Kind: captions
Language: en
there is a certain perspective where you
might be thinking what is the longest
possible game that you could be playing
a short game is for instance cancer is
playing a shorter game than your
organism it kind of is an organism
playing a shorter game than the regular
organism and because the Cancer Cannot
procreate beyond the organism
um except for some infectious cancers
like the ones that eradicated the
testimonial Devils
you typically end up with the situation
where the organism dies together with
stick cancer because the cancer has
destroyed the larger system due to
playing a shorter game and so ideally
you want to I think build agents that
play the longest possible games and the
longest possible games is to keep
entropy at Bay as long as possible by
doing interesting stuff
the following is a conversation with
yoshibak his third time on this podcast
yosha is one of the most brilliant and
fascinating Minds in the world exploring
the nature of intelligence Consciousness
and computation and he's one of my
favorite humans to talk to about pretty
much anything and everything this is the
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description and now dear friends here's
yosha Bach
you wrote a post about levels of
lucidity
quote as we grow older it becomes
apparent that our self-reflexive mind is
not just gradually accumulating ideas
about itself but that it progresses in
somewhat distinct stages
so there's seven of the stages stage one
reactive survival infant
stage two personal self young child
stage three social self adolescence
domesticated adult stage four is
rational agency self-direction stage
five is self
authoring that's full adult you've
achieved wisdom but there's two more
stages stage six is Enlightenment stage
seven is Transcendence can you explain
each
or the interesting parts of each of
these stages and what's your sense why
their stages
of this uh of Lucidity as we progress
through life in this too short life this
model is derived from concept by the
psychologist Robert Keegan and he talks
about the development of the self as a
process that happens in principle by
some kind of reverse engineering of a
mind where you gradually become aware of
yourself and thereby build structure
that allows you to interact deeper with
the world and yourself
and I found myself using this model not
so much as a developmental model I'm not
even sure if it's a very good
developmental model because I saw my
children not progressing exactly like
that and I also suspect that you don't
go to these stages necessarily in
succession and it's not that you work
through one stage and then you get into
the next one sometimes you revisit them
sometimes stuff is happening in parallel
but it's I think a useful framework to
look at what's present in the structure
of a person and how they interact with
the world and how they relate to
themselves
so it's more like a philosophical
framework that allows you to talk about
how mines work and at first when we are
born we don't have a personal self yet I
think instead we have an intentional
self and this attention itself is
initially in the infant task that's
building a world model and also an
initial model of the self but mostly
it's building a game engine in the brain
that is tracking sensory data and uses
it to explain it and in some sense you
could compare it to game engine like
Minecraft or so sort colors and sounds
people are all not physical objects they
are creation of our mind at a certain
level of core screening models that are
mathematical that use geometry and that
use manipulation of objects and so on to
create scenes in which we can find
ourselves and interact with them so
Minecraft yeah and this personal self is
something that is more or less created
after the world is finished after it's
trained into the system after it has
been constructed and this personal self
is an agent that interacts with the
outside world and the outside world is
not the world of quantum mechanics the
not the physical universe but it's the
model that has been generated in our own
mind
right and this is us and we experience
ourselves interacting with stead outside
world that is created inside of our own
mind and outside of our self there's
feelings and then they presented our
interface to this outside world they
pose problems to us these feelings are
basically attitudes that our mind is
Computing that tell us what's needed in
the world the things that we are drawn
to or the things that we are afraid of
and we are tasked with solving this
problem of satisfying the needs avoiding
the aversions following on our inner
commitments and so on and also modeling
ourselves and building the next stage so
after we have this personal self in
stage two online many people form a
social self and this social self allows
the individual to experience themselves
as part of a group
it's basically this thing that when you
are playing in a team for instance you
don't notice yourself just as a single
note that is reaching out into the world
but you're also looking down you're
looking down from this entire group and
you see how this group is looking at
this individual and everybody in the
group is in some sense emulating this
group Spirit to some degree and in this
state people are forming their opinions
by assimilating them from this group
mind obviously gain the ability to act a
little bit like a hive mind body are you
also modeling the interaction of how
opinions shapes and forms through the
interaction of the individual nodes
within the group
yeah it's basically the way in which
people do it in this stage is that they
experience what are the opinions of my
environment they experience the
relationship that they have to their
environment and they resonate with
people around them and get moral
opinions in this through this
interaction to
um the way in which they relate to
others
and at stage four you basically
understand that stuff is true and false
independently but other people believe
when you have agency over your own
beliefs in that stage you basically
discover epistemology the rules about
determining what's true and false so you
can you start to learn how to think
yes I mean at some level you're always
thinking you are constructing things and
I believe that this ability to reason
about your mental representation is what
we mean by thinking it's an
intrinsically reflexive process that
requires Consciousness without
Consciousness you cannot think you can
generate the content of feelings and so
on outside of Consciousness it's very
hard to be conscious of how your
feelings emerge at least in the early
stages of development but um thoughts is
something that you always control
and if you are a nerd like me
you often have to skip stage three
because you'd like the intuitive empathy
with others because in order to resonate
with a group you need to have a quite
similar architecture and if people are
wired differently then it's hard for
them to resonate with other people and
basically have empathy which is not the
same as compassion but it is a shared
perceptual mental state empathy happens
not just via inference about the major
states of others but it's a perception
of what other people feel and where
they're at can't you not have empathy
while also not having a similar
architecture cognitive architecture as
the others in the group I think yes but
I experience that too but you need to
build something that is like a meta
architecture you need to be able to
embrace the architecture of the other to
some degree also find some common ground
and it's also this issue that if you are
a nerd Nomis often so people is the
neurotypical people have difficulty to
resonate with you and as a result they
have difficult the understanding you
unless they have enough wisdom to to
fear what's going on there well aren't
we in the whole process of the stage
there is to figure out the API to the
other humans that have different
architecture and you yourself publish
public documentation for the API
that that people can interact with for
you isn't this the whole process of
socializing my experiment as a child
growing up was that um I did not find
any way to interface with the stage
three people and they didn't do that
with me so yeah of course they tried it
very hard but it was only when I entered
the mathematics school at ninth grade
lots of other nerds were present
um that I found people that I could
deeply resonate with and had the
impression that yes I have friends now I
found my own people and before that I
felt extremely lonely in the world there
was basically nobody I could connect to
and
I remember
um there was one moment in all these
years where I was in there was a school
exchange and it was the Russian boy kid
from the Russian garnison station in
Eastern Germany you visit our school and
we played a game of chess against each
other and we looked into each other's
eyes and we sat there for two hours
playing this game of chess and I had the
impression this is a human being he
understands but I understand
we didn't even speak the same language
I wonder if uh your life could have been
different if you knew that it's okay to
be different to have a different
architecture
whether like accepting that
the interface is hard to figure out
takes a long time to figure out and it's
okay to be different in fact it's
beautiful to be different
it was not my main concern my main
concern was mostly that it was alone
right this was not so much the question
is it okay to be the way I am the I
couldn't do much about it so I have to I
had to deal with it but um my main issue
was that I was not sure if I would ever
meet anybody growing up
that I would connect to at such a deep
level that I would feel that I could
belong so there's a visceral undeniable
feeling of being alone yes and I noticed
the same thing when I came into the math
school that I think
at least half probably two-thirds of
these kids were severely traumatized as
uh children growing up and in large part
due to being alone
because they couldn't find anybody to
relate to don't you think everybody's
alone deep down no
huh
I'm not alone anymore it took me some
time to update and to get over the
traumata and so on but I felt that in my
20s I had lots of friends and I had my
place in about and it was I had no
longer doubts that
I would never be alone again
is there some aspect to which We're
Alone Together you don't see a deep
loneliness inside yourself still no
sorry
okay so that's the non-linear
progression through the stages I suppose
you caught up on stage three something
very it's stage four and so basically I
find that many Nerds jump straight into
stage four bypassing stage three did
they return to it then later yeah of
course they sometimes they do not always
yeah the question is basically do you
stay a little bit Autistic or do you
catch up and I believe you can catch up
you can build this missing structure
yeah and um I basically experience
yourself as part of a group learn
intuitive empathy and develop the sense
this percept perceptual sense of feeling
what other people fear and before that I
could only basically feel this when I
was deeply enough for somebody and
visitor so there's a lot of friction to
feeling that way like it takes it only
with certain people as opposed to It
comes naturally yeah it's frictionless
but um this is something that basically
later I felt started to resolve itself
for me to a large degree what was the
trick
in many ways scoring up and paying
attention
meditation the top I had some very
crucial experiences
um in getting close to people building
connections
um
cuddling a lot in my student years
so really paying attention yeah to the
what is it to this
feeling another human being fully loving
other people and being loved by other
people and so building a space in which
you can be safe and can experiment and
um touch a lot and be close to somebody
a lot and over that over time basically
at some point you realize oh it's no
longer that I feel locked out but I feel
connected and I experience where
somebody else is at and normally my mind
is racing very fast at a high frequency
so it's not always working like this
sometimes works better sometimes it
works less but also don't see this as a
pressure it's more it's interesting to
observe myself which frequency I'm at
and uh at which mode somebody else is at
yeah man the mind is so beautiful in
that way it sometimes sometimes it comes
so natural to me so easy to pay
attention pay attention to the world
fool each other people fully and
sometimes the stress
over silly things is overwhelming it's
so interesting that demise that roller
coaster in that way and stage five
you'll discover how identity is
constructed self-offering realize that
your values are not terminal but they
are instrumental to achieving a world
that you like and Aesthetics that you
prefer yeah and um the more you
understand this the more you get agency
over how your identity is constructed
and you realize that identity in
interpersonal interaction is a costume
and you should be able to have agency
over that costume right it's useful to
be a costume it tells something to
others and that allows to interface in
roles but being locked into this is a
big limitation the word costume kind of
implies that it's fraudulent in some way
his costume a good word for you like to
present ourselves to the world in some
sense I learned a lot about costumes at
Burning Man before that I did not really
appreciate costumes and saw them more as
uniforms like wearing a suit if you are
working in a bank or if you are trying
to get startup funding for uh from a VC
in Switzerland right then you dress up
in a particular way and this is mostly
to show the other side that you are
willing to play by the rules and you
understand what the rules are but um
there is something deeper when you write
Burning Man your costume becomes
self-expression and there is no boundary
to the self-expression you're basically
free to wear what you want to express
other people what you feel like this day
and uh what kind of interactions you
want to have is the customer kind of
projection
of uh of Who You Are
that's very hard to say because the
costume also depends on what other
people see in the costume and this
depends on the context that the other
people understand and you have to create
something if you want to that is legible
to the other side and that means
something to yourself
do we become prisoners of the costume
because everybody expects us some people
do but um I think that once you realize
that you we are costume at Burning Man a
variety of costumes realize that you
cannot not wear a costume yeah right
basically everything that you wear and
present to others is something that is
to some degree in addition to what you
are deep inside so this stage in
parentheses you put full adult Karma
wisdom why is this full adult
why would you say this is full
and why is it wisdom it does allow you
to understand
um why other people have different
identities from yours and it allows you
to understand that the difference
between people who vote for different
parties and might have very different
opinions and different value systems is
often the accident of where they are
born and what happened after them after
that to them and what traits they got
before they were born and at some point
you realize the perspective where you
understand that everybody could be you
in a different timeline if you just flip
those bits
how many costumes do you have
I don't count but in more than one
yeah of course
how easy is to do costume changes
throughout the day
it's just a matter of energy and
interest when you are wearing your
pajamas and you switch out of your
pajamas into say a work short and pants
you're making a costume change right and
if you are putting on a gown you're
making a costume change you could do the
same with personality
you could if if that's what you're into
there are people which have multiple
personalities for interaction in
multiple worlds right so if somebody
works in a store and you put up a
storekeeper personality when you're
working when you're presenting yourself
at work you develop a step personality
for this and the social persona for many
people is in some sense a puppet that
they are playing like a marionette and
if they play this all the time they
might forget that there is something
behind this this is something what it
feels like to be in your skin and I
guess it's very helpful if you're able
to get back into this and for me it's
the other way around is relatively hard
for me it's pretty hard to learn how to
play consistent social roles for me it's
much easier just to be real
or not real but to have
a one costume
no it's not quite the same so basically
when you are wearing a costume at
Burning Man and say you are an
extraterrestrial Prince
um there's something where you are
expressing in some sense something is
closer to yourself than the way in which
you hide yourself behind a standard
closing when you go out in the city in
the default world and so this costume
that you're wearing at Burning Man
allows you to express more of yourself
and uh you have a shorter distance of
advertising to people
what kind of person you are what kind of
interaction you would want to have with
them and so you get much earlier into
media Express and I believe it's
regrettable that we do not use the
opportunities that we have this
custom-made closing now to weird
costumes that are much more stylish that
are much more custom-made that are not
necessarily part of a fashion in which
you express which milieu you're part of
and how up to date you are but you also
Express
how you are as an individual and what
you want to do today and how you feel
today and what you intend to do about it
well isn't it easier now with in the
digital world
to uh
to explore different costumes I mean
that's the kind of idea with virtual
reality that's the idea even with
Twitter in two-dimensional screens you
can you can swap all costumes you can be
as weird as you want it's easier for
burning man you have to like order
things you have to make things you have
to it's more effort to it's better if
you make them yourselves
sure but it's just easier to do
digitally right it's not about easy it's
about how to get it right and for me the
first Burning Man experience I got
adopted by a bunch of people in Boston
who direct me to Burning Man and we
spent a few weekends doing costumes
together and that was an important part
of the experience where the camp bonded
where people got to know each other and
we basically grew into the experience
that we would have later so the
Extraterrestrial Prince is based on a
true story yeah
[Music]
I can only imagine what that looks like
yosha okay stage six stage six
um at some point you can collapse the
division between self and personal stuff
and world generator again
and a lot of people get there via
meditation or some of them get their
bias academics some of them by accident
and you suddenly notice that you are not
actually a person but you are a vessel
that can create a person
and the person is still there You
observe that personal self But You
observe the personal self from the
outside
and you notice it's a representation and
you might also notice that the word that
is being created is a representation if
not then you might experience that I am
the Universe I am the thing that is
creating everything and of course what
you're creating is not quantum mechanics
and the physical Universe what you're
creating is the scheme engine that is
updating the world and you are creating
your valence your feelings your uh and
all the people inside of that world
including the person that you identify
with yourself in this world are you
creating the game engine or are you
noticing the game imagine
um you noticed how you're generating the
game engine
and I mean when you are dreaming at
night you can uh if you lose have a
lucid dream you can learn how to do this
deliberately and in principle you can
also do it during the day and the reason
why we don't get to do this from the
beginning and why we don't have agency
of our feelings right away is because we
would game it before they have the
necessary amount of wisdom to uh to deal
with creating this dream that we are in
you know you don't want to get access to
cheat codes too quickly otherwise you
won't enjoy so stage five is already
pretty rare and Stage six is even more
rare you both basically find this mostly
this Advanced Buddhist meditators and so
on that uh dropping into this stage and
can induce it as well and spend time in
it so stage five acquires a good
therapist stage six requires a good uh
Buddhist
spiritual leader it is for instance
could be that is the right thing to do
but it's not that these stages give you
scores or levels that you need to
advance to it's not that the next stage
is better you live your life in in the
motto it works best at any given moment
and when your mind decides that you
should uh have a different configuration
then it's building that configuration
and for many people they stay happily at
stage three and experiences themselves
as part of groups and there's nothing
wrong with this and for some people this
doesn't work and they're forced to build
more agency over their rational beliefs
than this and construct their Norms
rationally and so they go to this level
and Stage seven is something that is
more or less hypothetical that would be
the stage in which it's basically a
transhuman stage in which you understand
how you work and which the Mind fully
realizes how it's implemented and can
also in principle enter different modes
in which it could be implemented and
that's the stage that as as far as I
understand is not open to people yet
oh but it is possible to the process of
Technology yes and who knows if there
are biological agents that are working
at different time skills than us that
basically become aware of the way in
which they are implemented on ecosystems
and can change that implementation and
have agency over how they implemented in
the world and what I find interesting
about the discussion about AI alignment
that it seems to be following these
status very much most people seem to be
in stage three also according to Robert
Keegan I think he says that about 85
percent of people are in stage three and
stay there and if you're in stage fear
for a three and your opinions are the
result of social assimilation then what
you're mostly worried about and the AI
is that the AI might have the wrong
opinions so if the AI is just something
racist or sexist we are all lost because
we will assimilate the wrong opinions
from the AI and so we need to make sure
that the AI has the right opinions and
the right values and the right structure
and
and if you are at stage four that's not
your main concern and so most nerds I
don't really worry about
um the algorithmic bias and the model
that it picks up because if there's
something wrong with this bias the AI
ultimately will prove it at some point
we'll get it there that it makes
mathematical proofs about reality and
then it will figure out what's true and
what's false but you're still worried
that AI might turn you into paper clips
because it might have the wrong values
right so if it's set up is there a wrong
function that controls its direction in
the world then it might do something
that is completely horrible and there's
no easy way to fix it so that's more
like a stage four rational as kind of
worry and if you are at stage five
you're mostly worried that AI is not
going to be enlightened fast enough
because you realize that the game is not
so much about intelligence but about
agency about the ability to control the
future and the identity is instrumental
to this and if you are Are a Human Being
I think at some level you ought to
choose your own identity it's you should
not have somebody else pick the costume
for you and then wear it but instead you
should be mindful about what you want to
be in as well and I think if you are an
agent that is fully malleable that can
rewrite its own source code like an AI
might do at some point then the identity
that you will have is whatever you can
be
and in this way the AI will maybe become
everything like a planetary control
system and if it does that then if we
want to coexist with it it means that it
will have to share purposes with us so
it cannot be a transactional
relationship we will not be able to use
reinforcement learning with human
feedback to hardwire its values into it
but this has to happen it's probably
that it's conscious so it can relate to
our own mode of existence where an
observer is observing itself in real
time and there's a certain temporal
frames and the other thing is that it
probably needs to have some kind of
transcendental orientation building
shared agency and in the same way as we
do when we are able to enter with each
other and to a non-transactional
relationships and I find that something
that because the Stage 5 is so rare is
is missing in much of the discourse and
I think that we need in some sense
focus on how to formalize love how to
understand love and how to build it into
the machines that we are currently
building and that are about to become
smarter than us
well I think this is a good opportunity
to try to sneak up to the idea of
enlightenment
uh so you wrote a series of good tweets
about Consciousness and pen psychism so
let's break it down first you say I
suspect the experience that leads to the
pan psychism syndrome of some
philosophers and other Consciousness
enthusiasts
represents the realization that we don't
end at the self but share a resonant
Universe representation with every other
Observer coupled to the same universe
this actually eventually leads us to a
lot of interesting questions about Ai
and AGI but let's start with this
representation what is this resonant
Universe representation and what do you
think do we share such a representation
the neuroscientist grossberg has come up
with the cognitive architecture that he
calls the Adaptive resonance Theory and
his perspective is that our neurons can
be understood as oscillators that are
resonating with each other and this
outside phenomena
so the course grain model of the
universe that we are building in some
sense is a resonance with objects and
outside of us in the world so basically
we take up patterns that of the
University if we are coupled with and
our brain is not so much
understood as circuitry even though this
perspective is valid but it's almost an
ether in which the individual neurons
are passing on camera electrical signals
or arbitrary signals across all
modalities that can be transmitted
between cells stimulate each other in
this way and produce patterns that they
modulate while passing them on and this
speed of signal progression in the brain
is roughly at the speed of sound
incidentally because the time that it
takes for the signals to hop from cell
to cell which means it's relatively slow
with respect to the world it takes in a
pressurable fraction of a second for a
signal to go through the entire
neocortex something like a few hundred
milliseconds and so there's a lot of
stuff happening in that time where the
signal is passing through your brain
including in the brain itself so nothing
in the brain is assuming that stuff
happens simultaneously everything in the
brain is working in a paradigm where the
world has already moved on when you are
very ready to do the next thing to your
signal including the signal processing
system itself it's quite a different
Paradigm than the one in our digital
computers where we currently assume that
your GPU or CPU is pretty much globally
in the same state
so you mentioned there the non-dual
state and say that some people confuse
it for enlightenment yep what's the
non-dual state
there is a state in which you notice
that you are no longer a person and
instead you are one with the universe
that speaks to the resonance yes and but
this one with the universe is of course
not accurately modeling that you are
indeed some God entity or indeed the
universe is becoming aware of itself
even though you get this experience I
believe that you get this experience
because your mind is modeling the fact
that you are no longer identified with
the personal self on that state but you
have transcended this division between
the self model and the world model and
you are experiencing yourself as your
mind as something that is representing a
universe so that's still part of the
model yes so it's inside of the model
still you are still inside of patterns
that are generated in your brain and in
your organism and what you are now
experiencing is that you're no longer
this personal self in there but you are
the entirety of the mind on the its
contents why is it so hard to get there
a lot of people who get into the state
think this or associated with
Enlightenment I suspect it's a favorite
training goal for a number of meditators
but um I think that Enlightenment is in
some sense more mundane and it's a step
further or sideways it's the state where
you realize that everything is a
representation yeah you say
Enlightenment is a realization of how
experience is implemented yes so
basically you notice at some point that
your qualia can be deconstructed
reverse engineered what like uh almost
like a schematic of it what what uh
you can start with uh looking at the
face when we look at your own face in
the mirror yeah look at your face for a
few hours in a mirror or for a few
minutes at some point it will look very
weird and you because you notice that
there's actually no face you basically
start unseeing the face what you see is
the geometry and then you can just
assemble the geometry and realize how
that geometry is being constructed in
your mind
and you can learn to modify this so
basically you can change these
generators in your own mind to shift the
face around or to change the
construction of the face to change the
way in which the features are being
assembled why don't we do that more
often why don't we
start really messing with reality
without the use of drugs
or anything else why don't we get good
at this kind of thing like uh
um intentionally oh why should we
if I would because you can morph reality
into something
more pleasant for yourself just have fun
with it
yeah that is probably what you shouldn't
be doing right because outside of your
personal self this outer mind is
probably a relatively smart agent and
what you often notice is that you have
thoughts about how you should live but
you observe yourself doing different
things and have different feelings and
that's because your outer mind doesn't
believe you
and doesn't believe your rational
thoughts well can't you just silence the
outer mind the thing is that the outer
mind is usually smarter than you are
rational thinking is very brittle it's
very hard to use logic and symbolic
thinking to have an accurate model of
the world
so there is often an underlying system
that is looking at your rational
thoughts and then tells you no you're
still missing something your gut feeling
is still saying something else and this
can be for instance you find a partner
that looks perfect or you find a deal
when you build a company or whatever
that looks perfect to you and yet at
some level you feel something is off and
you cannot put your finger on it and the
more reason about it the better it looks
to you but the system that is outside
still tells you no no you're missing
something
and that system is powerful people call
this intuition right intuition is this
unreflected part of your attitude
composition and computation where you
produce a model of how you relate to the
world and what you need to do it in it
and what you can do on it and what's
going to happen that is usually deeper
and
um often more accurate than your reason
so if we look at this as you write in
the tweet
if you look at this more rigorously as a
sort of take the pants like this idea
more seriously almost as a scientific
discipline you write that quote
fascinatingly the pan psychist
interpretation seems to lead to
observations of practical results to a
degree that
physics fundamentalists might call
superstitious reports of long distance
telepathy and remote causation are
ubiquitous in the general population I
am not convinced says yoshibak that
establishing the empirical reality of
telepathy would force an update of any
part of serious academic physics but it
could trigger an important revolution in
both neuroscience and AI from a circuit
perspective to a coupled complex
resonator paradigm
are you suggesting that
um there could be some
rigorous
uh
mathematical wisdom to pan psychist
perspective on the world
so first of all pan psychism is the
perspective that Consciousness is
inseparable for matter in the universe
and I find pan psychism quite
unsatisfying because it does not explain
Consciousness right it does not explain
how this aspect of matter produces it is
also going to try to formalize pencilism
and write down what it actually means
and with a more formal mathematical
language it's very difficult to
distinguish it from saying that there is
a software site to the world in the same
way as their software side to what the
transistors are doing in your computer
so basically there's the pattern at a
certain core screening of the universe
that in some reasons of the universe
leads to observers that are observing
themselves
right so pen psychism maybe is not even
when I write it down a position that is
distinct from functionalism
but intuitively a lot of people that the
activity of matter itself of mechanisms
in the world is insufficient to explain
it so it's something that needs to be
intrinsic to matter itself and
you can apart from this abstract idea
have an experience in which you
experience yourself as being the
universe which I suspect is basically
happening because you manage to dissolve
the division between personal self and
mind that you establish as an infant
when you construct a personal self and
transcend it again and understand how it
works
but there is something deeper that is
that you feel that you're also sharing a
state with other people that you um
have an experience in which you notice
that your personal self is moving into
everything else that you basically look
out of the eyes of another person that
um every agent in the world that is an
observer is in some sense you so if we
forget that we are the same agent so is
it that we feel that or do we actually
accomplish it so is telepathy possible
is it real is that for me that's just a
question that I don't really know the
answer to in turing's famous 1950 paper
in which he describes the Turing test he
does speculate about telepathy
interestingly and thus himself if
telepathy is real and he thinks that
that variable might be what uh it would
be the implication for AI systems that
try to be intelligent because he didn't
see a mechanism by which a computer
program would become telepathic and I
suspect if telepathy would exist or if
all the reports that you get from people
when you ask the normal person on the
street
I find that very very often they say I
have experiences with telepathy the
scientists might not be interested in
this and might not have a theory about
this but I have difficulty explaining it
away and so you could say maybe this is
the Superstition maybe it's a false
memory or maybe it's a little bit of
their courses who knows maybe somebody
wants to make their own life more
interesting or misremember something but
a lot of people report I noticed
something terrible happened to my
partner and I know this is exactly the
moment it happened where my child had an
accident and I knew that was happening
and the child was in a different town
right so maybe it's a false memory where
this is later on mistakenly attributed
but a lot of people think this is not
the correct explanation so if something
like this was real what would it mean
it probably would mean that either your
body is an antenna that is sending
information over all sorts of channels
like
um maybe just electromagnetic radio
signals that you're sending over long
distances and you get attuned to another
person that you spend enough time with
to get a few bits out of The Ether to
figure out what this person is doing or
maybe it's also when you are very close
to somebody and you become empathetic
with them what happens that is that you
go into a resonance state with them
right similar to when people go into a
seance and they go into a trend State
and they start shifting a video board
around on the table I think what happens
is that they their minds go by their
nervous systems into a resonance state
in which they basically create something
like a shared dream between them
physical closeness or closeness broadly
defined with physical closeness is much
easier to experience empathy with
someone right it's I suspect it would be
difficult for me to have empathy for you
if you were in a different town also how
would that work but if you are very
close to someone you pick up all sorts
of signals from their body not just by
your eyes but with your entire body and
if the nervous system sits on the other
side and the interstellular
communication sits on the other side and
it's integrating over all these signals
you can make inferences about the state
of the other and it's not just the
personal self that does this via
reasoning but your perceptual system and
what basically happens is that your
interact representations are directly
interacting it's the physical
um
resonant models of the universe that
exist in your nervous system and in your
body might go into resonance with others
and start sharing some of their states
so we basically buy next to a big next
to somebody you pick up some of their
Vibes and uh feel without looking at
them what they're feeling in this moment
and it's difficult for you if you're
very empathetic to detach yourself from
it and have an emotional state that is
completely independent from your
environment people who are highly
empathetic are describing this and now
imagine that a lot of organisms in in on
this planet have representations of the
environment and operate like this and
they are adjacent to each other and
overlapping so there's going to be some
degree in which there is basically some
change interaction and we are forming
some slightly shared representation and
no relatively few neuroscientists who
consider this possibility I think big um
Rarity in this regard is Mac 11 who is
considering these things in earnest
and I stumbled on this train of thought
mostly by noticing that the tasks of a
neuron can be fulfilled by other cells
as well they can send different typed
chemical messages and physical messages
to their adjacent cells and learn when
to do this and why not make this
conditional and become Universal
functional approximators the only thing
that they cannot do is Telegraph
information over axons very quickly over
long distances right so neurons in this
perspective are specially adapted kind
of telegraph cell that has evolved so we
can move our muscles very fast but our
body is in principle able to also make
models of the world just much much
slower
it's interesting though that at this
time at least in human history there
seems to be a gap between the tools of
science
and the subjective experience that
people report like you're talking about
with telepathy and
it seems like
but not quite there no I think that
there is no gap between the tools of
science and telepathy either it's there
it's not and it's an empirical question
and if it's there we should be able to
detect it in a lab so why is there not a
lot of Michael Evans walking around I I
don't think that Mike 11 is uh
specifically focused on telepathy very
much he is focused on self-organization
in living organisms and in brains both
as a paradigm for development and
there's a paradigm for information
processing and when you think about how
organization processing works on
organisms there is first of all radical
locality which means everything is
decided locally from the perspective of
an individual cell the individual cells
the agent and the other one is coherence
basically there needs to be some
Criterion that determines how these
cells are interacting in such a way that
order emerges on the next level of
structure and this principle of
coherence of
imposing constraints that are not
validated by the individual parts and
lead to coherent structure to basically
Transcendent the agency where you form
an agent on the next level of
organization is crucial in this
perspective it's so cool that radical
locality
leads to the emergence of complexity at
the higher layers and I think what Mike
Levin is looking at is is nothing that
is outside of the realm of Science in
any way it's just that he is a
paradigmatic thinker who developed his
own Paradigm and most of the
neuroscientists are using a different
Paradigm at this point and this often
happens in science that a field is has a
few paradigms in which people try to
understand reality and build Concepts
and make experiments you're kind of one
of those type of paradigmatic thinkers
actually if we can take a tangent on
that
once again returning to the biblical
verses of your tweets
uh you're right my public Explorations
are not driven by audience service
but by my lack of ability for
discovering understanding or following
the relevant authorities so I have to
develop my own thoughts since I think
autonomously these thoughts cannot
always be very good that's you
apologizing for the chaos of your
thoughts or perhaps not apologizing just
identify it but let me ask the question
uh since we talked about
Mike 11 and yourself who I think are
very kind of
uh radical big independent thinkers uh
can we reverse engineer your process of
thinking autonomously how do you do it
how can humans do it
how can you avoid being influenced
by uh what is it stage
stage three
well why would you want to do that it's
uh you see what is working for you and
if it's uh not working for you you build
another structure that works better for
you right and so I found myself in when
I was thrown into this world in a state
where my intuitions were not working for
me I was not able to
understand how I would be able to
survive on this world and build the
things that I was interested in build
the kinds of relationship I needed to
but work on the topics that I wanted to
make progress on and so I had to learn
and I for me Twitter is not some tool of
publication it's not something where I
put stuff that I entirely believe to be
true and provable it's an interactive
notebook in which I explore
possibilities
and I found that when I try to
understand how the mind and how
Consciousness works I was quite
optimistic I thought I need to need to
be a big body of knowledge that I can
just study and that works and so I
entered studies in philosophy and
computer science and later psychology
and a bit of Neuroscience and so on and
I was disappointed by what I found
because I found that the questions of
how Consciousness and so on Works how
emotion Works how it's possible that the
system can experience anything how
motivation emerges in the mind when not
being answered by the authorities that I
met and the schools that were around
and instead I found that with individual
thinkers that had useful ideas that
sometimes were good sometimes were not
so good sometimes were adopted by a
large group of people sometimes were
rejected by large groups of people but
um for me it was much more interesting
to see these Minds as individuals and in
my perspective thinking is still
something that is done not in groups
that has to be done by individuals
so that motivated you to become an
individual thinker yourself I didn't
have a choice okay I didn't find the
group that thought in a way where I
thought okay
um I can't just adopt everything that
everybody thinks here and now I
understand how Consciousness works right
so or how the mind works or how thinking
works or what thinking even is or What
feelings are and how they're implemented
and so on so to figure all this out I
had to take a lot of ideas from
individuals and then try to put them
together in something that works for
myself and on one hand I think it helps
if you try to go down and find first
principles on which you can recreate how
thinking Works how languages work what
representation is when the
representation is necessary
how the relationship between a
representing agent and the world Works
in general
but how do you escape the influence once
again the pressure of the crowd
whether it's
you in responding to the the pressure or
you being swept up by the pressure if
you even just look at Twitter the
opinions of the crowd I don't feel
pressure from the crowd I'm completely
immune to that in the same sense I don't
have respect for authority I have
respect for what an individual is
accomplishing or have a respect for
mental Firepower or so but it's not that
I meet somebody and gets like God and
unable to speak
um or when a large group of people has a
certain idea that is different from mine
I don't necessarily feel intimidated
which has often been a problem for me in
my life because I like instincts that
other people develop at a very young age
and that help with their
self-preservation in a social
environment
so I had to learn a lot of things the
hard way
yeah
so is there a practical advice you can
give how to think parenting
paradigmatically how to think
independently or you know because you've
kind of said I had no choice
but I think
to a degree you have a choice
because you said you want to be
productive and I think thinking
independent is productive if what you're
curious about is understanding the world
especially when the problems are very
kind of new and open so
it seems like
this is a active process like we can
choose to do that we can practice it
well there's a very basic question when
you read a theory that you find
convincing or interesting how do you
know
but it's very interesting to figure out
what are the sources of that other
person not uh which authority can they
refer to that is then taking off the
burden of being truthful but how did
this Authority in turn know what is the
epistemic chain to observables what are
the first principles from which the
whole thing is derived and
when I was young I was not blessed with
a lot of
um
people around myself who knew how to
make proofs from first principles and I
think mathematicians do this quite
naturally but most of the great
mathematicians do not become
mathematicians in school but they tend
to be self-taught
because school teachers tend not to be
mathematicians right they tend not to be
people who derive things from first
principles so when you ask your school
teacher why does two plus two equal four
um that's your school teacher give you
the right answer like it's a simple game
and there are many simple games that we
could play and
um most of those games that you could
just take different roles would not lead
to an interesting arithmetic and so it's
just an exploration but you can try what
happens if you take different axioms and
here is how you build axioms and derive
Edition from them and build Edition is
some basically syntactic sugar in it and
so this I wish that somebody would have
opened me this Vista and explained to me
how I can build a language in my own
mind and from which I can derive what
I'm seeing and how I can which I can
make geometry and Counting and
um
all the number games that we are playing
in our life and on the other hand I felt
that I learned a lot of this while I was
programming as a child when you start
out with a computer like a Commodore 64
who doesn't which doesn't have a lot of
functionality it's relatively easy to
see how a bunch of relatively simple
circuits are just basically performing
hashes between bit patterns and how you
can build the entirety of mathematics
and computation on top of this and all
the representational languages that you
need
man Commodore 64 could be one of the
sexiest machines ever built if I still
say so myself if you can return
to uh this really interesting idea
that we started to talk about with
pansychism
sure
and uh the complex resonated Paradigm
and the verses of your tweets
you're right instead of treating eyes
ears and skin a separate sensory systems
with fundamentally different modalities
we might understand them as overlapping
aspects of the same universe coupled at
the same Temple resolution and almost
Inseparable from a single share resonant
model instead of treating mental
representations as fully isolated
between Minds The representations of
physically adjacent Observers might
directly interact and produce causal
effects through the coordination of the
perception and behavior of world
modeling Observers
so the modalities the distinction
between modalities let's throw that away
the distinction between the individuals
let's throw that away
so what does this interaction
representations look like
when you think about how you represent
the interaction of us in this room yeah
at some level you can the modalities are
quite distinct they're not completely
distinct but you can see this is Vision
but you can close your eyes and then you
don't see a lot anymore but you still
imagine how my mouth is moving when you
hear something and you know that it's
very close to uh the sound that you can
just open your eyes and you get back
into the street merge space and we also
have these experiments where we notice
that the vein which my lips are moving
are affecting how you hear the sound and
also vice versa the sounds that you're
hearing have an influence on how you
interpret some of the visual features
and so this modalities are not separate
in your mind they do are merge