?

57:43 So at the bottom you have some kind of table that tells you how to manipulate

57:47 boolean uh formulas and then how to make

57:49 addition and so on from first principles.

57:52 Whereas basically classical mathematics does

57:54 not always have these first principles.

57:56 And why does mathematics not make this jump to go into computation?

58:00 It's because they lose some of their favorite concepts.

58:02 So it's very difficult to make infinities if you

58:05 cannot actually process infinitely many bits in one step.

58:08 And so classical mathematics doesn't have this notion of state.

58:11 Instead uh it leads leaves the states

58:13 this stepwise manipulation to as an exercise

58:16 to God and just defines what should be happening after the evaluation

58:21 is done and good knew that it's not possible when you want

58:25 to fix the foundation of mathematics

58:27 to do this from the outside because languages

58:29 can only point inside there is no way to get your language

58:33 to point into the outside world because how would you make an arrow inside

58:37 of a language that points into the outside world and so uh you

58:41 have to write all the things that you're talking about inside of your language.

58:45 And Gur had a very brilliant idea

58:47 on how to talk about mathematics inside of mathematics.

58:51 He built a logical language um that allowed him to define arithmetic with it.

58:56 Piano's exoms and piano's exoms are basically a computer

58:59 because you can calculate arbitrary things with it.

59:02 And then he translated the symbols in his language into numbers.

59:07 Same thing as we do with computers today, right?

59:09 we take this programming language and turn it into bytes which are

59:12 numbers that the computer can then evaluate with some kind of arithmetic.

59:16 And so Guru had the same idea.

59:17 He basically builds an emulator in arithmetic for his logical language.

59:21 And so then it defines um functions that um

59:25 mathematical arithmetic functions that can manipulate the numbers

59:28 that in such a way that the manipulations

59:31 are equivalent to the meaning of the symbols.

59:34 And so he can evaluate his logical language inside of itself.

59:38 And this allows him to rewrite his language inside of the language.

59:41 And so he's basically talking about the language by rebuilding

59:44 the language inside of the language from first principles.

59:48 And so now he can make self-referential statements in there.

59:51 And then he can show that certain things cannot be avoided like a statement

59:55 that is pointing at itself by claiming that it has the inverse truth value.

59:59 And that's a big problem for when you believe

1:00:02 that truth is something that is independent of state.

1:00:05 In a computer it's not, right?

1:00:06 You have to evaluate the truth with some kind of definition

1:00:09 of the truth that you have in some kind of algorithm.

1:00:11 And if this algorithm is pointing at itself

1:00:13 in such a way that overrites the truth value,

1:00:15 then maybe the truth value will never be stable.

1:00:18 But tough luck.

1:00:18 This is just how you made it, right?

1:00:20 And so in the world of the computer, syntax and semantics are always the same.

1:00:25 The state and the transitions between the states

1:00:27 of the computer is exactly the meaning.

1:00:29 There is no other meaning.

1:00:30 Whereas in classical mathematics there is a gap between the meaning

1:00:34 of the expression and the actual rating of the expression.

1:00:38 And uh so I think that what G discovered is that mathematics is buggy.

1:00:42 Classical mathematics needs to be replaced by computation.

1:00:46 And that was one of the biggest breakthroughs I think in the 20th century.

1:00:50 The switch from classical mathematics to stateful constructive mathematics.

1:00:54 And the other one is the good shuring thesis

1:00:57 is that all these mathematical languages that are constructive,

1:01:00 all the computational languages have the same power.

1:01:04 Which means it doesn't really matter whether you're using

1:01:06 basic or Python or Java or Boolean logic or NANDgates,

1:01:11 they're all the same game of life constructors.

1:01:15 Many many different ways to define computation from the ground

1:01:19 up and you can all compile them into each other.

1:01:22 So uh this means that all the languages in which

1:01:25 a reality can be described are the same languages.

1:01:28 They just have different notations, different shortcuts, different flourishes.

1:01:32 Maybe some of them more elegant and easy to understand for the human mind.

1:01:36 But ultimately it doesn't really matter which one you use.

1:01:39 And so uh when we notice these are

1:01:41 the only languages that work without contradictions.

1:01:44 And the universe that we're talking about has to be

1:01:47 something that we can defi describe in a language

1:01:50 not necessarily in a spoken language but in a language

1:01:52 of thought in a language that can fit

1:01:54 into God's computer and or into one of the computers

1:01:57 that we can build right and they all the same then it means the world that we're

1:02:01 talking about is one that happens in this computational universe

1:02:05 what is the so I mean very eloquently throughout and then also through what

1:02:11 you just said you refer to not just how we know or what we know,

1:02:15 but the means in which we arrive to knowing.

1:02:18 And I'm curious about what your thoughts are of a the cost of a culture

1:02:22 that is overly identified in top- down processing

1:02:26 and analytical reasoning as the dominant mode of knowing.

1:02:30 So when you think of especially in the west and like our use

1:02:34 of the intellect and it being the predominant

1:02:37 mode of knowing or engaging with reality,

1:02:40 I'm curious what you think the direct cost is

1:02:42 by living our life from a completely analytical reasoning perspective.

1:02:47 I suspect that very very few people actually do this.

1:02:50 Most people act on their instincts and their life is a show and our society is

1:02:54 a shitow because it does not actually use

1:02:56 a lot of analytical reasoning to justify its behavior.

1:02:59 Right.

1:03:00 Mostly we take shortcuts and in a way I think it makes sense to to acknowledge

1:03:06 that uh it's justified often to take

1:03:09 these shortcuts because our reasoning is very brittle.

1:03:12 If you try to find the best possible partner uh

1:03:15 you have to rely in many parts of your instincts because

1:03:18 by the time you make this choice uh your rational understanding

1:03:22 of psychology and your future life is probably insufficient to figure this out.

1:03:26 So when you make a laundry list of features that you're looking

1:03:28 for in a partner and you use this to pick your partner,

1:03:31 the result is probably not very good, right?

1:03:34 So instead you uh probably rely on instincts

1:03:38 on feelings that and these feelings hopefully are good ones.

1:03:41 They can also be very delusional.

1:03:42 And so reason is actually a tool to deal with your darkest feelings

1:03:46 to deal with those parts of your feelings

1:03:48 that are inscrutable that are insec unsure.

1:03:50 And then you go in and you disassemble this part and try

1:03:53 to figure out why I do have to have this particular feeling.

1:03:56 And if you do it right, your feelings will change as a result.

1:03:59 They will become more sophisticated.

1:04:01 And so I think that reason and feeling are supposed to interact with each other.

1:04:06 And do you have a model and how emotion does so?

1:04:09 like how there is an intelligence to the emotional uh landscape

1:04:13 that we have and how that can sometimes and often if we listen

1:04:18 to it and have the courage to point us in a direction

1:04:20 that would behoove us more than if we were to reason our way there.

1:04:25 Sure.

1:04:25 I think that that we have different um emotions which can

1:04:30 be understood as um control functions that are themselves giving rise

1:04:35 to agencies and these agencies are interacting with each other and produce

1:04:40 the total behavior a little bit like in the movie Inside Out.

1:04:44 I I think that inside out is in large part metaphorical because not

1:04:48 every emotion basically has reason attached to it and is a person by itself.

1:04:52 But uh the emotions are basically way in which

1:04:55 the organism is expressing its alignment to the reality that surrounds

1:05:00 the organism to the model of the world

1:05:01 that the organism has and that it plays a role in.

1:05:04 And so for instance when uh you have

1:05:07 heartbreak you will experience this in your chest

1:05:10 region and typically as something that is um

1:05:13 as a feeling of compression together with a particular

1:05:16 kind of pain and you uh project this into your body map and can experience

1:05:22 it as a feature of the way in which the self is interacting with the world.

1:05:26 And this experience of heartbreak is going to recon configure yourself.

1:05:30 It's going to be like a puppet that is pulling

1:05:33 on the marionette of the self and pulls it into particular shape.

1:05:36 And now the marionette has to deal with the shape that it's being pulled

1:05:40 into and has to interact with the world

1:05:42 while being put into this position into this constricted

1:05:46 pain position where it needs to resolve

1:05:48 an issue and might feel helpless or feel grief

1:05:50 or feel broken and so on and it has to navigate the world from this angle.

1:05:56 And I think that the chakras of the eastern perspective are exactly what

1:06:01 we call feelings in in the west that we observe them we experience them

1:06:06 in the body and the chakras they in addition visualized in the body and it's

1:06:12 interesting to ask ourselves what role does

1:06:14 the body actually play in computing these feelings.

1:06:18 Is this uh the peripheral nervous system or is it happening uh

1:06:22 in cells of the organs of the body that basically are moonlighting uh

1:06:26 in computing the alignment of the organism next to their organismic duties

1:06:30 that they have like the heart is not supposed to deal with heartbreak.

1:06:33 It is supposed to pump blood through my body.

1:06:35 But um maybe uh the reason why uh the romantic inclinations

1:06:40 of people change after heart transplant is that there is actually

1:06:42 an interaction with the way in which the organ is working

1:06:45 and the way in which we experience our relationship to reality.

1:06:49 But um regardless this stuff is projected into our mind and we

1:06:53 experience as at one of the forces that are pulling us

1:06:56 in a certain direction and these dynamic forces are interacting with each

1:06:59 other and producing uh the world in which we subjectively have to negotiate.

1:07:05 uh our motivation and our goals.

1:07:08 It makes me question the role memory plays

1:07:11 and uh and maintaining the continuity of our conscious awareness.

1:07:15 Um I'm curious what your thoughts are on that.

1:07:18 Memory is a way to carry information into the future mostly

1:07:22 for future learning and some of our memories are fictitious, right?

1:07:26 The contents of the memories are constraints

1:07:29 that are we use basically cues to reconstruct

1:07:33 a situation from uh ideas stored in our long-term

1:07:37 memory and objects stored in our long-term memory.

1:07:39 They basically instantiate in working memories as fictions and every

1:07:43 memory that we recall is a construct that we

1:07:46 are making a new and it's difficult to to actually

1:07:49 determine which parts of this construct are real.

1:07:52 Ultimately our mind only makes good enough memories

1:07:55 that are on average good enough for learning.

1:07:57 Right?

1:07:58 And so I suspect that the memories that we recall from our early childhood

1:08:02 are being tainted by the way in which the objects in our mind change.

1:08:06 For instance, the way in which we classify faces

1:08:09 changes over the years because we make different face models.

1:08:13 And we can test this because if we see for instance

1:08:16 as children people from a different ethnicity for the first time,

1:08:19 we might not be able to tell their faces apart.

1:08:22 Or if you see sheep for the first time,

1:08:24 you might not be able to tell their faces apart, whereas a shepherd can.

1:08:28 And after you build the proper face prototypes,

1:08:30 you basically can see that sheep have faces that are

1:08:33 just as different as human faces and so on.

1:08:35 But when you remember sheep in your childhood,

1:08:38 they don't look different than they look now, right?

1:08:40 So clearly your memory is creating a fiction of what this looked like uh

1:08:45 to you and is actually it much more informative about how you see the world now.

1:08:52 How would you see that our orient our understanding and use

1:08:56 case I suppose of memory changes as we approach something approximating

1:09:02 enlightenment like as a saliency grows in our experience how does

1:09:07 how we relate to memory change I'm curious if you have thought

1:09:10 I think we uh realize that it's a fiction

1:09:14 and that it's fickle and uh we I think have to be

1:09:19 okay with this that only the present is to some

1:09:22 degree real and the future and the past are fictitious.

1:09:25 It's also a way in which you can deal with suffering.

1:09:28 When you feel that you're overwhelmed by your life,

1:09:32 uh realize that you are existing in the present

1:09:35 and in this present you can uh typically deal with the situation, right?

1:09:40 You can make yourself a really nice cup of tea and get

1:09:42 some chocolate and a blanket and uh the present might be bearable.

1:09:47 And the things that concern you like your heartbreak for instance

1:09:50 is a thing that is only happening yesterday and tomorrow.

1:09:54 And so if you put everything into daytight compartments and only

1:09:57 live in this interval while behaving in such a way

1:10:01 that you will not be broke tomorrow and you will

1:10:04 be able to face tomorrow in the best possible way.

1:10:06 But experientially you are confined to the present.

1:10:10 Life can become a lot easier.

1:10:12 Right?

1:10:12 This this is something that you can deal with if you are

1:10:14 in in a state that makes it hard for you to interact with the world.

1:10:19 But um of course uh it's more powerful if you integrate over longer

1:10:22 time spans and if you can maintain a longer period and so I

1:10:26 think the subjective time that we inherit is like the self a construct

1:10:30 that we can tune to make it as useful to us as we can.

1:10:34 What role do you think then suffering plays on towards

1:10:38 the evolution of us as individuals and the planet

1:10:41 at large uh from the vic perspective whether

1:10:44 or not you real like you agree with it

1:10:46 or not like the non-dual understanding of sort

1:10:50 of suffering being the price of admission for the illusion

1:10:54 of separation by taking on this belief of a separate

1:10:58 self who goes through all of these things.

1:11:01 It allows us to experience the one

1:11:03 infinite consciousness in a limited identified self for the purpose of exploring

1:11:08 and identifying and growing and learning about itself.

1:11:11 Um whether or not I'm curious whether or not you agree

1:11:16 um and what role suffering then plays from the larger perspective.

1:11:23 First of all, let's see what we mean by suffering.

1:11:26 Right?

1:11:27 At the lowest level, I think um pain is a signal that a part of your mind sends

1:11:32 to another part of your mind to uh change its behavior for the better.

1:11:37 Right?

1:11:37 It's a learning signal.

1:11:39 And sometimes this learning signal does not lead to an improvement

1:11:42 of the behavior which means that the signal is misguided.

1:11:46 This could be because uh the part of the mind that received

1:11:49 the signal is not able to change the situation or the world is

1:11:52 not set up in such a way that you can change it

1:11:55 or the thing is not actually a thing that needs to be changed.

1:11:58 Right?

1:11:58 Uh or it conflicts with another more important

1:12:00 goal that you don't want to give up on.

1:12:03 So while the pain signal becomes stronger,

1:12:06 you don't have a way to mitigate its origin.

1:12:09 and uh this um chronic pain signal

1:12:12 that becomes stronger as a result of this mismatch

1:12:14 between action and the signal that directs

1:12:16 the action that is what we call suffering.

1:12:18 So you could say that suffering in in at some

1:12:21 technical sense is the result of a miswiring of your mind.

1:12:24 And if we resolve this wiring issue because suffering

1:12:26 is not created by the world and inflicted on you.

1:12:29 It's created inside of your own mind

1:12:31 at the boundary between self model and world

1:12:33 model because you think you have a certain alignment that you need to change.

1:12:37 Right?

1:12:38 And suffering in a sense is optional.

1:12:40 If you are fixing the wiring, the suffering will disappear.

1:12:43 The pain might not be, but it does not necessarily have to create suffering.

1:12:48 And when you get older, you may have more back pain,

1:12:50 but it does not necessarily need to more suffering because

1:12:52 it just informs you that your back is getting worse.

1:12:55 And a lot of people have chronic pain

1:12:57 without suffering because it's not something that occupies them.

1:13:00 It's just an information and thisformational stimulus can be

1:13:04 after it's being listened out and acknowledged uh dies down

1:13:08 and it's just an information somewhere in the back

1:13:10 of your mind and you don't have to worry about it anymore.

1:13:13 Yeah, they don't compound the pain by this narrative we place on top of it.

1:13:17 And it's tempting to say we should not suffer at all.

1:13:20 I think that approximately true to say that suffering

1:13:23 is a result of a lack of consciousness.

1:13:26 If you are able to have enough

1:13:28 consciousness to understand the origin of your pain

1:13:31 and the mechanisms that you are embedded in, you can resolve the suffering.

1:13:35 But uh but suffering can also be useful because

1:13:38 it can lead to motivation for an individual that lets

1:13:41 the individual do things that are useful maybe not

1:13:45 even for the individual but for the world at large.

1:13:48 Right?

1:13:48 So I suspect that a lot of works of great science and of great

1:13:51 art and statesmanship and so on were the result of suffering and we

1:13:56 can be grateful for the indivi to the individuals that were unable to fix

1:13:59 themselves before uh they uh went

1:14:03 into greatness that was caused by suffering ultimately.

1:14:07 Yeah, that was the case with girdle as well, right?

1:14:09 I think it was this case for for a lot of the great ones

1:14:12 and suffering is one of the great motivations for people to achieve good things.

1:14:19 But uh doesn't necessarily mean that we should seek it out and it's not

1:14:23 necessarily that all suffering leads to greatness

1:14:25 and that also not all greatness is desirable.

1:14:30 Totally.

1:14:30 Yeah.

1:14:31 Because it can also disrupt the world in terrible ways.

1:14:34 How do you make the distinction between knowledge and wisdom?

1:14:37 Uh knowledge to me is a representation of a state

1:14:41 of affairs that uh it can either be tested like a skill.

1:14:45 It's basically specific to your own organism

1:14:48 like the knowledge how to ride a bicycle.

1:14:50 Something that is difficult to explain by itself

1:14:52 because it is tied into your nervous system.

1:14:55 And there is this uh explicit knowledge

1:14:57 that is formulated in languages that you can share.

1:15:00 So it's independent of the individual mind and can be transported.

1:15:04 But by itself, knowledge is neutral.

1:15:07 It's um philosophers you often say it's justified true belief.

1:15:11 So it's basically uh information about states of affairs that we have reason

1:15:17 to consider to be true and that can be applied as models across situations.

1:15:22 And uh wisdom is more related to an understanding of what should

1:15:26 be done of uh how to make sense of the world and how

1:15:30 to regulate the world of the things to do and not to do

1:15:34 of um the way in which uh the self is embedded in the world.

1:15:40 How does one cultivate the latter consistently?

1:15:44 In some uh ways patience helps.

1:15:47 So basically observing questioning um ensuring that uh you don't

1:15:52 believe yourself too much and try to understand the larger patterns.

1:15:57 Part of it is really accepting the fact that learning

1:16:01 happens layer by layer and you cannot force it.

1:16:03 It's it's just wisdom is not for all of us like not for me.

1:16:08 I'm not a supervised person and um some

1:16:11 people are born with better prior so it's much easier for them to obtain wisdom

1:16:15 or to maintain states of wisdom than for others.

1:16:20 And what also helps is to spend time among full adults.

1:16:24 Basically people who get to the point where

1:16:27 they understand that their own identity is an accident

1:16:30 and that in some sense everybody is everybody

1:16:32 else in the same time a different timeline.

1:16:35 and uh the accidents of our births and biography and so on are producing

1:16:41 the differences of between us and some

1:16:46 people basically are given more to wisdom because

1:16:48 their mind is set up in such a way that they're better at discovering

1:16:52 these structures but often wisdom is also dependent

1:16:55 on the world in which you are in.

1:16:57 For instance, a lot of indigenous cultures had elders

1:17:00 that basically were very very good at understanding the relationship

1:17:03 that the tribe had to the evolutionary game of the forests

1:17:07 and ecosystems around them and how to deal with this.

1:17:10 And when they were confronted with an industrial society,

1:17:12 they went insane because they were no longer able to apply their wisdom to it.

1:17:16 And they might realize this.

1:17:17 And we also observe a similar thing in us that our circumstances can change.

1:17:22 We can be dropped into life circumstances that overwhelm our ability to be wise,

1:17:27 to keep our mind in a state that is in balance,

1:17:30 that is able to uh identify whether we

1:17:33 get drawn into delusions and whether we become manic,

1:17:36 whether uh we become triggered by impulses and so

1:17:39 on and whether or ability to question whether

1:17:43 we actually have a good systemic understanding of reality

1:17:45 and instead are just driven by immature instincts.

1:17:49 What would you say from and it's not a given but let's say the humanity reaches

1:17:54 the 25th century and peers back into the 21st

1:17:57 century and finds observations about our current developmental moment.

1:18:02 What do you think would be the predominant observation and how does

1:18:06 how we view intelligence change over the next coming decades and centuries?

1:18:12 It's extremely hard to say because

1:18:13 the changes have been compounding recently so quickly.

1:18:17 I think that in in many ways our ability to plan the future ended

1:18:21 with the industrialization because we our future changed

1:18:25 faster than our models of the future could.

1:18:27 And so we had this transhumanist idea

1:18:29 of modernism that by patching technology more and more

1:18:33 we would be able to change ourselves to adapt to this more and more rapid world.

1:18:38 Before the industrialization our world was largely cyclical, right?

1:18:43 that you would have cycles of ups and downs

1:18:45 of uh famines and wars and uh recovery and so on.

1:18:49 But after the industrialization everything becomes linear.

1:18:53 We basically no time can get revisited because you can never

1:18:57 fall back to a time in which we didn't have mythology.

1:19:00 It's it's very difficult to imagine a thing

1:19:02 that would uh come back is not us anymore.

1:19:05 So once you have libraries,

1:19:07 once you have uh technology and so on, you produce more books,

1:19:10 more libraries, more technology, more insight and you produce these different

1:19:14 phase transitions that happen with mass communication,

1:19:17 with the printing press, with um the radio,

1:19:21 with the TV and um at some point modernism died.

1:19:25 I think 1968 was the moment when our next generation of thinking elites were no

1:19:32 longer believing in this transhumanist fiction of modernism

1:19:35 and since then we are a bit of a headless chicken and so we still

1:19:38 have these technological revolutions but we don't really

1:19:41 have a strong belief in the future anymore

1:19:42 because we have difficulty to picture ourselves in it.

1:19:46 everything is changing too fast and uh we see compounding of existential risks

1:19:51 that we don't actually really know how

1:19:53 to deal with and this creates certain helplessness

1:19:56 and we just as best hope to muddle through at least that's my sense

1:20:00 when I look at the theories of our elites and the planners and governments

1:20:04 of our societies they seem to be muddling through they don't see actually have

1:20:08 a plan anymore of how to deal with the future and um this phenomenon

1:20:13 of thinking machines that we are building intellig igence systems that are able

1:20:17 to think in humanlike ways but unlike

1:20:19 human minds can be scaled is somewhat undeniable

1:20:22 and this changes the nature of intelligence

1:20:25 identification and minds I think beyond

1:20:27 our comprehension and we find a number of scenario on how this can play out

1:20:31 in intelligent science fiction but I don't

1:20:34 see a similar thing happening in solid

1:20:37 futurism or solid sociology and so on instead it seems to me that uh

1:20:42 anthropology sociology and so on are becoming more and or just those stories

1:20:46 that serve uh local ideologies and are

1:20:49 no longer directed on seriously understanding how human

1:20:53 identity is going to change in the future

1:20:55 when we are interfacing with artificial

1:20:57 intelligence and uh with each other through

1:20:59 tools that allow us to have unlimited attention,

1:21:02 unlimited knowledge and deeper wisdom that currently fits into a human brain.

1:21:07 What would be your quick thoughts on the most

1:21:10 ideal timeline in which humanity implements AGI?

1:21:14 Yeah, I think near-term it would be your universal basic intelligence.

1:21:18 We give everybody tools that extend them,

1:21:21 extend the individual human agency into something

1:21:23 that makes us all competent and able to interface

1:21:26 with each other like let my AIS talk to your AIS and sort all the things out.

1:21:30 It also means we can no longer hide.

1:21:32 All the information will be out in the open because it can be inferred.

1:21:35 And so we will have a world in which people

1:21:38 cannot meaningfully lie about their intentions and have to get along,

1:21:43 have to become coherent.

1:21:44 And such a coherent world is probably going to lead

1:21:48 to an a system in which we have to account for the way

1:21:53 in which we go into the future and in which

1:21:55 our all our actions count for that future and matter for it.

1:21:59 And if if such a world becomes real,

1:22:02 it basically it would be the end of our childhood as a species.

1:22:05 It would mean that we become a mature techno civilization that is

1:22:11 meaningfully and self-aware and uh interacting with its future and itself.

1:22:18 What about medium to long term?

1:22:20 I suspect this has already happened, right?

1:22:23 You think we're living in the dream of a future AGI?

1:22:26 I'm I'm no not not in this sense but uh at the moment

1:22:31 uh the next paradigm seems to be happening until um last

1:22:36 week we the main paradigm of AI was the chatbot and before

1:22:40 that uh it was the text generator and now it's the agent

1:22:46 and it's this thing that is always on and it's self-improving and is

1:22:50 acting on behalf and with the user and we have no idea

1:22:53 how we control this and whether it's going to be and whether

1:22:56 it runs into a wall or or whether it leads to continuous self-improvement.

1:23:00 It's so it's a very exciting moment in history in which we currently are.

1:23:05 It's also induces vertigo because it's so rapid and so fast.

1:23:10 I still think that we are missing something important in AI.

1:23:13 I think that these systems that we're building are grammatically inefficient.

1:23:16 The way in which they learn is just not right.

1:23:18 I don't think that you learn by imitation.

1:23:20 I think you learn by making sense of reality, by projecting yourself into it,

1:23:24 and by understanding the possibilities that you can have in this world.

1:23:29 With that understanding,

1:23:31 what advice if you have for everybody who's listening right now

1:23:35 and the next coming decades as they find themselves in this world with rapidly,

1:23:39 exponentially growing artificial intelligence?

1:23:42 Um, how can we best orient ourselves so that we can live well?

1:23:47 I don't really have good advice because I do like wisdom.

1:23:50 I'm not a spiritual teacher.

1:23:51 I'm just a guy looking at things.

1:23:53 So, um, personally, I think it's important to cultivate love,

1:23:57 to cultivate the ability to find shared purpose and, uh,

1:24:01 to scale this up into deep systems of meanings that are sustainable,

1:24:06 in which you can meaningfully interface, interact with each other.

1:24:09 When you're able to fix your root node to reality,

1:24:11 the way in which you relate to existence

1:24:14 in this evolutionary game of life and then you come to a set of rules

1:24:19 that constrain your behavior and you will observe others

1:24:22 that come to the same conclusions and you

1:24:24 will find natural scalable interfaces and I think

1:24:26 that AI might help with this by finding

1:24:28 a long game that we can actually meaningfully participate in.

1:24:33 So this this makes me somewhat optimistic because I thought

1:24:37 by by per default these are the last days of a technological

1:24:40 society that is not able to model itself anymore and as a result

1:24:43 is breaking down and these new technologies might change that.

1:24:46 It's not a given that they do but I think that they throw the balls

1:24:50 back up into the air and we don't know yet how they're going to fall down.

1:24:56 Last question.

1:24:56 I know you have your next thing to jump into and I have

1:24:59 thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and I'm

1:25:01 really looking forward to continuing the conversation.

1:25:03 As you said, there is an importance

1:25:05 to cultivate love and a shared sense of purpose.

1:25:09 What is love?

1:25:11 I think that love is shared sacredness.

1:25:14 That's basically the discovery of the sacred in the other

1:25:17 where you observe that others are serving purposes above

1:25:20 the ego that are more important than them and that ultimately

1:25:24 lead them to recognizing a global optimum of agency.

1:25:28 And love is this principle by what which God organizes itself.

1:25:32 It's basically the thing that binds agents together

1:25:34 into ethically accountable entities where when you are ethical,

1:25:38 it means you have to be able to justify

1:25:40 your purposes to somebody else and this leads to shared purposes.

1:25:45 Beautifully said.

1:25:47 Well, to me, this has felt like a shared purpose that we

1:25:50 get to have these conversations and have a wider community tune,

1:25:53 you know, tune into these ideas that they

1:25:55 find very fascinating and supportive for their life.

1:25:58 Um, so thank you for coming today.

1:26:00 It was a pleasure.

1:26:01 Thank you for inviting me.

1:26:02 It was big joy.

1:26:04 Yeah.

1:26:04 Uh is there any work that you have upcoming you want to share with with people?

1:26:07 We can leave links down towards

1:26:09 You can find our work at the California in Silver Machine Consciousness.

1:26:12 We have a website.

1:26:14 It's called CIMC.ai.

1:26:16 And what we study at CIMC is um whether we are able to identify

1:26:21 the principles of self-organization that um consciousness is

1:26:26 expressing in the human mind and simulate them.

1:26:28 So it's a very bold project.

1:26:30 We basically want to use the tools of AI to understand the human mind.

1:26:35 I can't wait to see.

1:26:36 Thank you, Fruit Bears.

1:26:37 Thank you.

1:26:38 And for everybody tuning into this episode,

1:26:39 let us know in which ways as always this episode has resonated with you.

1:26:43 Until next time, be well.

1:26:44 Thank you, Yosha.

1:26:45 Thank you.