Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
peter wang one of the most impactful
leaders and developers in the python
community former physicist current
philosopher and someone who many people
told me about and praised as a truly
special mind that i absolutely should
talk to recommendations ranging from
travis oliphant to eric weinstein so
here we are
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now here's my
conversation with peter wang
you're one of the most impactful humans
in the python ecosystem
so you're an engineer leader of
engineers but you're also a philosopher
so let's talk both in this conversation
about programming and philosophy
first programming
what do you is the best or maybe the
most beautiful feature of python or
maybe the thing that made you fall in
love or
stay in love with python well those are
three different things what i think is
most beautiful what made me fall in love
with me stay in love when i first
started using it
was when i was a c plus computer
graphics performance nerd in the 90s and
yeah in late 90s and that was my first
job out of college
um
and we kept trying to do more and more
uh like abstract and higher order
programming in c plus which at the time
was quite difficult with templates the
the compiler support wasn't great etc
so when i started playing around with
python that was my first time
encountering really first class support
for types for functions and things like
that and it felt so incredibly
expressive
so that was what kind of made me fall in
love with a little bit and also
once you spend a lot of time in a c plus
dev environment the ability to just whip
something together that basically runs
and works the first time
is amazing so really productive
scripting language i mean i i knew pearl
i knew bash i was decent at both but
python just made everything it made the
whole world accessible right i could
script this and that and the other
network things
you know little hard drive utilities i
could write all these things in the
space of an afternoon and that was
really really cool that's what made me
fall in love is there something specific
you could put your finger on
that you're not programming in perl
today like why python for scripting
i think
there's not a specific thing as much as
the design motif of both the the creator
of the language and the core
uh group of people that built the
standard library around him
um
there was definitely
there was a taste to it i mean steve
jobs you know used that term you know in
somewhat of an arrogant way but i think
it's a real thing that it was designed
to fit a friend of mine actually
expressed this really well he said
python just fits in my head
and there's nothing better to to say
than that now now people might argue
modern python there's a lot more
complexity but certainly as version 5
152 i think is my first version
that fit in my head very easily so
that's what made me fall in love with it
okay so
the most beautiful
feature of python that made you stay in
love it's like over the years
what has like you know you do a double
take you you return too often as a thing
that just brings you a smile i really
still like the um
the ability to play with meta classes
and express higher order things when i
have to create some new
object model to model something right
it's easy for me because i'm i'm pretty
expert as a python programmer i can
easily put all sorts of lovely things
together and use properties and
decorators and other kinds of things and
create something that feels very nice so
that that to me i would say that's tied
with the numpy and vectorization
capabilities i love thinking in terms of
the matrices and the vectors and these
kind of
data structures so i would say those two
are kind of uh tied for me so the
elegance of the numpy data structure
like slicing through the different
multi-dimensions yeah there's just
enough things there it's like a very
it's a very simple comfortable tool just
it's easy to reason about what it does
when you don't stray too far afield
can you uh put your finger on
how to design
a language such that it fits in your
head
certain things like the colon or the
certain notation aspects of python that
just kind of work is it uh something you
have to kind of write out on paper look
and say it's just right is it a taste
thing or is there a systematic process
what's your sense
i think it's more of a taste thing
but one one thing that should be said is
that
you have to pick your audience right so
the better defined the user audience is
or the users are the easier it is to
build something that fits in their minds
because their needs will be more compact
and coherent it is possible to find a
projection right a compact projection
for their needs the more diverse the
user base
the harder that is yeah and so as python
has grown in popularity that's also
naturally created more complexity as
people try to design any given thing
there will be multiple valid
opinions about a particular design
approach and so i do think that's the
that's the downside of popularity it's
almost an intrinsic aspect of the
complexity of the problem well at the
very beginning aren't you an audience of
one isn't ultimately aren't all the
greatest projects in history were just
solving a problem that you yourself had
well so clay shirky in his um book on
crowdsourcing or his kind of thoughts on
crowdsourcing he identifies the first
step of crowdsourcing is me first
collaboration you first have to make
something that works well for yourself
yeah it's very telling that when you
look at all of the impactful
big project well they're fundamental
projects now in the scipy and pi data
ecosystem they all started with
the
people in the domain trying to scratch
their own itch and the whole idea of
scratching your own itch is something
that the open source or the free
software world has known for a long time
but in the scientific computing areas
you know these are assistant professors
or electrical engineering grad students
they didn't have really a lot of
programming skills necessarily but
python was just good enough for them to
put something together that fit in their
domain right so it's almost like a it's
a necessity as a mother invention aspect
and also it was a really harsh filter
for
utility and compactness and
expressiveness like it was too hard to
use then they wouldn't have built it
because it was just too much trouble
right it was a side project for them and
also necessity creates a kind of
deadline it seems like a lot of these
projects are quickly thrown together
in the in the first step and that even
though it's flawed
that just seems to work well for
software projects well it does work well
for software projects in general and in
this particular space um well one one of
my colleagues uh stan siebert identified
this that all the projects in the scipy
ecosystem
um you know if we just rattle them off
there's num pai there's scipy built by
different collaborations of people
although travis is the heart of both of
them um but numpy coming from numeric
and numero these are different people
and then you've got pandas you've got
jupiter
or ipython there's um there's matplotlib
there's just so many others i'm you know
not going to justify trying to name them
all but all of them are actually
different people
and as they rolled out their projects
the fact that they had limited resources
meant that they were humble about scope
um a a great famous hacker jamie zawiski
once said that every every geek's dream
is to build
the uh the ultimate middleware right and
the the thing is with these scientists
turned programmers they had no such
theme they were just trying to write
something that was a little bit better
for what they needed the matlab and they
were going to leverage what everyone
else had built so naturally almost in
kind of this annealing process or
whatever we built a very modular
cover of the basic needs of a scientific
computing library
if you look at the whole human story how
much of a leap is it
we've developed all kinds of languages
all kinds of methodologies for
communication he just kind of like grew
this collective intelligence the
civilization grew it expanded
wrote a bunch of books and now we tweet
uh how big of a leap is programming if
programming is yet another language is
it just a nice little trick that's
temporary in our human history or is it
like
a big
leap in the uh
almost us becoming
uh another organism at a higher level of
abstraction something else i think the
act of programming or
using
grammatical constructions of some
underlying primitives
that is something that humans do learn
but every human learns this anyone who
can speak learns how to do this
what makes programming different has
been that up to this point
when we try to give instructions to
computing systems
all of our computers well actually this
is not quite true but i'll first say it
and then i'll tell you to tell you why
it's not true but for the most part we
can think of computers as being these
iterated systems
so when we program we're giving very
precise instructions to uh iterated
systems that then run at um
incomprehensible speed
and run those instructions in my
experience
some people
are just better equipped to model
systematic iterated systems
well whatever iterated systems in their
head
[Music]
some people are really good at that and
other people are not um and so
when you have like for instance
sometimes people have tried to build
systems that uh make programming easier
by making a visual drag and drop and the
issue is you can have a drag and drop
thing but once you start having to
iterate the system with conditional
logic handling case statements and
branch statements and all these other
things
the visual drag and drop part doesn't
save you anything you still have to
reason about this giant iterated system
with all these different conditions
around it that's the hard part right
so handling iterated logic um
that's the hard part the languages we
use then emerge to give us ability and
capability over these things
now the one exception to this rule of
course is the most popular programming
system in the world which is excel which
is a data flow and a data driven
immediate mode data transformation
oriented programming system
and this actually not an accident that
that system is the most popular
programming system because it's so
accessible to much of a much broader
group of people
i do think as
we build future computing systems
you're actually already seeing this a
little bit it's much more about
composition of modular blocks
they themselves um actually maintain all
their internal state and the interfaces
between them are well-defined data
schemas and so to stitch these things
together using like ifttt or zapier or
any of these kind of you know i would
say compositional scripting kinds of
things
i mean hypercard was also a little bit
in this vein
that's much more accessible to most
people
it's it's really that implicit state
that's so hard for people to track yeah
okay so that's modular stuff but there's
also an aspect where you're standing on
the shoulders of giants so you're
building like
higher and higher levels of abstraction
you do that a little bit with language
so with language you develop sort of
ideas philosophies from plato and so on
and then you kind of leverage those
philosophies as you try to have
deeper and deeper conversations but with
programming it seems like you can build
much more complicated systems like
without knowing how everything works you
can build on top of the work of others
and it seems like you're developing more
and more sophisticated
uh
expressions
ability to express ideas
in a computational space i think
it's worth
pondering the difference here between
complexity and
complication
uh sure okay right back to excel well
not quite back to excel but but the the
idea is um you know when we have a human
conversation all languages
uh for humans emerged to support um
human uh relational communications
which is that the person we're
communicating with is a person
and they would communicate back to us
and so
we sort of um hit a residence point
right when we actually agree on some
concepts so there's a messiness to it
and there's a fluidity to it with
computing systems when we express
something to the computer and it's wrong
we just try again so we can basically
live many virtual worlds of having
failed at expressing ourselves to the
computer until the one time we expressed
ourselves right then we kind of put in
production and then discover that it's
still wrong you know a few days down the
road so i think the
the sophistication of things that we
build with computing
one has to
really pay attention to the difference
between when an end user is expressing
something onto a system that exists
versus when they're extending the system
to to increase the system's capability
um for someone else to then interface
with we happen to use the same language
for both of those things and usu in most
cases but it doesn't have to be that and
excel is actually a great example of
this
of kind of a counterpoint to that
okay so what about the idea of
you said messiness
wouldn't you put
the software 2.0 idea this idea of
machine learning
into the
further and further steps into the world
of messiness
the same kind of beautiful messages of
human communication isn't that what
machine learning is is uh building
on levels of abstraction that don't have
messiness in them
that uh at the operating system level
then there's python the programming
languages that have more and more power
but then finally
there's a neural networks that
ultimately work with data and so the
programming is almost in the space of
data and the data is allowed to be messy
isn't that a kind of program so the idea
of software 2.0 is a lot of the
programming happens
in the space of data
so back to excel
all roads lead back to excel in the
space of data and also the hyper
parameters of the neural networks and
all of those allow
this the
same kind of messiness that human
communication allows
it does but
you know my background is a physics i
took like two cs courses in college so i
don't have now i did cram a bunch of cs
uh in prep when i applied for grad
school but um but still i don't have a
formal background in computer science um
but what i have observed in studying
programming languages and programming
systems and things like that is that
there seems to be this this this
triangle it's one of these beautiful
little iron triangles in it that you
find in life sometimes
and it's the connection between
the code correctness and kind of
expressiveness of code the semantics of
the data
and then the kind of correctness or
parameters of the underlying hardware
compute system
so there's the algorithms that you want
to you know apply um there's what the
bits
that are stored on whatever media
actually represent so the semantics of
the data you know within the
representation and then there's what the
computer can actually do
in every programming system every
information system
ultimately
finds some spot in the middle of this
little triangle
sometimes some systems collapse them
into just one edge are we are we
including humans as a system no no i'm
just thinking about computing systems
here okay and the reason i bring this up
is because i believe there's no free
lunch around this stuff so if we build
if we build machine learning systems to
sort of write the correct code that is
at a certain level of performance so
it'll sort of select right with the
hyper parameters we can tune kind of how
we want the performance boundary and sla
to
look like
for
transforming some set of inputs into
certain kinds of outputs
that training process itself is
intrinsically sensitive to the kinds of
inputs we put into it it's and it's
quite sensitive to the boundary
conditions we put around the performance
so i think even as we move to using
automated systems to build this
transformation as opposed to humans
explicitly from a top-down perspective
figuring out well this schema and this
database and these columns get selected
for this algorithm and here we put a you
know a fibonacci heap for some other
thing
human design or computer design
ultimately what we hit the boundaries
that we hit with these information
systems is when the representation of
the data hits the real world is where
there's a lot of slop and a lot of
interpretation
and that's where actually i think a lot
of the work will go in the future is
actually understanding kind of how to
better
in this in the view of these live data
systems how to better encode the
semantics of the world
for those things they'll be less about
the details of how we write a particular
sql query okay but given the semantics
of the real world and the messiness of
that what does the word correctness mean
when you're talking about code
there's a lot of dimensions to
correctness
historically and this is one of the
reasons i say that we're coming to the
end of the era of software because for
the last 40 years or so software
correctness was really defined
about functional correctness i write a
function it's got some inputs does it
produce the right outputs if so then i
can turn it on hook it up to the live
database and it goes
and more and more now we have i mean in
fact i think the bright line in the sand
between machine learning systems or
modern data-driven systems versus
software classical software systems
is that the values of the input
actually
have to be considered with the function
together to say this whole thing is
correct or not and usually there's a
performance sla as well like did it
actually finish making sla sorry service
level agreement so it has to return
within some time you have a 10
millisecond time budget to return a
prediction of this level of accuracy
right um so these are things that were
not traditionally in most business
computing systems the last 20 years at
all people didn't think about it
but now we have value dependence on
functional correctness so that that
question of correctness is becoming a
bigger and bigger question why does that
map to the end of software
we've thought about software as just
this thing that you can do in isolation
with some you know test trial inputs and
in a very you know um
very sort of sandboxed environment and
we can quantify how does it scale how
does it you know perform how many nodes
do we need to allocate if we want to
scale this many inputs
when we start turning this stuff into
prediction systems real cybernetic
systems you're going to find scenarios
where you get inputs that you don't want
to spend a little more time thinking
about you're going to find inputs that
are not it's not clear what you should
do right so then the software has a
varying amount of runtime
and correctness with regard to input and
that is a different kind of system
altogether now it's a full on cybernetic
system it's a next generation
information system that is not like
traditional software systems can you
maybe describe what is a cybernetic
system do you include humans in that
picture so is it as a human in the loop
kind of complex mess of the whole kind
of interactivity of software with the
real world or is it something more
concrete well when i say cybernetic i
really do mean that the software itself
is closing the observe orient decide act
loop by itself so humans being out of
the loop is is the fact what
for me uh makes it a cybernetic system
and humans are out of that loop when
humans are out of the loop when the
machine is actually sort of deciding on
its own what it should do next to get
more information
that makes it a cybernetic system so
we're just at the dawn of this right i
think everyone talking about mlai it's
it's it's great but really the thing we
should be talking about is when we
really enter the cybernetic era
and all of the questions of ethics and
governance and all correctness and all
these things
they really are the most important
questions okay can we just linger on
this what does it mean for the human to
be out of the loop in a cybernetic
system because isn't the cybernetic
system that's
ultimately accomplished in some kind of
purpose that at the at the bottom
you know the the turtles all the way
down at the bottom turtle is a human
well the human may have set some
criteria but the human wasn't precise so
for instance i just read the other day
that um earlier this year or maybe it
was last year at some point the um
libyan army i think um sent out some
automated killer drones with explosives
um and there was no human in the loop at
that point they basically put them in a
geofenced area said find any moving
target like a truck or vehicle it looks
like this and boom um that's not a human
in the loop right
so increasingly the less human there is
in the loop the more concerned you are
about these kinds of systems because uh
there's unintended consequences like
less
the original designer and engineer of
the system is able to predict
even one with good intent is able to
predict the consequences of such a
system is that that's right there are
some software systems right that run
without humans in the loop that are
quite complex and that's like the
electronic markets and we get flash
crashes all the time we get um you know
in the in the heyday of high frequency
trading there's a lot of market
microstructure people doing all sorts of
weird stuff that the market
designers had never really thought about
contemplated or intended so when we run
these full-on systems with these
automated trading bots um
now they become automated you know
killer drones and then all sorts of
other stuff
we we are that's what i mean by we're at
the dawn of the cybernetic era and the
end of the era of just pure software
are you more concerned
if you're thinking about cybernetic
systems or even like self-replicating
systems so systems that aren't just
doing a particular task but are able to
sort of multiply and scale in some
dimension
in the digital or
even the physical world are you more
concerned about uh
like the lobster being boiled so a
gradual with us not noticing
collapse of civilization or
a big explosion
uh it's like oops
kind of a big thing where everyone
notices but it's too late
i think that
it will be a different experience for
different people
um i do i do um share a common point of
view with some of the climate um
you know people who are concerned about
climate change and and just the
uh this uh
the the big existential risks that we
have but unlike a lot of people who are
who share my level of concern i think
the collapse will not be
quite so dramatic as some of them think
and what i mean is that i think that for
certain tiers of let's say economic
class or certain locations in the world
people will experience dramatic collapse
scenarios but for a lot of people
especially in the developed world the
realities of collapse will be managed
there will be narrative management
around it so that
they essentially insulate the middle
class will be used to insulate the upper
class from
the pitch forks and the and the um
flaming torches and everything it's
interesting because uh so my specific
question wasn't is
my question was more about cybernetic
systems the software okay uh it's
interesting but it would nevertheless
perhaps be about class so the effect of
algorithms might affect certain classes
more than others absolutely i was more
thinking about whether it's social media
algorithms or actual robots
is there going to be a gradual effect on
us where we wake up
one day and don't recognize the humans
we are
or or is it something truly dramatic
where there's you know like
a meltdown of a nuclear reactor kind of
thing chernobyl like uh catastrophic
events
that um
are almost bugs in a program that scaled
itself too quickly yeah i'm not as
concerned about the visible stuff
and the reason is because the big
visible explosions i mean this is
something i said about social media is
that you know at least with nuclear
weapons when a newt goes off you can see
it and you're like well that's really
wow that's kind of bad right i mean
oppenheimer was reciting the baha'i gita
right when he saw one of those things go
off so
we can see nukes are really bad he's not
reciting anything about twitter
well but right but then when when you
have social media when you have um all
these different things that conspire to
create a layer of virtual experience for
people that alienates them from you know
reality and from each other
that's very pernicious it's impossible
to see right and it kind of slowly gets
in there so
you've written about this idea of
virtuality on this topic which you
define as the subjective phenomenon of
knowingly engaging with virtual
sensation and perception and suspending
or forgetting the context that it's uh
somalicum
so let me ask
uh
what is real
is there a hard line between reality and
virtuality like perception drifts from
some kind of physical reality we have to
kind of have a sense of what is the line
that's to we've gone too far right right
for me it's not about any hard line
about physical reality as much as
um a simple question of
um
does the particular technology
help people connect in a more integral
way with other people with their
environment with all of the full
spectrum of things around them so it's
less about oh this is a virtual thing
and this is a hard real thing more about
when we create virtual representations
of the real things um
always some things are lost in
translation usually many many dimensions
are lost in translation right we're now
coming to
almost two years of covet people on zoom
all the time you know it's different
when you meet somebody in person than
when you see them i've seen you on
youtube lots right
but the senior person is very different
and so
i think when we engage in virtual
experiences
all the time and we only do that there
is absolutely a level of embodiment
there's a level of embodied experience
some participatory interaction that is
lost
and it's very hard to put your finger on
exactly what it is it's hard to say oh
we're gonna spend a hundred million
dollars building a new system that
captures this five to five five percent
better higher fidelity human expression
no one's gonna pay for that right so
when we rush madly into
a world of simulacrum and and virtuality
um
you know the things that are lost are
it's difficult
once everyone moves there it can be hard
to look back and see what we've what
we've lost so is it irrecoverably lost
or rather when you put it all on the
table
is it possible for more to be gained
than is lost if you look at video games
they create
virtual experiences that are surreal
and can bring joy to a lot of people can
connect a lot of people
uh and can get people to talk a lot of
trash uh
so they can bring out the best and the
worst in people so is it possible to
have a future world
where the pros outweigh the cons
it is i mean it's possible to have that
in the in the current world but
um when
literally trillions of dollars of
capital are tied to using those things
to
groom the worst of our inclinations
and to attack our weaknesses in the
limbic system to create these things
into id machines versus connection
machines
then um then the those good things don't
stand a chance can you make a lot of
money by building connection machines is
it possible do you think
to bring out the best in human nature to
uh create fulfilling connections and
relationships in the digital world and
make a ton of money
um if i it out i'll let you know
but what's your intuition without
concretely knowing what's
my intuition is that a lot of our
digital technologies give us the ability
to have synthetic connections or to
experience virtuality
they have co-evolved
with
sort of the human expectations it's sort
of like sugary drinks as people have
more sugary drinks they get they need
more sugary drinks to get that same hit
right so with these virtual things
and with tv
and fast cuts and you know tick tocks
and all these different kinds of things
we're co-creating essentially humanity
that
sort of asks and needs those things and
now becomes very difficult to get people
to slow down it gets difficult for
people to hold their attention
on on slow things and actually feel that
embodied experience right so mindfulness
now more than ever is so important in
schools and um as a therapy technique
for people because our environment has
been accelerated and mcluhan actually
talks about this in the electric
environment of the television and that
was before tick-tock and before
front-facing cameras so
i think for me the the concern is that
it's not like we can ever switch to
doing something better but more of
the humans and technology
they're not independent of each other
the technology that we use
kind of molds what we need for the next
generation of technology yeah but humans
are intelligent and they're uh
introspective and they can reflect on
the experiences of their life so for
example there's been many years in my
life where i i ate an excessive amount
of sugar and then a certain moment i
woke up
and said uh
why do i keep doing this this doesn't
feel good
like long term and i think
uh so going through the tick tock
process of realizing
okay when i shorten my attention span
actually that does not make me feel good
longer term
and realizing that and then going to
platforms
going to places that
um
are away from the sugar so so in in so
doing you can create platforms that can
make a lot of money when so to help
people wake up to what actually makes
them feel good long-term develop grow as
human beings and it just feels like
humans are more intelligent than
uh mice looking for cheese
they're able to sort of think i mean we
can think we can contemplate our
mortality right and contemplate things
like
long-term
love and we can have a long-term fear of
certain things like mortality we can
contemplate whether the
experiences the sort of the drugs of
daily life that we've been partaking in
is making us happier a better people and
then once we contemplate that we can
make financial decisions
in using services and paying for
services that are making us better
people so it just seems that
we're in the very first stages of social
networks
that just were able to make a lot of
money really quickly but in
bringing out sometimes
the bad parts of human nature they
didn't destroy humans they just they
just fed everybody a lot of sugar and
now everyone's gonna wake up and say
hey we're gonna start having like
sugar-free social media right
right well there's a lot to unpack there
i think some people certainly have the
capacity for that and i certainly think
i mean it's very interesting even the
way you said it you woke up one day and
you thought well this doesn't feel very
good yeah well that's still your limbic
system saying this doesn't feel very
good
right you have a cat brains worth of
neurons around your gut right and so
maybe that exaggerated and that was
telling you hey this isn't good
humans are
more than just mice looking for cheese
or monkeys looking for sex and power
right so
let's slow down now you're um now a lot
of people would argue with you on that
one but we're more than just that but
we're at least that and we're
very very seldom not that
so
um my i don't actually disagree with you
that we could be better and that we can
that better platforms exist and people
are voluntarily noping out of things
like facebook and noting
awesome verb it's a great term yeah i
love it i use it all the time
you're going to have to know part of
that i want to nope out of that right
it's going to be a hard pass and
and that's and that's that's great but
that's again to your point that's the
first generation of front-facing cameras
of social pressures and you as a you
know self-starter self-aware adult have
the capacity to say yeah i'm not going
to do that i'm going to go and spend
time on long form reads i'm going to
spend time managing my attention i'm
going to do some yoga
if you're a 15 year old in high school
and your entire social environment is
everyone doing these things guess what
you're going to do you're going to kind
of have to do that because your limbic
system says hey i need to get the guy or
the girl or whatever and that's what i'm
going to do and so one of the things
that we have to reason about here is the
social media systems or you know social
media i think is a
first
our first encounter with
a technological system
that runs a bit of a loop around
our own cognition and attention
it's not the last
it's it's far from the last and it gets
to the heart of some of the
philosophical achilles heel of the
western philosophical system which is
each person gets to make their own
determination each person is an
individual that's you know sacrosanct in
their agency and their sovereignty and
all these things the problem with these
systems is they come down and they are
able to manage everyone on mass
and so every person is making their own
decision but together the the bigger
system is causing them to act with a
group
um dynamic that's very profitable for
people
so this is the issue that we have is
that our philosophies are actually not
geared to understand
what is it for a person to be to have an
uh
high trust connection uh as part of a
collective and for that collective to
have its right to coherency and agency
that's something like when when a social
media app causes a family to break apart
it's done harm to more than just
individuals right so that concept is not
something we really talk about or think
about very much but that's actually the
problem is that we're vaporizing
molecules into atomic units and then
we're hitting all the atoms with certain
things that's like yeah well that person
chose to look at my app so our
understanding of human nature is at the
individual level it emphasizes the
individual too much because ultimately
society operates at the collective level
and these apps do as well and the apps
do as well so for us to understand the
progression the development of this
organism we call human civilization we
have to think of the collective level
too i would say multi-tiered
multi-tiered multi-so individual as well
individuals family units social
collectives
um and and on the way up okay two so
you've said that individual humans are
multi-layered susceptible to signals and
waves and multiple strata the physical
the biological social cultural
intellectual so
sort of going along these lines can you
describe
the layers of the cake that that is a
human being
and maybe the human collective human
society
so i'm just stealing wholesale here from
robert persig
who is the author of zen in the art of
motorcycle maintenance and in his um
follow-on
book
uh has a sequel to it called lila he
goes into this in a little more detail
but um it's it's a it's a crude approach
to thinking about people but i think
it's still an advancement over
traditional subject object metaphysics
where we look at people as
a dualist would say well is is your mind
you know your consciousness is that
is that just merely the matter that's in
your brain or is there something kind of
more beyond that and they would say yes
there's a soul sort of ineffable
soul beyond just merely the physical
body right and then and i'm not one of
those people right i think that we don't
have to draw a line between
are things only this or only that
collectives of things can emerge
structures and patterns that are just as
real as the underlying pieces but you
know they're transcendent but they're
still of the underlying pieces
so your body is this way i mean we just
know physically you consist of atoms and
uh and and whatnot and then the atoms
are arranged into molecules which then
arrange into certain kinds of structures
that seem to have a homeostasis to them
we call them cells and those cells form
you know sort of biological structures
those biological structures give your
body
its physical ability and biological
ability to consume energy and to
maintain homeostasis but humans are
social animals and a human by themselves
is is not very long for the world so we
also part of our biology is wire to
connect to other people to you know from
the mirror neurons to our language uh
centers and all these other things
so
we are intrinsically there's a layer
there's a part of us that wants to be
part of a thing if we're around other
people not saying a word but they're
just up and down jumping and dancing
laughing we're gonna feel better right
and they didn't there was no exchange of
physical anything they didn't give us
like five atoms of happiness right but
there's an induction in our own sense of
self that is at that social level
and then beyond that um
person puts the intellectual level kind
of one level higher than social i think
they're actually more intertwined than
that but the intellectual level is
the the level of pure ideas that you are
a vessel for memes you're a vessel for
philosophies
you will conduct yourself in a
particular way
i mean i think part of this is if we
think about it from a physics
perspective you're not you know there's
a joke that physicists like to um
approximate things and we'll say well
approximate a spherical cowl right
you're not a spherical cow you're not a
spherical human you're a messy human and
we can't even um say what the dynamics
of your emotion will be unless we
analyze all four of these layers
right
if it's if you're if you're muslim at a
certain time of day guess what you're
going to be on the ground kneeling and
praying right and that has nothing to do
with your biological need to get on the
ground or physics of gravity it is an
intellectual drive that you have it's a
cultural phenomenon and an intellectual
belief that you carry so that's what the
four layered stack
is is all about it's that a person is
not only one of these things they're all
of these things at the same time it's a
superposition
of dynamics that run through us that
make us who we are
so no layers is special
um not so much nowhere especially each
layer is just different
um but we are
each layer against the participation
trophy
yeah each layer is a part of what you
are you are a layer cake right of all
these things and if we try to deny
right so many philosophies do try to
deny
the reality of some of these things
right some people say well we're only
atoms well we're not only atoms because
there's a lot of other things that are
only atoms i can reduce a human being to
a bunch of soup and it's not they're not
the same thing even though it's the same
atoms so i think the the order and the
patterns that emerge within humans
to understand
to really think about what a next
generation philosophy would look like
that would allow us to reason about
extending humans into the digital realm
or to interact with autonomous
intelligences that are not biological
nature we really need to appreciate
these that human what human beings
actually are is the superposition of
these different layers
you mentioned consciousness
are each of these layers of cake
conscious
is consciousness a particular quality of
one of the layers is there like a spike
if you have a consciousness detector at
these layers or it's something that just
permeates all of these layers and just
takes different form i believe what
humans experience as consciousness
is something that sits on a gradient
scale
of
a general principle in the universe that
seems to
look for order and reach for order when
there's an excess of energy you know
it's it would be odd to say a proton is
alive right it'd be odd to say like this
particular atom or molecule of of
hydrogen gas is alive
but there's certainly something
we can make
assemblages of these things that that
are that have autopoetic aspects to them
that will create structures that will
you know crystalline solids will form
very interesting and beautiful
structures um this gets kind of into
weird mathematical territories you start
thinking about penrose and game of life
stuff uh about the generativity of math
itself like the hyper real numbers
things like that but um without going
down that rabbit hole i would say that
there seems to be a tendency
in the world that when there is
excess energy things will structure and
pattern themselves and they will then
actually furthermore try to create an
environment that furthers their
continued stability
it's the concept of externalized
extended phenotype or niche construction
so
um this is ultimately what leads to
certain kinds of amino acids forming
certain kinds of structures and so forth
until you get the ladder of life so what
we experience as consciousness no i
don't think cells are conscious of that
level but is there something beyond mere
equilibrium state biology and and
chemistry and biochemistry that drives
what makes things
work
i think there is um
so adrian bajan has this constructive
law there's other things you look at
when you look at the life sciences and
you look at
any kind of statistical physics and
statistical mechanics
when you look at things far out of
equilibrium
when you have excess energy what happens
then life
doesn't just make a harder soup it
starts making structure
there's something there the poetry of
reaches for order when there's an excess
of energy
because you brought up game of life
you did it not me my i love cellular
automata so i have to sort of
linger on that for a little bit
so cellular automata i guess is uh or
game of life is a very simple example of
reaching for order when there's an
excess of energy
or reaching for order and somehow
creating complexity it within like this
explosion of just
turmoil somehow trying to construct
structures and so doing
uh creates very elaborate
organism-looking type things
what intuition do you draw from this
simple mechanism well i i like to turn
that around on its head and um
and look at it as what if every single
one of the patterns created
life or created you know not life but
created interesting patterns because you
know some of them don't and sometimes
you make cool gliders and other times
you know you start with certain things
and you make gliders and other things
that then construct like you know and
gates and not gates right and you build
computers on them um all of these rules
that create these patterns that we can
see those are just the patterns we can
see
what if our subjectivity is actually
limiting our ability to perceive
the order in all of it
you know what are some of the things
that we think are random are actually
not that random we're simply not
integrating at a final f level across a
broad enough time horizon
um and this is again i said we go down
the rabbit holes and the penrose stuff
or like wolf runs explorations on these
things um
there is something deep and beautiful in
the mathematics of all this that is
hopefully one day i'll have enough money
to work and retire and just ponder those
those questions but there's something
there but you're saying there's a
ceiling to when you have enough money
and you retire and you ponder it there's
a ceiling to how much you can truly
ponder because there's cognitive
limitations
in what you're able to
perceive as a pattern
yeah so and maybe mathematics extends
your
perception capabilities but it's still
it's still finite it's just like
yeah the mathematics we use is the
mathematics that can fit in our head
yeah
you know did god really create the
integers or did god create all of it and
we just happen at this point in time to
be able to perceive integers
well she just did the the positive
energy
and then we
um
she just graded the natural numbers and
then we screwed all up with zero and
then i guess okay
but we did we created mathematical uh
operations so we can have iterated steps
to approach bigger problems
right i mean the entire the entire point
of the arabic numeral system and it's a
rubric for mapping a certain set of
operations and folding them into a
simple little expression
but that's just the operations that we
can fit in our heads
there are many other operations besides
right
the thing that worries me the most about
aliens and humans
is that their aliens are all around us
and we're too dumb
yeah see them oh certainly yeah or life
let's say just life life of all kinds of
forms or organisms you know what just
even the intelligence of organisms
is uh imperceptible to us because we're
too dumb and
we're looking self-centered
a particular kind of thing yeah
when i was at cornell i had a lovely
professor of asian religions jamerry law
and she would tell this um story about a
musical a musician a western musician
who went to japan and he taught you know
classical music and
could play you know all sorts of
instruments he went to japan um and he
would ask people you know he would
basically be looking for things in the
style of
western you know chromatic scale and
these kinds of things and then finding
none of it he would say well there's
really no music in japan but they're
using a different scale they're playing
different kinds of instruments right the
same thing she was using as sort of a
metaphor for religion as well in the
west we center a lot of religion
certainly the the religions of abraham
we center them around belief and in the
east it's more about practice right
spirituality and practice rather than
belief so anyway the point is here to
your point um life we i think so many
people are so fixated on certain aspects
of self-replication
or you know homeostasis or whatever
but if we kind of broaden and generalize
this thing of things reaching for order
under which conditions can they then
create an environment that sustains that
order
that um allows them you know the the
invention of death is an interesting
thing there are some organisms on earth
that are thousands of years old
and it's not like they're incredibly
complex actually simpler than the cells
that comprise us
but they never die so at some point um
death was invented you know somewhere
along the eukaryotic scale i mean even
the protists right there's death
and why is that along with the
sexual reproduction right there is
something about
the renewal process something about the
ability to respond to a changing
environment where
it just becomes you know just killing
off the old generation and letting new
generations
try seems to be the best way to fit into
the niche you know human historian seems
to write about wheels and fires the
greatest inventions but it seems like
death and sex are pretty good and
they're they're kind of essential
inventions at the very beginning at the
very beginning yeah well we didn't
invent them right
well broad we
you didn't invent life i see us as one
uh you particular homo sapien did not
invent them but uh we together it's a
team project just like you're saying i
think the greatest homo sapien
invention is collaboration so when you
say collaboration
peter where do ideas come from
and how do they take hold in society
what's is that the nature of
collaboration is that the basic atom of
collaboration is ideas
it's not not ideas but it's not only
ideas there's a book i just started
reading called death from a distance
have you heard of this no it's a really
fascinating thesis which is that
humans are the only conspecific
the
the only species that can kill other
members of the species from range
and maybe there's a few exceptions but
if you look in the animal world you see
like pronghorns butting heads right you
see the alpha
lion and the beta lion and they take
each other down humans we develop the
ability to chuck rocks at each other and
while at prey but also at each other and
that means the beta male can chunk a
rock at the alpha male and take them
down
and with very he can throw a lot of
rocks actually miss a bunch of times so
just hit once and be good so
this ability to actually kill members of
our own species from range without a
threat of harm to ourselves
created essentially mutually assured
destruction where we had to evolve
cooperation if we didn't
then if we just continue to try to do
like i'm the biggest monkey in the tribe
and i'm gonna you know
own this tribe and you have to go
if we do it that way then those tribes
basically failed and the tribes that's
that persisted and that have now given
rise to the modern homo sapiens are the
ones where respecting the fact that we
can kill each other from range
uh without heart like there's an
asymmetric ability to to snipe the
leader from range that
meant that we sort of had to learn how
to cooperate with each other right come
back here don't throw that rock at me
let's talk our witnesses out so violence
is also part of collaboration the threat
of violence let's say
well the recognition i was maybe the
better way to put it is the recognition
that we have more to gain by working
together
than the prisoner's dilemma of both of
us defecting
so uh mutually assured destruction in
all his forms is part of this idea of
collaboration well and eric weinstein
talks about our nuclear piece right i
mean it kind of sucks with thousands of
warheads aimed at each other we mean
russia and the us but it's like on the
other hand
you know we only fought proxy wars right
we did not have another world war three
of like hundreds of millions of people
dying to like machine gun fire and and
you know giant you know guided missiles
so the original nuclear weapon is a rock
that we learned how to throw essentially
the original yeah well the original
scope of the world for any human being
was their little tribe
i would say it still is to the most for
the most
part eric weinstein
speaks very highly of you
which was very surprising to me at first
because i didn't know there's this depth
to you because i knew you as a as a as
an amazing
leader of engineers and engineer
yourself and so on so it's fascinating
maybe just as a comment uh a side
tangent that we can take uh wh