Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation of Yoshi
Bach VP of research at the AI foundation
with a history of research positions at
MIT and Harvard Yosha is one of the most
unique and brilliant people in the
artificial intelligence community
exploring the workings of human mind
intelligence consciousness life on Earth
and the possibly simulated fabric of our
universe I could see myself talking to
Yoshi many times in the future quick
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Lex Friedman since this comes up more
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people around the world and now here's
my conversation with the OSHA buck as
you've said
up in a forest in East Germany just as
what we're talking about off mic to
parents who were artists and now I think
at least to me you become one of the
most unique thinkers in the AI world so
can you try to reverse engineer your
mind a little bit
what were the key philosophers
scientists ideas maybe even movies or
just realizations that a impact on you
when you're growing up that kind of led
to the trajectory or what the key sort
of crossroads in the trajectory of your
intellectual development my father came
from a long tradition of architects
distant branch of the family and so
basically he was technically a nerd and
nerds need to interface in society with
non-standard ways sometimes I define a
nerd as somebody who thinks that the
purpose of communication is to submit
your ideas to peer review and normal
people understand that the primary
purpose of communication is to negotiate
alignment and these purposes tend to
conflict which means that nerds have to
learn how to interact with society at
large who is the reviewer in the nerd
view of communication everybody who will
consider to be a peer so whatever
happiest individual is to around well
you would try to make him or her the
gift of information okay so you're now
by the way my research will have Mellon
for me so you're architect or artist I
study architecture but basically my
grandfather made the wrong decision he
married an aristocrat and I was drawn
into a window into the war and he came
back after 15 years so basically my
father was not parented by a nerd by but
by somebody who tried him tell him what
to do and expected him to do what he was
told and he was unable to he's unable to
do things if he's not intrinsically
motivated so in some sense my
grandmother
broke her son and her son responded by
when he became an architect
to become an artist
so he bought wounded bizarre
architecture he built houses without
right angles he'd be lots of things that
didn't work in more brutalist traditions
of eastern Germany and so he bought an
old water mill moved out of the
countryside and did only what he wanted
to do which was art eastern Germany was
perfect for p'jem because you had
complete material safety put was heavily
subsidized Oskar was free you didn't
have to worry about rent or pensions or
anything so as a socialized communist
side yes and the other thing is it was
almost impossible not to be in political
disagreement with your government which
is very productive for artists so
everything that you do is intrinsically
meaningful because it will always touch
on the deeper currents of society of
culture and be in conflict visit and
tangent visit and you will always have
to define yourself and with respect to
this so what impact did your father this
outside the bar outside the box thinker
against the government against the world
artists have it was not a thinker he was
somebody who only got self-aware to the
degree that he needed to make himself
functional so in some sense he's it was
also late 1960s and he was in some sense
a hippie so he became a one-person cult
he lived out there in his kingdom he
built big sculpture gardens and he
started many avenues of art and so on
and convinced a woman to live with him
she was also an architect and she adored
him and decided to share her life with
him and I basically grew up in a big
cave full of books
I'm almost feral and I was bored out
there it was very very beautiful very
quiet and quite lonely so I started to
read and by the time I came to school
I've read everything until fourth grade
and then some and there was not a real
way for me to relate to the outside
world and I couldn't quite put my finger
on why and today I know it was because I
was a nerd obviously and it was the only
nerd around so there was no other kids
like me and there was nobody interested
in physics or computing or mathematics
and so on and this village school that I
went to was busy in high school kids
were nice to me I was not beaten up but
I also didn't make many friends or but
relationships that only happened and
starting from ninth grade when I went to
a school for mathematics and physics do
you remember any key books from my
cigarette everything so I went to the
library and I've worked my way through
the children's and young adult sections
and then I read a lot of science fiction
for instance Danny's laflamme basically
the great author of cybernetics has
influenced me back then I didn't see him
as a big influence because everything
that he wrote seem to be so natural to
me and it's only later that I contrasted
it with what other people wrote another
thing that was very influential on me
were the classical philosophers and also
the Tudor of Romanticism so German
poetry and art cross two heads off and
Heine and up to Heather and so on that's
a love Heather so at which point is a
classical philosophers end at this point
or in the 21st century what's what's the
latest classical philosopher does this
stretch through even as far as Nietzsche
or just I were talking about Plato and
there's that one I think that Nietzsche
is the classical equivalent of a
poster yeah but he's not so much tolling
others he's trolling himself because he
was at odds with the world largely his
romantic relationships didn't work out
he got angry and he basically became a
nihilist and his nether is not a
beautiful way to be isn't until I show
it to cast him be trolling yourself to
be in that conflict in that no Venice at
some point you have to understand the
comedy of your own situation if you take
yourself seriously and you are not
functional
it ends in tragedy as I did for
Nietzsche by thinking you think he took
himself too seriously in the in that
tension and as we apply the same thing
and in HESA and so on this step involves
two enormous classic a dollar sense
where you basically feel misunderstood
by the world and you don't understand
that all the misunderstandings are the
result of your own lack of
self-awareness because you think that
you are a prototypical human and the
others around you should behave the same
way as you expect them based on your
innate instincts and it doesn't work out
and you become a transcendentalist to
deal with that and so it's very very
understandable
great sympathies for this to the degree
that I can have sympathy for my own
intellectual history but out of it was
an intellectual a life well-lived a
journey well traveled is one where you
don't take yourself seriously from now I
think that you are neither serious or
not serious yourself because you need to
become unimportant as a subject that is
if you are if a lot of a belief is not a
verb you don't do this for the audience
you don't do it for yourself you have to
submit to the things that are possibly
true and you have to follow wherever
your inquiry leads but it's not about
you and has nothing to do with you
so do you think then people like Iran
believed sort of an idea of there's a
objective truth so GE what's your sense
in the philosophical well if you remove
yourself a subjective from the picture
you think it's possible to actually
discover ideas that are true or we just
in a measure relative concepts they're
an either true nor false it's just a
giant mess you cannot define objective
truth without understanding the nature
of truths in the first place so what
does the brain mean by saying that it
covers something as truth so for
instance a model can be predictive or
not predictive then there can be a sense
in which a mathematical statement can be
tool because it's defined as true under
certain conditions so it's basically a
particular state that a variable can
have an assembled game and then you can
have a correspondence between systems
and talk about truth which is again a
type of model correspondence and that
also seems to be a particular kind of
ground rules so for instance you're
confronted with the enormity of
something existing at all right that's
standing when you realize something
exists rather than nothing and this
seems to be true right there is two EPs
absolute truth in the fact that
something seems to be happening
yeah that that to me is a showstopper I
could just think about that idea and be
amazed by that idea for the rest of my
life and not go any farther because I
don't even know the answer to that why
does anything exist at all well the
easiest answer is existence is the
default right so this is the lowest
number of bits that you would need to
encode this whose answer who brought the
simplest answer sympathisers that
existence is that if
what about non-existence I mean that
seems non-existence might not be a
meaningful notion in the sense so in
some sense if everything that can exist
exists for something to exist it
probably needs to be implementable the
only thing that can be implemented as
finite automata so maybe the whole of
existence is the superposition of all
finite automata and we are in some
region of the fractal that has the
properties that it can contain us what
does it mean to be a superposition of
fine and vanish superposition of all
power like all possible rules imagine
that every automaton is basic an
operator that acts on some substrate and
as a result you get emergent patterns
most a substrate is no idea to know so
it's based on substrate it's something
that can store information something
that can store information there is a
counter something that can hold state
still doesn't make sense to me the why
that exists at all I could just sit
there with a with a beer or or a vodka
and just enjoy effect monitoring the why
may not have a why this might be the
wrong direction so a skin to this so
there could be no relation in in the Y
direction without asking for a purpose
or for a course it doesn't mean that
everything has to have a purpose or
cause right so we mentioned some
philosophers in that early just taking a
brief step back into in today okay so we
asked ourselves when did classical
philosophy end I think what Germany
largely ended was the first revolution
that's basically even which was that
this was when we ended the monarchy and
started a democracy and at this point we
basically came up with a new form of
government that didn't have a good sense
of the this new organism that society
wanted to be and in a way it decapitated
the universities so the university spent
on so modernism like a headless chicken
at the same time democracy failed in
Germany and we got fascism as a result
and it burnt down things in the similar
way as Stalinism burnt down intellectual
traditions in Russia and Germany boast
Germany's have not recovered from this
Eastern Germany at this bog or a
dialectic materialism and western
Germany didn't get much more edgy that
Hamas so in some sense both countries
lost their intellectual traditions and
killing off and driving out
Jules didn't help yeah so that was the
end that was the end of really rigorous
well you would say it's classical
classical philosophy is also this thing
that in some sense the low-hanging foods
in philosophy were mostly wrapped and
the last big things that we discovered
was the constructivist turn in
mathematics so to understand that the
parts of mathematics that work are
computation it was a very significant
discovery in the first half of the 20th
century and it hasn't fully permeated
philosophy and even physics yet
physicists checked out the core
libraries from mathematics before
constructivism became universal what's
constructivist and what are you French
girls incompleteness theorems that kind
of discuss so it basically girdle
himself I think didn't get it yet
Hilbert could get it Hilbert saw that
for instance a country's set theoretic
experiments and mathematics led into
contradictions and he noticed that mr.
current semantics we cannot build a
computer in mathematics that runs
mathematics without crashing and a good
proof could prove this and so what
Google could show is using classical
mathematical semantics you run into
contradictions and because gödel
strongly believed in these semantics and
one then in what he could observe and so
on he was shocked
it basically shook his well to the core
because in some sense he felt that the
world has to be implemented in classical
mathematics and for Turing it wasn't
quite so bad I think that you were in
could see that the solution is to
understand the quest mathematics was
computation all along which means you're
for instance PI and classical
mathematics is a value it's also a
function but it's the same thing in a
computation a function is only a value
of n you can compute it and if you
cannot compute the last digit of pi you
only have a function you can plug this
function into your local Sun let it run
until the Sun burns out this is it this
is the last digit of pi you will know
but it also means that it can be no
process in the physical universe or in
any physically realized computer that
depends on having known the last digit
of pi yes which means there are parts of
physics that are defined in such a way
that cannot strictly be true because
assuming that this could be true leads
under contrary
actions so I think putting computation
at the center of the the worldview is
actually the right way to think about it
yes and Wittgenstein could see it and
Wittgenstein basically preempted the
largest program of AI that Minsky
started later like thirty years later
Turing was actually a pupil of Vidkun
Stein and really I didn't know there's
any connection if it can stand even
cancel some classes venturing was not
present because he thought it was not
worth spending the time if you read the
attract address it's a very beautiful
book but capacity one salt on 75 pages
it's very non typical for philosophy
because it doesn't have arguments in it
and it doesn't have references in it
it's just one thought that is not
intending to convince anybody hisses
says it's mostly for people that had the
same insight as me just spell it out and
this insight is there is a way in which
mathematics and philosophy ought to meet
mathematics tries to understand the
domain of all languages by starting with
those that are so form Aliza bulette you
can prove all the properties of the
statements that you make but the price
that you pay is that your language is
very very simple so it's very hard to
say something meaningful in mathematics
yes and it looks complicated to people
but it's far less complicated than what
our brain is casually doing all the time
it makes sense of reality and philosophy
is coming from the top so it's mostly
starting from natural languages which
vaguely defined concepts and the hope is
that mathematics and philosophy can meet
at some point and Wittgenstein was
trying to make them meet and he already
understood that for instance you could
express everything Western and calculus
that you could produce the entire logic
to NAND gates as we do in all modern
computers so in some sense he already
understood - and universality before
touring spelled it out I think he when
he wrote the Tractatus he didn't
understand yet that the idea was so
important and significant and I suspect
then when curing wrote it out nobody
cared that much your chewing was not
that famous when he lived it was mostly
his work in decrypting the German codes
that made him famous and or gave him
some notoriety but this same status that
he has to computer science right now in
the eye is something that I think he
could acquire later it's kind of
interesting and do you think of
computation and computer science and you
represent that to me is maybe that's the
modern-day you in a sense are the new
philosopher by sort of the computer
scientist who dares to ask the bigger
questions that philosophy originally
started is the new philosophy is the new
philosopher certainly not me I think I
mostly the oldest child that grows up in
a very beautiful Valley and looks at the
world from the outside and tries to
understand what's going on and my
teachers tell me things and they largely
don't make sense right so I have to make
my own models I have to discover the
foundations of what the others are
saying I have to try to fix them to be
charitable I try to understand what they
must have thought originally or what
their teachers or their teachers
teachers must have thought until
everything are lost in translation and
how to make sense of the reality that we
are in and whenever I have an original
idea
I'm usually late to the party by say 400
years and the only thing that's good is
that the parties get smaller and smaller
the older I get and the more I explore
the part the party gets smaller and more
exclusive and more exclusive so it seems
like one of the key qualities of your
upbringing was that you are not tethered
whether it's because your parents or in
general maybe you're something within
your within your mind some genetic
material you were not tethered to the
ideas of the general populace which is
actually a unique property we're kind of
throughout you know the education system
and whatever from that education system
just existing in this world forces
certain sets of ideas onto you can you
uh disentangle that why were you why are
you not so tethered even in your work
today
you seem to not care about perhaps a
best paper in Europe's right being
tethered to particular things that
current today in this year people seem
to value as a thing you put on your CV
and resume you're a little bit more
outside of that world outside of the
world of ideas that people are
especially focusing the benchmarks of
today the things what
can you disentangle that because I think
that's inspiring and if there were more
people like that we might be able to
solve some of the bigger problems that
sort of AI dreams to solve and that's a
big danger in this because in a way you
are expected to marry into an
intellectual tradition and visit this
tradition into a particular school if
everybody comes up with their own
paradigms the whole thing is not
cumulative as an enterprise right so in
some sense you need a healthy balance
you need paradigmatic thinkers and you
need people that work within given
paradigms basically sciences today to
find themselves largely by methods and
it's almost a disease that we think as a
scientist somebody who was convinced by
the guidance counselor that they should
join a particular discipline and then
they find a good mentor to learn the
right methods and then they are lucky
enough and privileged enough to join the
right team and then they will their name
will show up on influential papers but
we also see that there are diminishing
returns with this approach and when our
field computer science day I started
most of the people that joined this
field had interesting opinions and
today's thinkers and AI either don't
have interesting opinions at all or
these opinions are inconsequential for
what they actually doing because what
they're doing is they apply the
state-of-the-art methods with a small
epsilon and this is often a good idea if
if you think that this is the best way
to make progress and for me it's first
of all very boring if somebody else can
do it why should I do it right if if the
current methods of measuring learning
lead to strong AI why should I be doing
it right well just wait and hold that
done and wait until they do this on the
beach or read interesting books or write
some and have fun but if you don't think
that we are currently doing the right
thing if we are missing some
perspectives then it's required to think
outside of the box it's also required to
understand the boxes but it's it's
necessary to understand what worked and
what didn't work and for what reasons so
you have to be willing to ask new
questions and design new methods
whenever you want to answer them and you
have to be willing to dismiss the
existing methods
if you think that they're not going to
give the right answers it's very bad
career advice to do that so maybe to
briefly stay for one more time in the
early days one would you say for you was
the dream before we dive into the
discussions that we just almost started
one was the dream to understand or maybe
to create human level intelligence born
for you I think that you can see AI
largely today as advanced information
processing if you would change the
acronym of AI and to that most people in
the field would be happy it would not
change anything what they're doing for
your automating statistics and when you
of the statistical models are more
advanced than what statisticians had in
the past and it's pretty good work it's
very productive and the the other aspect
of AI is is philosophical project and
this philosophical project is very risky
and very few people work on it and it's
not clear if it succeeds so first of all
let's this is you you keep throwing a
sort of a lot of really interesting
ideas and I have to pick which ones we
cook with but sort of first of all you
use the term information processing just
information processing as if it's it's
the mirror
it's the muck of existence as if it's
the epitome of a logistic that that the
entirety the universe may be information
processing it consciousness the
intelligence might be information
problem so that maybe you can comment on
if that's if the advanced information
processing is is a limiting kind of
realm of ideas and then the other one is
would II mean by the philosophical
project so I suspect that general
intelligence is the result of trying to
solve general problems so intelligence I
think is the ability to model it's not
necessarily goal directed rationality or
something many intelligent people are
bad at this but it's the ability to be
presented with a number of patterns and
see a structure in those patterns and be
able to predict the next set of patterns
right to make sense of things and some
problems are very trainable usually
Intel
serfs control so you make these models
for a particular purpose of interacting
as an agent with the world and getting
certain results but it's the
intelligence itself is in the sense
instrumental to something but by itself
it's just the ability to make models and
some of the problems are so general that
the system that makes them needs to
understand what itself is and how it
relates to the environment so as a child
for instance you notice you do certain
things despite you perceiving yourself
as wanting different things so you
become aware of your own psychology you
become aware of the fact that you have
complex structure in yourself and you
need to model yourself to
reverse-engineer yourself to be able to
predict how you will react to certain
situations and how you deal with
yourself in relationship to your
environment and this process if this
project if you reverse engineer yourself
new relationships or reality in the
nature of a universe that can continue
if you go all the way this is basically
the project of AI or you could say the
project of AI is a very important
component in it the tutoring test in a
way is you ask a system what is
intelligence if that system is able to
explain what it is how it works then you
would should assign it the property of
being intelligent in this general sense
so the test the Turing was administering
in a way I don't think that he couldn't
see it but he didn't express it yet and
the original 1950 paper is that he was
trying to find out other that he was
generally intelligent because in order
to take this test the wrappers of course
you need to be able to understand what
that system is saying and we don't yet
know if we can build an AI have you
don't yet know if you are generally
intelligent basically you win the Turing
test by building an AI yes so it so in a
sense hidden within the Turing test is a
kind of recursive test yes it's a test
on us yeah the Turing test is basically
a test of the conjecture whether people
are intelligent enough to understand
themselves okay but you also mentioned a
little bit of a self-awareness and then
the project of AI do you think this kind
of emergent self-awareness is one of the
fundamental aspects of intelligence so
as opposed to goal oriented ease you
said kind of puzzle solving is
coming to grips with the idea that
you're an agent in the world and I find
that many highly intelligent people are
not very self-aware right so
self-awareness and intelligence are not
the same thing and you can also be surf
aware if you have put priors especially
it without being especially intelligent
so you don't need to be very good at
solving puzzles if the system that you
are already implements the solution but
I do find intelligence so you kind of
mentioned children right it is that the
fundamental project of AI is to create
the learning system that's able to exist
in the world so you kind of drew a
difference between self-awareness and
intelligence and yet you said that the
self-awareness seems to be important for
children so I call this ability to make
sense of the world and your own place
and so to understable make you able to
understand what you're doing in this
world sentience and I would distinguish
sentience from intelligence because
sentience is the possessing certain
classes of models and intelligence is
the way to get to these models if you
don't already have them I see so can you
maybe pause a bit and try to answer the
question that we just said we may not be
able to answer and might be a recursive
meta question of what is intelligence
and I think that intelligence is the
ability to make models the models is I
think it's useful as examples very
popular now neural networks form
representations of large-scale data set
they they form models of those data sets
when you say models and look at today's
new all networks what are the difference
of how you're thinking about what is
intelligent in saying that intelligence
is the process of making models two
aspects tool to this question one is the
representation is the representation
adequate for the domain that we want to
represent and the other one is is the
type of the model that you arrive at
adequate so basically are your modeling
the correct domain
and I think in both of these cases
modern AI is lacking stuff and I think
that I'm not saying anything new you're
not criticizing the field most of the
people that design our paradigms are
aware of that and so one aspect that
you're missing is unified learning when
we learned we'd at some point discover
that everything that we sends this part
of the same object which means we learn
it all into one model and we call this
model the universe so an experience of
the world that we are embedded on it's
not a secret direct via to physical
reality physical reality is a view at
quantum graph that we can never
experience or get access to but it has
this properties that it can create
certain patterns at our systemic
interface to the world and we make sense
of these patterns and the relationship
between the patterns that we discover is
what we call the physical universe so at
some point in our development is a
nervous system we discover that
everything that we relate to and in the
world it can be mapped to a region in
the same three-dimensional space by and
large we now know in physics that this
is not quite true well it's not actually
three-dimensional but the world that we
are entangled is at the level of which
we are entangled this is largely a flat
three-dimensional space and so this is
the model that our brain is intuitively
making and this is I think what gave
rise to this intuition of res extends
a-- of this material world this material
domain it's one of the mental domains
but it's just the class of all models
that relate to this environment this v
dimension of physics engine in which we
are embedded physics engine or embedded
i love that phrase it just slowly pause
so the the quantum graph i think you
called which is the real world which you
can never get access to there's a bunch
of questions i want to sort of
disentangle that maybe one useful one
one of your recent talks i looked at can
you just describe the basics can you
talk about what is dualism
what does idealism what is materialism
what is functionalism and what connects
with you most in terms of because you
just mentioned there's a reality we
don't have access to okay what does that
even mean
and why don't we get access to it only
part of that
one week why can we access it so the
particular trajectory that mostly exists
in the West is the result of our
indoctrination by a card for 2000 years
occult which yes the Catholic cause
mostly yes and for better or worse right
it has created or defined many of the
modes of interaction that we have that
have best created this society but it
has also in some sense scarred our
rationality and the intuition that
exists if you would translate the
mythology of the Catholic Church into
the modern world is that the world in
which you and me interact is something
like a multiplayer role-playing
adventure yes and the money and the
objects that we have in this world this
is all not real or is Eastern
philosophers would say it's my eye it's
just stuff that is it appears to be
meaningful and this embedding in this
meaning and people leave in it is
samsara this it's basically the
identification with the needs of the
mundane secular everyday existence and
the Catholics also introduced the notion
of higher meaning the sacred and this
existed before but eventually the
natural shape of God is the Platonic
form of the civilization that you're
part of it's basically the super
organism that is formed by the
individuals as an intentional agent and
basically the Catholics used relatively
crude mythology to implement software on
the minds of people and get the software
synchronized to make them walk in
lockstep this basically get they get
this got online and you make it
efficient and effective and I think our
God technically is just itself that
spends multiple brains as opposed to
your and myself which mostly exists just
on one brain
right and so in some sense you can
construct yourself functionally as a
function is implemented by brains that
exists across brains and this is a God
with a small G that's one of the if you
look evil Harare kind of talking about
this is one of the nice features of our
brains it seems to that we can all
download the same piece of software I
got in this case and kind of share it
yes you give everybody a spec and the
mathematical constraints that are in
front
to information-processing make sure that
given the same spec you come up with a
compatible structure okay
so that's there's the space of ideas
that we all share and we think that's
kind of the mind and but that's separate
from the idea is from from Christianity
for from religion is that there's a
separate thing between the mind as a
real vault and this real world is the
world in which God exists God is the
quarter of the multiplayer adventure so
to speak and we are all players in this
game and that's dualism usually but it
is because the mental realm is exists in
a different implementation than a
physical realm and the mental realm is
real and a lot of people have this
intuition that there is this real room
in which you and me talk and speak right
now
then comes a layer of physics and
abstract rules and so on and then comes
another real room where our souls are
and our tool form isn't the thing that
gives us phenomenal experience and this
of course a very confused notion that
you would get and it's basically it's
the result of connecting materialism and
idealism in the wrong way so okay I
apologize but I think it's really
helpful if we just tried to define try
to define terms like what is joules and
what is idealism what is materialism for
people done' so the idea of dualism and
our cultural tradition is that there are
two substances a mental substance and a
physical substance and they interact by
different rules and the physical world
is basically causally closed and is
built on a low level causal structures
or the bezier bottom level that is
causally closed it's entirely mechanical
and mechanical in the widest sense
so it's computational there's basically
a physical world in which information
flows around and physics describes the
laws of how information flows around an
adult would you compare it to like a
computer where you have a hardware and
software the computer is a
generalization of information flowing
around basically but join discovered
that there is genuine universal
principle you can define this Universal
machine that is able to perform all the
computations so all these machines have
the same power this this means that you
can always define a translation between
them
as long as they have unlimited memory to
be able to perform each other's
computations so would you then say that
materialism is this whole world is just
the hardware and idealism is this whole
world is just a software why I think
that most idealists don't have a notion
of software yet because software also
comes down to information processing
right so what you notice is the only
thing that is real to you and me is this
experimental world in which things
matter in which things have taste in
which things of color phenomenal content
and so on and you are bringing up
consciousness okay and this is distinct
from the physical world in which things
have values in only in an abstract sense
and you only look at cold patterns
moving around so how does anything feel
like something in this connection
between the two things is very puzzling
to a lot of people of course to many
philosophers so idealism starts out with
the notion that mind is primary
materialism thinks that matter is
primary and so for the idealist the
material patterns that we see a play in
playing out a part of the dream that the
mind is dreaming and we exist in the
mind on a higher plane of existence if
you want and for the materialist there
is only this material thing and that
generates some models and via the result
of these models and in some sense I
don't think that we should understand if
you understand it properly materialism
and idealism is a dichotomy but there's
two different aspects of the same thing
so the via thing is we don't exist in
the physical world we do exist inside of
a store way that the brain tells itself
ok that's it let me uh let my my my
information processing I take they take
that in we don't exist in the physical
world we exist in the narrative basic
your brain cannot feel anything
New York cannot feel anything they're
physical things physical systems are
unable to experience anything but it
would be very useful for the brain or
for the organism to know what it would
be like to be a person and to feel
something yeah so the brain creates a
simulacrum of such a person that it uses
to model the interactions of the
person's the best model of what that
brain this organism thinks it is in
relationship to its
and so it creates that model it's a
story a multimedia novel that the brain
is continuously writing and updating but
you also kind of said that you said that
we kind of exist in the head and that's
alright yes that story yeah what is real
in any of this so like there's a again
these terms are you kind of said there's
a quantum graph I mean what is what is
this whole thing running on then is this
story and is it completely fundamentally
impossible to get access to it because
isn't the story supposed to is in the
brain in a in something in existing in
some kind of context so what we can
identify as computer scientists we can
engineer systems and test our theories
this way that may have the necessary and
sufficient properties to produce the
phenomena that you're observing which is
there is itself in a virtual world that
is generated in somebody's neocortex who
that is contained in the skull of this
primate here and when I point at this
this indexicality is of course wrong but
I do create something that is likely to
give rise to patterns on your retina
that allow you to interpret what I'm
saying right but I both know that the
world that you and me are seeing is not
the real physical world what we are
seeing is a virtual reality generated in
your brain to explain the patterns on
your retina how close is it to the real
world that's kind of the the question is
it when you have when you have like
people like Donald Hoffman let's say
that like that you're really far away
the thing we're seeing you and I now
that interface would have it's very far
away from anything like we don't even
have anything close like to the sense of
what the real world is or is it a very
surface piece of architecture imagine
you look at the Mandelbrot fractal right
this famous thing that when a man would
discover deadlines if you're you see an
overall shape and they're right but you
know if you truly understand it you know
it's two lines of quote it's basically
in a series that is being tested for
complex numbers and in the complex
number plane for every point and for
those for this year is is diverging
you paint this black and where it's
converging you don't and you get the
intermediate colors by taking how far it
diverges yes right this gives you this
shape of this fractal but imagine you
live inside of this fractal and you
don't have access to where you are in
the fractal or you have not discovered
the generator function even right so
what you see is all of all I can see
right now is the spiral and the spiral
moves a little bit to the right is this
an accurate model of reality yes it is
right it is an adequate description is
you know that there is actually no
spiral and the mailboat fractal it only
appears to like this to an observer that
is interpreting things as a
two-dimensional space and then define
certain regularities in there at a
certain scale that currently observes
because if you zoom in the spiral might
disappear and turn out to be something
different at the different resolution
right yes so at this level you have the
spiral and then you discover the spiral
moves to the right and some point it
disappears so you have a singularity at
this point your model is no longer valid
you cannot predict what happens beyond
the singularity but you can observe
again and you will see it is another
spiral and at this point it disappeared
so maybe we now have a second-order law
and if you make 30 layers of these laws
then you have a description of the world
that is similar to the one that we come
up with when we describe the reality
around us it's reasonably predictive it
does not cut to the core of it so you
explain how it's being generated how it
actually works but it's relatively good
to explain the University of your
entangled fence but you don't think the
tools are computer sizes the tools of
physics could get could step outside see
the whole drawing and get at the basic
mechanism of how the pattern the spiral
is generated imagine you would find
yourself embedded into a mother but
Franklin you try to figure out what
works and you you know somehow have a
throwing machine there's enough memory
to think and as a result you've come to
this idea it must be some kind of
automaton and maybe you just enumerate
all the possible automata until you get
to the one that produces your reality so
you can identify necessary and
sufficient condition for instance we
discover that mathematics itself is the
domain of all languages and then we see
that most of the domains of mathematics
that we have discovered are in some
sense describing the same
this is what category theory is obsessed
about that you can map these different
domains to each other so they're not
that many fractals and some of these
have interesting structure and symmetry
breaks and so you can just cover what
region of this global fractal you might
be embedded in from first principles yes
but the only way you can get there is
from first principles so basically your
understanding of the universe has to
start with automata and the number
theory and then spaces and so on yeah I
think like Stephen Wolfram still dreams
that he's it that he'll be able to
arrive at the fundamental rules of the
cellular automata or the generalization
of which is behind our universe yeah
it's you've said on this topic you said
in a recent conversation that quote some
people think that a simulation can't be
conscious and only a physical system can
but they got a completely backward a
physical system cannot be conscious only
a simulation can be cautious yeah
consciousness is a simulated property
that's simulate itself yeah just like
you said the mind is kind of the call it
story narrative there's a simulation or
our mind is essentially a simulation and
usually I try to use the terminology so
that the mind is basically a principles
that produce the simulation it's the
software that is implemented by your
brain and the mind is creating both the
universe that we are in and the self the
idea of a person that is on the other
side of attention and is embedded in
this world why is that important that
idea of a self
why is that an important feature in
simulation it's basically a result of
the purpose that the mind has it's a
tool for modeling right we are not
actually monkeys via side effects of the
regulation needs of monkeys and what the
monkey has to regulate is the
relationship of an organism to an
outside world that is a large part also
consisting of other organisms and as a
result it basically has regulation
targets that it tries to get to this
regulation target start with priors
they're basic like unconditional
reflexes that we are more less born with
and then we can reverse-engineer them to
make them more consistent and then we
get more detailed models about how the
world works
and how to interact with it and so these
priors that you commit to are largely
target values that our needs should
approach set points and this deviation
to the set point creates some urge some
tension and we find ourselves living
inside of feedback loops right
consciousness emerges over dimensions of
disagreements with the universe things
that you care things are not the way
there should be but you need to regulate
and so in some sense the sense self is
the result of all the identifications
that you're having an identification is
a regulation tracker that you're
committing to it's a dimension that you
care about do you think is important and
this is also what locks you in if you
let go of these commitments of these
identifications you get free there's
nothing that you have to do anymore and
if you let go of all of them you're
completely free and you can enter
Nirvana because you're done and actually
this is a good time to pause and say
thank you to sort of a friend of mine
Gustav's or Ostrom who introduced me to
your work I wanted to give him a shout
out he's a brilliant guy and I think the
AI community is actually quite amazing
and Gustav is a good representative that
you are as well some I'm glad first of
all I'm glad the internet exists you -
who's this where I can watch your talks
and then get to your book and study your
writing and think about you know that's
that's amazing okay
but the you've kind of described instead
of this emergent phenomena of
consciousness from the simulation so
what about the hard problem of
consciousness the can you just linger on
it like but why this is still feel like
I understand you're kind of the self is
an important part of the simulation but
why does the simulation feel like
something so if you look at the book by
say george RR martin with the characters
have plausible psychology yeah and they
stand on a hill because they want to
conquer the city below the hill and
they've done in it and then look at the
color of the sky and they are Princip
and feel empowered and all these things
why do they have these emotions it's
because it's written into the story
right and threatened with the story
because it's an adequate model of the
person that predicts what they're going
to do next
and the same thing is helpful it's
basically a story that our brain is
writing it's not written in words it's
written in perceptual content basically
multimedia content and it's a model of
what the person would feel if it existed
so it's a virtual person and you and me
happen to be this virtual person so if
this virtual person gets access to the
language center and talks about the sky
being blue and this is us but hold on a
second do I exist in your simulation you
do exist even almost similar way as me
so there are internal states that I that
are less accessible for me in that you
have and so on and you're my model might
not be completely adequate there are
also things that I might perceive about
you that you don't perceive but in some
sense both you and me are some puppets -
puppets that enact this play in my mind
and I identify with one of them because
I can't control one of the puppet
directly and with the other one I can
create things in between so for instance
we can go or in an interaction that even
leads to a coupling to a feedback loop
so we can sync things together in a
certain way or feel things together but
this coupling is itself not a physical
phenomena entirely a software phenomenon
it's a result of two different
implementations interacting with each
other so this is thing so are you
suggesting I did like the way you think
about it is the entirety of existence
simulation and we're kind of each mind
is a little sub simulation that like why
don't you why doesn't your mind have
access to my mind's full state like for
the same reason that my mind hasn't have
access to its own full state so what I
mean
there is no trick involved so basically
when I say know something about myself
it's because I made a model yes of your
brain is tasked with modeling what other
parts of your brain are doing yes but
there seems to be an incredible
consistency about this world in the
physical sense that is repeatable
experiments and so on yeah how does that
fit into our silly the center of apes
sim you
of the world so why is it some repeat
why is everything so repeatable and not
everything there's a lot of fundamental
physics experiments that are repeatable
for a long time all over the place and
so on
laws of physics how does that fit in it
seems that the parts of the world that
are not deterministic are not long-lived
so if you build a system any kind of
automaton so if you build simulations of
something you'll notice that the
phenomena that endure are those that
give rise to stable dynamics so
basically if you see anything that is
complex in the world it's the result of
usually of some control of some feedback
that keeps it stable around certain
attractors and the things that are not
stable that don't give rise to certain
harmonic patterns and so on they tend to
get weeded out over time so if we are in
a region of the universe that sustains
complexity which is required to
implement Minds like ours this is going
to be a region of the universe that is
very tightly controlled and controllable
so it's going to have lots of
interesting symmetries and also symmetry
breaks that allow the creation of
structure but they exist where so
there's such an interesting idea that
our - simulation is constructing the
narrative but my question is just to try
to understand how that fits with this
with the entirety of the universe you're
saying that there's a region of this
universe that allows enough complexity
to create creatures like us but what's
the connection between the the brain the
mind and the broader universe which
comes first which is more fundamental is
the is the mind the starting point the
universe is emergent is the universe the
starting point the minds are emergent I
think quite clearly the letter it's at
least a much easier explanation because
it allows us to make causal models and I
don't see any way to construct an
inverse cos allottee so what happens
when you die to your mind simulation my
implementation ceases so basically the
thing that implements myself will no
longer be present it means if I am NOT
implemented on the minds of other people
to think that I identify this
is the weird thing is I don't actually
have an identity beyond the identity
that I construct if I was the Dalai Lama
he identifies as a form of government so
basically the dad Adama gets reborn not
because he is confused but because he is
not identifying as a human being he runs
on a human being he's basically a
governmental software right that is
instantiated in every new generation in
you so his advisors will pick someone
who does this in the next generation so
if you identify as this you are no
longer human and you don't die and
essentially what dies is only the body
of the human that you ran on here to
kill the Dalai Lama you would have to
kill his tradition and if we look at
ourselves we realized that we are to a
small part like this most of us so for
instance if you have children you
realize something lives on in them or if
you spark an idea in the world something
lives on or if you identify it as a
society around you because you are part
that you are not dressed this human
being yes so in a sense you are kind of
like a Dalai Lama and since that you
Jascha Bach is just a collection of
ideas so like you have this operating
system on which is a bunch of ideas live
and interact and then once you die they
kind of part some of them jump off the
should it put it the other way identity
is a software state it's a construction
it's not physically real identity is not
a physical concept it's basically a
representation of different objects on
the same world line but identity let
lives and eyes are you attached this is
it's what's the fundamental thing is
that the ideas that come together to
form identity or is each individual
identity actually a fundamental thing
it's a representation that you can get
agency over if you care so basically you
can choose what you identify best if you
want to nobody just seems if if the mind
is not very real it's not that the the
birth and death is not a crucial part of
it
well maybe I'm silly
maybe I'm attached to this whole
biological organism but it's
that the physical being a physical
object in this world is is a an
important aspect of birth and death like
it feels like it has to be physical to
die it feels like simulations don't have
to die the physics that we experience is
not the real physics that explains is no
color and sound in the real world color
and sound are types of representations
that you get if you want to model
reality with oscillators right so colors
and sound in some sense have octaves yes
and it's because they are represented
probably with oscillators right so
that's why colors form a circle of views
and colors have harmonic sounds have
harmonics is a result of synchronizing
oscillators in in the brain right so the
world that we subjectively interact with
is fundamentally the result of the
representation mechanisms in our brain
they are mathematically to some degree
Universal they are certain regularities
that you can discover in the patterns
and not others but the patterns that we
get this is not the real world the world
that we interact with is always made of
too many parts to count right so when
you look at this table and so on it's
consisting of so many more molecules and
atoms that you cannot count them so you
only look at the aggregate dynamics at
limit dynamics if you had almost
infinitely many patterns of particles
what would be the dynamics of the table
and this is roughly what you get so
geometry that we are interacting this is
the result of discovering those
operators that work in the limit that
you get by building an infinite series
that converges for those parts where it
converges its geometry for those parts
or a dozen convergence chaos right and
then so all that is filtered through
with the cuts of the consciousness
that's emergent in our narrative the the
consciousness gives it color gives a
feeling gives it flavor so I think the
feeling flavor and so on is given by the
relationship that a feature has to all
the other features it's basically a
giant relational graph that is our
subjective universe the color is given
by those aspects of the representation
or the this experiential color where you
care about but you have identifications
but something means something where you
are the inside of a feedback loop when
the dimensions of of caring are
basically dimensions of this
motivational system that we emerge over
the
the meaning of the relations the graph
can you elaborate that a little bit like
where does the maybe we can even step
back and ask the question of what is
consciousness to be sort of more
systematically what what what do you how
do you think about consciousness
consciousness is largely a model of the
contents of your attention it's a
mechanism that has evolved for a certain
type of learning at the moment of a
machine learning systems we largely work
by building chains of weighted sums of
real numbers with some non-linearity and
you will learn by typing an error signal
so these different chained layers and
adjusting the weights in this way that
Samms and you can approximate most
polynomials if you have enough training
data but the prices you need to change a
lot of these weights basically the error
is piped backwards into the system until
it accumulates at certain junctures in
the network and everything else evens
out statistically and only at these
junctures this is where you had the
actual error in the network you make the
change there this is a very slow process
and our brains don't have enough time
for that because we don't get old enough
to play go the way that our machines
learn to play go so instead what we do
is an attention based learning we
pinpoint the probable region in the
network where we can make an improvement
and then we store the this binding state
together with the expected outcome in a
protocol and there's ability to make
index memories for the purpose of
learning to revisit these commitments
later this requires an memory of the
contents of our attention another aspect
is when I construct my reality and make
mistakes so I sees things that turn out
to be reflections or shadows and so on
which means I have to be able to point
out which features of my perception gave
rise to a present construction of
reality so the system needs to pay
attention to the earth features that are
currently in its focus and it also needs
to pay attention to whether it pays
attention itself in part because the
attentional system gets trained is the
same mechanism so it's reflexive but
also in part because your attention
lapses if you don't pay attention to the
attention itself
all right so it's this thing that I'm
currently seeing just a dream that my
brain has spun off into some kind of
daydream or am I still paying attention
to my percept so you have to
periodically go back and see whether you
are still paying attention and if you
have this loop and you make it tight
enough between the system becoming aware
of the contents of its attention and the
fact that it's paying attention itself
and makes attention the object of its
attention I think this is the loop over
which if you wake up so there's this so
there's this attentional mechanism
that's somehow self referential that's
fundamental to what consciousness is
mm-hmm so just uh ask you a question I
don't know how much you're familiar with
the recent break there is a natural
English processing they use attentional
mechanisms used something called
transformers to learn patterns and
sentences by allowing a network to focus
its attention to particular parts of a
sentence at each individual so like
parameterize and make it learn about the
dynamics of a sentence by having like a
little window into the into the sentence
do you think that's like a little step
towards that eventually would will take
us to the intentional mechanisms from
which consciousness could emerge not
quite I think it models only one aspect
of attention in the early days of
automated language translation there was
a example that I found particularly
funny where somebody tried to translate
a text from English into German and it
was a bet broke the window and the
translation in German was eine
Fledermaus it's a practice Fenster MIT
einem baseball schlager so to translate
it back into English a bet the this
flying mammal broke the window with a
baseball bat yes and it seemed to be the
most similar to this program because it
somehow maximized the possibility of
translating the concept bat into German
in the same sentence and this is some a
mistake that the Transformer model is
not doing because it's tracking identity
and the attentional mechanism in the
Transformer model is basically putting
its finger on individual concepts and
make sure that these concepts pop up
later in the text
yeah and tracks basically the
individuals through the text and it's
why the system can learn things that
other systems couldn't before it which
makes the for instance possible to write
a text where it talks about the
scientist then the scientist is a name
and has a pronoun and it gets a
consistent story about that thing what
it does not do it doesn't fully
integrate this so his meaning falls
apart at some point it loses track of
this context it does not yet understand
that everything that it says has to
refer to the same universe and this is
where this thing falls apart but the
attention in transformer model does not
go beyond tracking identity and tracking
identity is an important part of
attention but it's a different very
specific attentional mechanism and it's
not the one that gives rise to the type
of consciousness that they have okay
just to linger I know what what do you
mean by identity in the context of
language so when you talk about language
that you have different words that can
refer to the same concept got it and in
the sensor concepts so yes and it can
also be in a nominal sense or an
indexical sense that you say yeah this
word does not only refer to this class
of objects but it refers to a definite
object to some kind of agent that waves
their way to through the story and it's
only referred by different ways in the
language so the language is basically a
projection from a conceptual
representation from a scene that is
evolving into a discrete string of
symbols and what the transformer is able
to it learns aspects of this projection
mechanism that other models couldn't
learn so have you ever seen an
artificial intelligence or any kind of
construction idea that allows for unlike
neural networks or perhaps within your
networks it's able to form something
where the space of concepts continues to
be integrated so the way you're
describing building an all knowledge
base building this consistent larger and
larger sets of ideas that would then
allow for a deeper understanding of it
concerns thought that we can build
everything from language from basically
a logical grammatical construct and I
think to some degree this was also what
Minsky believed so that's why I focus so
much
on common sense reasoning and so on and
project that was inspired by him both
psyche um there was special going on yes
of course
ideas don't die only people die and
that's true but in doubt psyche is a
productive project it's just probably
not one that is going to converge to
general intelligence the thing that
Wittgenstein couldn't solve and he
looked at this in his book at the end of
his life philosophical investigations
was the notion of images so images play
an important role in track titles the
Tractatus an attempt to basically turn
philosophy into logical probing language
to design a logical language in which
you can do actual philosophy that rich
enough for doing this and the difficulty
was to deal with perceptual content and
eventually I think he decided that he
was not able to solve it and I think
this preempted the failure of the logit
his program in AI in the solution as we
see it today is we need more general
function approximation there are
functions geometric functions that we
learn to approximate that cannot be
efficiently expressed and computed in a
grammatical language can of course build
automata that go via number theory and
so on and to learn linear algebra and
then compute an approximation of this
geometry but to equate language and
geometry is not an efficient way to
think about it so functional is well you
kind of just said then you'll now work
sir the sort of the approach in you all
know this takes is actually more general
than the then what can be expressed
through language yes so what can be
efficiently expressed through language
at the data rates at which we process
grammatical language okay so you don't
think so you don't think languages so
you disagree with Wittgenstein that
language is not fundamental - I agree
with commit constrain it I just agree
with the late Wittgenstein and I also
agree with the beauty of the early
Wittgenstein I think that the Tractatus
itself is probably the most beautiful
philosophical text that was written in
the twentieth century but but language
is not fundamental to cognition and
intelligence and consciousness so I
think that language is a particular way
or the natural language that we're using
is a particular level
of abstraction that we used to
communicate with each other but the
languages in which people express
geometry are not grammatical languages
in the same sense so they work slightly
different they're more general
expressions of functions and I think the
general nature of a model is you have a
bunch of parameters these are have
arranged it as these are the variances
of the world and you have relationships
between them which are constraints which
say if certain parameters have these
values then other parameters have to
have the following values and this is a
very early insight in computer science
and I think the some of the earliest
formulations is the Boltzmann machine
and the problem is the Boltzmann machine
is that it has a measure of whether it's
good this is basically the energy on the
system the amount of tension that you
have left and the constraints where the
constraints don't quite match it's very
difficult to despite having this global
measure to train it because if yes as
soon as you add more than trivially fuel
elements parameters into the system it's
very difficult to get it settle in the
right architecture and so we the
solution that Hinton and Sinofsky found
was to use a restricted Boltzmann
machine which uses the hidden links the
internal links and in the Boltzmann
machine and only has based the input and
output layer but this limits the Express
ativy Civet e of the boltzmann machine
so now he builds a network of small of
these primitive Boltzmann machines and
in some sense you can see a almost
continuous development from this to the
deep learning models that we are using
today even though we don't use Boltzmann
machines at at this point but the idea
of the Boltzmann machine is you take
this model you clamp some of the values
to perception and this forces the entire
machine to go into a state that is
compatible with the states that you
currently perceive and this state is
your model of the world right so I think
it's a very general way of thinking
about models but we have to use a
different approach to make it work this
is we have to find different networks
that train the Boltzmann machine so the
mechanism that trains the Boltzmann
machine and the mechanism that makes the
Boltzmann machine settle into its state
are distinct from the constrained
architecture of the Boltzmann machine
itself the the kind of mechanism we want
to develop
yes so this the direction in which I
think our research is going to go is
going to for instance what you notice in
perception is our perceptual models of
the world are not probabilistic but
possible istic which means with them you
should be able to perceive things that
are improbable but possible right the
sexual State is valid not if it's
probable but if it's possible if it's
quite coherent yeah so if you see a
tiger coming after you should be able to
see this even if it's unlikely and the
probability is necessary for convergence
of the model so given the state of
possibilities that is very very large
and a set of perceptual features how
should you change the state of states of
the model together to convert with your
perception but the space of the space of
ideas that are coherent with the context
that you're sensing is perhaps not as
large I mean that that's perhaps
pretty small the degree of coherence
that you need to achieve depends of
course how deep your models goal is for
instance politics is very simple when
you know very little
without game theory and human nature so
the younger you are the more obvious is
how politics should work right yes and
because you get in a Korean aesthetics
from relatively few inputs and the more
layers you model them add more layers
you model reality the harder it gets to
satisfy all the constraints so you know
the current neural networks are
fundamentally supervised learning system
with the feed-forward neural network is
back propagation to learn what's your
intuition about what kind of mechanisms
might we move towards to improve the
learning procedure I think one big
aspect is going to be meta learning and
architecture search starts in this
direction in some sense the first wave
of AI classical a I work by identifying
a problem into the possible solution and
implementing the solution right program
that plays chess and right now we are in
the second wave of AI so instead of
writing the algorithm that implements
the solution revise an algorithm that
automatically searches for an algorithm
that implements the solution so the
learning system in some sense is an
algorithm that itself discovers the
algorithm that solves the problem
or goes too hard to implement it by
dissolution by hand but we can implement
an algorithm that finds the solution yes
so now let's move to the third stage
right the third stage would be
meta-learning
find an algorithm that discovers the
learning algorithm for the given domain
our brain is probably not a learning
system but a meta learning system this
is one way of looking at what we are
doing there is another way if you look
at the way our brain as for instance
implemented there is no central control
that tells all the new ones how to wire
up yes instead every neuron is an
individual reinforcement learning agent
every neuron is a single-celled organism
that is quite complicated and in some
sense quite motivated to get fed and it
gets fed if it fires on average at the
right time yes auntie the right time
depends on the context that the neuron
exists in which is the electrical and
chemical environment that it has so it
basically has to learn a function over
its environment that tells us when to
fire to get fat or if you see it as a
reinforcement learning agent every
neuron is in some sense making a
hypothesis when it sends a signal it
tries to pipe a signal through the
universe and tries to get positive
feedback for it and the entire thing is
set up in such a way that it's robustly
self-organizing into a brain which means
you stride out with different neuron
types that have different priors in
which hypothesis to test on how to get
its reward and you put them into
different concentrations in a certain
spatial alignment and then you entrain
it in a particular order and as a result
you get develop a nice brain yeah so
okay so the brain is a meta learning
system with a bunch of with
reinforcement learning agents and what I
think you said but just to clarify where
do the LA there's no centralized
government that tells you here's a loss
function here's a loss function here's a
loss function like what who is who says
what's the also governments which impose
loss functions on different parts of the
brain so we have differential attention
some areas in your brain get especially
rewarded when you look at faces if you
don't have that you will get post of
agnosia which basically mean the
inability to tell people apart by their
faces
so and the reason that happens is
because it was had an evolutionary
advantage like evolution comes in a play
here about it's basically an
extraordinary attention that we have for
faces I don't think that people were
supposed to up no see I have Percy a
defective brain the brain just has an
average attention for faces so people
were supposed of agnosia don't look at
faces more than they look at cups so the
level at which they resolve the geometry
of faces is not higher than the one that
then four cups and people that don't
have prosopagnosia looked obsessively at
faces right for you and me it's
impossible to move through a crowd
without scanning the faces and as a
result we make insanely detailed models
of faces that allow us to discern mental
states of people so obviously we don't
know 99% of the details of this meta
learning system that's our mind okay
but still we took a leap from something
much dumber to that from love through
the evolutionary process can you first
of all maybe say how hard these how big
of a leap is that from our brain from
our a branch asters to multi cell
organisms and is there something we can
think about about as we start to think
about how to engineer intelligence is
there something we can learn from
evolution in some sense life exists
because of the market opportunity of
controlled chemical reactions we compete
with some chemical reactions and we win
in some areas against this damp
combustion because we can harness those
entropy gradients where you need to add
a little bit of energy in a specific way
to harvest more energy so we are
competing combustion yes in many regions
we do and we try very hard because when
we under ekam petition we lose right
yeah so because the combustion is going
to close the entropy gradients much
faster than we can run yes you gotta
quit so I probably am yeah so basically
to this because every cell has a Turing
machine built into it it's like
literally a read/write head of the tape
and so everything that's more
complicated than a molecule that just is
a vortex around attractors
that needs the Turing machine in it for
its regulation and then you bind cells
together and you get next level
organization or organism where the cells
together implement some kind of software
and for me very interesting discovery in
the last year was the word spirit
because I realized that what spirit
actually means it's an operating system
for an autonomous robot and when the
word was invented people needed this
word but they didn't have robots that
they built themselves yet the only
autonomous robots that were known were
people animals plants ecosystems cities
and so on and they all had spirits and
it makes sense to say that the plant is
an operating system right if you pinch
the plant in one area then there's going
to have repercussions throughout the
plant everything in the plant is in some
sense connected into some global
aesthetics like in other organisms an
organism is not a collection of cells is
a function that tells cells how to
behave and this function is not
implemented as some kind of supernatural
thing like some more for genetic field
it is an emergent result of the
interactions of the each service each
other cell all right so you're you're
saying is the organism is a function
that tells what's what what now that the
cell sells what to do and the function
is an emerging the interaction of the
cells yes so it's basically a
description of what the plant is doing
in terms of macro States and the micro
States the physical implementation are
too many of them to describe them so the
software that we use to describe what
the plant is doing the spirit of the
plant is the software the operating
system of the plant right this is a way
in which V the observers make sense of
the plant yes okay same is true for
people so people have spirits which is
their operating system in a very
rightness aspects of that operating
system that relate to how your body
functions and others how you socially
interact or you interact with yourself
and so on and we make models of that
spirit and we think it's a loaded term
because it's from a pre-scientific age
but we it took the scientific age a long
time to rediscover a term that is pretty
much the same thing and I suspect that
the difference is that we still
between the old world and the new world
our translation errors over the
centuries but can you actually link
around that like well why do you say
that spirit just to clarify because I'm
a little bit confused so the the word
spirit is a powerful thing but why did
you say in the last year or so they
discovered this do you mean the same old
traditional idea of a spirit or Jamie I
try to find out what people mean by
spirit when people say spirituality in
the u.s. it usually is the refers to the
phantom limb that they developed in the
absence of culture and a culture is in
some sense you could say the spirit of a
society that is long game this thing
that it's become self-aware at a level
above the individuals where you say if
you don't do the following things then
the grand crying crying when children of
our children will not have nothing to
eat yeah
so if you take this long scope where you
try to maximize the length of the game
that you are playing as a species to
realize that you're part of a larger
thing that you cannot fully control you
probably see to submit to the ecosphere
instead of trying to completely control
it right there needs to be a certain
level at which we can exist as a species
if you want to endure and our culture is
not sustaining this anymore we basically
made this bet with the Industrial
Revolution that we can control
everything and the modernist societies
was basically unfettered growth led to a
situation in which we depend on the
ability to control the entire planet and
since we are not able to do that as it
seems this culture will die if we
realize that it doesn't have a future
right we called our children generations
that it's not very optimistic things
yeah you can have this kind of intuition
that our civilization you say culture
but you really mean this the spirit of
the civilization do in the entirety the
civilization may not exist for long yeah
so what can you kion tangle that what's
your intuition behind that so you you
kind of offline mentioned to me that the
Industrial Revolution was kind of a the
moment we agreed to accept the offer
sign on the paper on the dotted line
with the Industrial
lucien we doomed ourselves can you
elaborate and this is suspicion i of
course don't know how it plays out but
gosh it seems to me that in society in
which you leverage yourself very far
over an entropic a piss without land on
the other side it's relatively clear
that your cantilevers at some point
going to break down into this entropic
abyss and you have to pay the bill okay
russia is my first language and i'm also
an idiot this is just two apes instead
they're playing with the banana trying
to have fun by talking okay and
throbbing what in what's anthropic and
tropic and drop and and so n tropic in
the sense of entropy and all entropic
that yes so this end and tropical oils
the other word you have this what's that
it's a big porch abyss abyss yes and
tropic abyss so many of the things you
say are poetic it's and often rings
meb's amazing right it's miss Burrell
which makes you do more poetic
Wittgenstein would be proud so entropic
abyss okay let's let's rewind then the
Industrial Revolution so how does that
get us into the entropic abyss so in
some sense we burned a hundred million
years worth of trees to get everybody
plumbing yes and the society that we had
before that had a very limited number of
people so basically since 0 BC we
hovered between 300 and 400 million
people yes and this only changed with
the Enlightenment and the subsequent
Industrial Revolution and in some sense
the Enlightenment a feat of rationality
and also freed our norms from the
pre-existing order gradually it was an
process that basically have been
feedback loop so it was not that just
one cost the other it was a dynamic that
started and the dynamic worked by
basically increasing productivity to
such a degree that we could fit all our
children and I think the definition of
property is that you have as many
children as
you can feed before they die which is in
some sense the state that all animals on
earth are in the definition of poverty
is having enough so you can have only so
many children as you can feed and if you
have more they die yes and in our
societies you can basically have as many
children as you want they don't die
right so I the reason why we don't have
as many children as we want us because
we also have to pay a price in terms of
you have to insert ourselves in the
lowers also tritonus yeah if you have
too many so basically everybody in the
under middle and lower upper class has
only a limited number of children
because having more of them would mean a
big economic hit to the individual
families yes because children especially
in u.s. super expensive to have and you
only are taken out of this if you are
basically super rich or if you are super
poor if you're super poor it doesn't
matter how many kids you have because
your status is not going to change and
these children are largely not going to
die of hunger so how does this leads us
just self-destruction so there's a lot
of unpleasant properties about this
process so basically what we try to do
is we try to let our children survive
even if they have diseases it's like I
would have died and before my
mid-twenties without modern medicine and
most of my friends would have as well
and so many of us wouldn't live without
the advantages of modern medicine and
modern industrialized society we get our
protein in largely by subduing the
entirety of nature imagine there would
be some very clever microbe that would
live in our organisms and would
completely harvest them and change them
into a thing that is necessary to
sustain itself and it would discover
that for instance brain cells are kind
of edible but they're not quite nice so
you need to may have more fat in them
and you turn them into more fat cells
yes and basically this big organism
would become a vegetable that is barely
alive and it's going to be very brittle
and not resilient when the environment
changes yeah but some part of that
organism the one that's actually doing
all the using of the there's still be
somebody thriving so as it relates back
to this original question I suspect that
we are not
smartest thing on this planet I suspect
that basically every complex system has
to have some complex regulation if if it
depends on feedback loops and so for
instance it's likely to that we should
describe a certain degree of
intelligence to plants the problem is
that plants don't have a nervous system
so they don't have a way to Telegraph
messages over large distances almost
instantly in the plant and instead they
will rely on chemicals between adjacent
cells which means the signal processing
speed depends on their signal processing
with a rate of a few millimeters per
second yes and as a result the if the
plant is intelligent it's not going to
be intelligent it's similar timescales
yes the ability process the timescales
different so you suspect we might not be
the most intelligent but when were the
most intelligent and this in our
timescale so basically if you would room
out very far you might discover that
they have been intelligent ecosystems on
the planet that existed for thousands of
years in a almost undisturbed state and
it could be that these ecosystems
actively related their environment so
basically change the course of the
evolution within this ecosystem to make
it more efficient and as brittle as
possible something like plants is
actually a set of living organisms an
ecosystem of living organisms they're
just operating a different time scale
and a far superior intelligence than
human beings and then human beings will
die out and plus will still be there and
they'll be there yeah
they also there's an evolutionary
adaptation playing a role at all of
these levels for instance if mice don't
get enough food and get stressed the
next generation of mice will be more
sparse in most quani and the reason for
this is because they in a natural
environment the mice have probably
hidden a drought or something else and
if they over grace then all the things
that sustain them might go extinct and
there will be no mice a few generations
from now so and to make sure that there
will be mice and five generations from
now they see the mice scale back and a
similar thing happens with the Predators
of mice they should make sure that the
mice don't completely go extinct so in
some sense if the Predators are smart
enough they will be tasked this shepherd
their food supply may be the reason why
Alliance have much larger brains and
antelopes is not so much because it's so
hard to catch antelope as opposed to run
away from the lion but the Lions need to
make complex models of their environment
more complex than the antelopes so the
first of all just describing that
there's a bunch of complex systems and
human beings may not even be the most
special or intelligent to those complex
systems even on earth makes me feel a
little better about the extinction of
human species that we're talking about
yes maybe you addressed Gaia's ploy to
put the carbon back into the atmosphere
this is just a nice big stain on
evolution is not as it was trees hers I
evolved trees before they could be to
adjust it again right there were no
insects that would break all of them
apart
cellulose is so robust that you cannot
get all of it with microorganisms so
many of these trees fell into swamps and
all this carbon became inert and could
no longer be recycled into organisms and
via the species that is destined to take
care of that so this is kind of dig it
out of the ground for the decade the
atmosphere in the u.s. is already
greening yeah so visitin million years
or so when the ecosystems have recovered
from the rapid changes yeah that they're
not compared to us right now yeah this
is going to be awesome again and there
won't be even a memory of us of us
little apes I think that will be
memories of us I suspect we are the
first generally intelligent species in
the sense we are the first species with
an industrial society because we believe
more phones than bones in the
stratosphere well see I have phones them
bones I like it
but then let me push back idea you've
kind of suggested that with a very
narrow definition of of until I mean why
aren't trees more general a higher-level
general intelligence than trees very
intelligent and it would be at different
time scales which means within a hundred
years the tree is probably not going to
make models that are as complex as the
one step you make in ten years but maybe
the trees are the ones that made the
phones right like like you could say the
entirety of life did it you know the
first cell never died the first cell
only split right and every divided and
every cell in our body is still an
instance of the first cell that split
off from that
a first sell it was only one sell on
this planet as far as we know and so the
cell is not just a building block of
life
it's a hypo organism yeah right and we
are part of this type of organism so
nevertheless this type of organism no
the this little particular branch of it
which is us humans because the
Industrial Revolution and maybe the
exponential growth of technology might
somehow destroy ourselves so what what
do you think is the most likely way we
might destroy ourselves so some people
worry about genetic manipulation some
people as we've talked about worry about
either dumb artificial intelligence or
super intelligent artificial
intelligence destroying us some people
worry all nuclear weapons and weapons of
war in general what do you think if you
had to if you are a betting man what
would you bet on in terms of
self-destruction and it would be higher
than 50 or to be higher than 50% so it's
very likely that nothing that we bet on
matters after we win our bet so I don't
think that bets are literally the right
thing way to go about I mean once you're
dead it doesn't you you won't be there
to collect so it's also not clear if we
as a species go extinct but I think that
our present civilization is not
sustainable so the thing that will
change is there will be probably fewer
people on the planet NR today and even
if not then still most of people that
are alive today will not offering 100
years from now because of the geographic
changes and so on in the change in the
food supply it's quite likely that many
areas of the planet will only be livable
is a closed cooling chain in 100 years
from now so many of the areas around the
equator and in subtropical climates that
are now quite pleasant to live in will
stop to be inhabitable this is out
everyday you honestly Wow cooling chain
close knit cooling chain communities so
you think you have a strong worry about
the the effects of global warming itself
it's not the big issue if you will live
in Arizona right now you have basically
three months in the summer in which you
cannot be outside yes and so you have a
closed cooling chain you have air
conditioning in your car in your home
and you're fine and if the air
conditioning would stop
for a few days then in many areas you
would not be able to survive frankly we
just pause for a second
like you say so many brilliant poet ik
things like what is a closed is that do
people use that term closed cooling
chain I imagine that people use it when
they describe how they get meat into a
supermarket right it could break the
cooling chain and this thing's rights to
saw you had trouble and you have to
solve it away there's such a beautiful
way to put it's like calling a city a
closed social chain or something like
that I mean yeah that's right I mean the
locality of is really yeah but it
basically means you wake up in the
climatized room you go to work in the
climatized car you work in the car all
into the shop and acclimatized
supermarket and in between you have very
short distance which you run from your
car to the supermarket but you have to
make sure that your your temperature
does not approach the temperature of the
environment yeah so the usual thing is
the bad pub temperature the what the
best pub temperature it's what you get
when you take wet clothes and you put it
around your thermometer and then you
move it very quickly through the air so
you get the evaporation heat yes and as
soon as you can no longer cool your body
temperature via app evaporation to a
temperature below something like I think
35 degrees you die right and which means
if the outside world is dry you can
still cool yourself down by sweating but
if it has a certain degree of humidity
or if it goes up over a certain
temperature then sweating will not save
you and this means you even if you're a
healthy fit individual within a few
hours even if you try to be in the shade
and so on you'll die unless you have
some climate sizing equipment and this
itself if you as long as you maintain
civilization and you have energy supply
and you have food trucks coming to your
home that are climatized everything is
fine but what if you lose a large scale
open every culture at the same time so
basically we'll run into food insecurity
because climate becomes very irregular
or weather becomes very irregular and
you have a lot of extreme weather events
so you need to roll most of your foot
maybe indoor or you need to import your
food from certain regions and maybe you
are not able to maintain the
civilization notes without the
planet to get the infrastructure to get
the foot to your home right but there
could be is so there could be
significant impacts in a sense that
people begin to suffer
they could be wars over resources and so
on but ultimately do you have do you not
have a lot of faith but what do you make
of the capacity of technology
technological innovation to help us
prevent some of the worst damages that
this condition can create so as an
example as a almost out there example is
the work of SpaceX Elon Musk is doing of
trying to also consider our propagation
throughout the universe in deep space to
colonize other planets
that's one technological step but of
course what Hamas is trying on Mars is
not to save us from global warming
because Mars looks much worse than
planet Earth will look like after the
worst outcomes of global warming
imaginable right yes Martha said
essentially not habitable it's
exceptionally harsh environment yes but
what he is doing what a lot of people
throughout history since the Industrial
Revolution are doing are just doing a
lot of different technological
innovation was some kind of target and
one ends up happening is totally
unexpected new things come up
so trying to trying to terraform or
trying to colonize Mars extremely harsh
environment might give us totally new
ideas of how to expand the or increase
the power of this closed cooling circuit
that that empowers the community so like
do you it seems like there's a little
bit of a race between our open-ended
technological innovation of this
communal operating system that we have
and our general tendency to want to
overuse resources and thereby destroy
ourselves would you don't think
technology can win that race I think the
probability is relatively low given that
our technology is Prince the u.s. is
stagnating since the 1970s roughly in
terms of technology most of the things
that we do are the result of incremental
processes sort of our Intel what about
Moore's law it's basically it's very
incremental the things that we're doing
is so after the invention of the
microprocessor was a major thing right
the miniaturization of transistors was
really major but the things that we did
afterwards largely were not that
innovative trifle changes of scaling
things into a foams GPUs into from CPUs
into GPUs and things like that but I
don't think that there are basic they're
not many things if you take a person
that died in the 70s and was at the top
of that game they would not need to read
that many books to all be current again
but it's all about books who cares about
books so the there might be things that
are beyond what books might be every
papers or no papers forget papers there
might be things that are so papers and
books and knowledge that's a that's a
concept of a time when you were sitting
there by candlelight and individual
consumers of knowledge what about the
impact that you we're not in the middle
of we're not might not be understanding
of Twitter of YouTube the reason you and
I are sitting here today is because of
Twitter and YouTube yes so the the
ripple effect and there's there's two
minds sort of two dumb apes coming up
with the new perhaps a new clean
insights and there's 200 other apes
listening right now 200,000 other Apes
listening right now and that effect it's
very difficult to understand what that
effect will have that might be bigger
than any of the advancements of the
microprocessor Ernie the Industrial
Revolution the ability of spread
knowledge and that that the the that
knowledge the like it allows good ideas
to reach millions much faster and the
effect of that that might be the new
that might be the 21st century is the
multiple the multiplying of ideas of
good ideas because if you say one good
thing today that will multiply across
you know huge amounts of people and then
they will say something and then they'll
have another pocket and I'll say
something and then I'll write a paper
that that could be a huge you don't
think that yeah if you should have
billion
fun for Normans right now often omens
right now in two rings and we don't for
some reason I suspect the reason is that
we destroy our attention span also the
incentives of course different but in
Cardassians yeah so the reason why we
are sitting here and doing this as a
YouTube video is because you and me
don't have the attention span to write a
book together right now and you guys
probably don't have the attention span
to read it so let me tell you but we're
you know we're an hour and 40 minutes in
and I guarantee you that 80% of the
people are still listening so there's an
attention span it's just the the forum
you know who said that the book is the
optimal way to transfer information
that's said this is still an open
question I mean that's what we're
something that social media could be
doing that other forms could not be
doing I think the end game of social
media is a global brain and Twitter is
in some sense a global brain that is
completely hooked on dopamine doesn't
have any kind of inhibition and as a
result is caught in a permanent seizure
yes it's also in some sense a
multiplayer role-playing game and people
use it to play an avatar that is not
like them as the Verna's sane world and
they look through the world through the
lens of their phones and think it's the
real world but it's the Twitter of all
that is thwarted by the popularity
incentives of Twitter yet the the
incentives and just our natural
biological the the dopamine rush of
alike no matter how like I consider I
try to be very kind of zen-like and
minimalist and not being influenced by
likes and so on but it's probably very
difficult to avoid that to some degree
the speaking at a small tangent of
Twitter what how can be how can Twitter
be done better
I think it's an incredible mechanism
that has a huge impact on society by
doing exactly what you're doing
oh sorry doing exactly you described
which is having this but we're like is
this some kind of game and we're kind of
our individual RL agents in this game
and it's uncontrolled because there's
not really a centralized control neither
jack dorsey nor the engineers at twitter
seem to be able to control this game
or can they that's sort of a question is
there any advice you would give
and control is advice because I am
certainly not an expert but I can give
my thoughts on this and I our brain is
has solved this problem to some degree
right our brain has lots of individual
agents that manage to play together
anyway and you have also many contexts
in which other organisms have found ways
to solve the problems of cooperation
that we don't solve on Twitter and maybe
the solution is to go for an
evolutionary approach so imagine that
you have something like reddit or
something like Facebook and something
like Twitter and do you think about what
they have in common what they have in
common they're companies that in some
sense own a protocol and this protocol
is imposed on a community and the
protocol has different components for
monetization for a user management for
user display for rating for anonymity
for importer of other content and so on
and now imagine that you take these
components of the protocol apart and you
do it in some sense like communities
visiting this social network and these
communities are allowed to mix and match
their protocols and design new ones so
for instance the UI and the UX can be
defined by the community the walls for
sharing content across communities can
be defined the monetization can be
redefined the way you reward individual
users for what can be redefined the way
users can represent themselves and to
each other can redefined and will be the
redefine er so it can individual human
beings build enough intuition to
redefine those things if self can become
part of the protocol so for instance it
could be in some communities it will be
a single person that comes up with these
things and others it's a group of
friends some might implement a voting
scheme that has some interesting
weighted voting who knows who knows what
will be the best self organizing
principle for this but the process can
be automated I mean it seems like the
brain can be automated so people can
write a software for this and eventually
the idea is let's not make a assumption
about this thing if you don't know what
the right solution is in those areas
that we have no idea whether the right
solution will be people designing this
ad hoc or machines doing this whether
you want to enforce compliance by social
norms like weak
Orvis software solutions or this AI that
goes through the post of people or is a
legal principle and so on this is
something maybe you need to find out and
so the idea would be if you let the
communities evolve and you just control
it to say in such a way that you are
incentivizing the most sentient
communities hmm the ones that produce
the most interesting behaviors and that
allow you to interact in the most
helpful ways to the individuals right so
you have a network that gives you
information that is relevant to you it
helps you to maintain relationships to
others in healthy ways it allows you to
build teams it allows you to basically
bring the best of you into this thing
and goes into a coupling into a
relationship with others in which you
produce things that you would be unable
to produce alone yes
beautifully put so but the key process
of that with incentives and evolution is
things that don't adapt themselves to
effectively get the incentives have to
die and the thing about social media is
communities that are unhealthy or
whatever you want and it defines the
incentives really don't like dying one
of the things that people really get
aggressive protests aggressively is when
they're censored especially in America I
don't know I don't know much about the
rest of the world but the idea of
freedom of speech the idea of censorship
is really painful in America and so what
yeah well what do you think about that
have been growing up in East Germany
what do you think censorship is an
important tool in our brain in the
intelligence and in the social networks
so basically if you're not a good member
of the entirety of the system they
should be blocked away well locked away
blocked important thing is who decides
that you are a good member who is it
distributed or and what is the outcome
of the process that decides it both for
the individual and for society at large
for instance if you have a high trust
society you don't need a lot of
surveillance and the surveillance is
even in
undermining trust yes because it's
basically punishing people that look
suspicious when surveyed but do the
right thing anyway
and the opposite if you have a low trust
society in there and surveillance can be
a better trade-off and the u.s. is
currently making a transition from a
relatively high trust a mixed trust
society to a low trust society so
surveillance will increase another thing
is that beliefs are not just Inuit
representations there are
implementations that run code on your
brain
and change for a reality and change the
way you interact with each other at some
level and some of the beliefs are just
public opinions that we use to display
our alignment so for instance people
might say all characters have are the
same and equally good but still they
prefer to live in some cultures over
others very very strongly so and it
turns out that the cultures are defined
by certain rules of interaction and
these rules of interaction lead to
different results when you implement
them right so if you adhere to certain
rules you get different outcomes in
different societies and this all leads
to very tricky situations when people do
not have a commitment to shared purpose
and our societies what we need to
rediscover what it means to have a
shared purpose and how to make this
compatible with a non totalitarian view
so in some sense the u.s. is caught in a
conundrum between totalitarianism and
diversity and doesn't it need to how to
resolve this and the solutions that the
u.s. has found so far a very crude
because it's a very young society that
is also under a lot of tension it seems
to me that the US will have to reinvent
itself what do you think just uh
philosophizing what kind of mechanisms
of government do you think we as a
species should be involved with us or
broadly what do you think will work well
as a system of course we don't know it
all seems to work pretty crapoly some
things worse than others some people
argue that communism is the best others
say yeah look at the Soviet Union some
people argue that anarchy is the best
and then completely discarding the
positive effects of government you know
there's a lot of argument
u.s. seems to be doing pretty damn well
in in the span of history there says
respect for human rights which seems to
be a nice feature not a bug and
economically a lot of girls law
technological development people seem to
be relatively kind and the grand scheme
of things what lessons do you draw from
that what kind of government system do
you think is good ideally a government
would not be perceivable all right it
should be frictionless the more you
notice the influence of the government
the more friction you experience the
less effective and efficient the
government probably is right so a
government game theoretically is an
agent that imposes an offset on your
payout metrics to make your Nash
equilibrium compatible with the common
good right so you have these situations
and these local incentives everybody
does the thing that's locally the best
for them but the global outcome is not
good and this is even the case when
people care about the global outcome
because a regulation mechanisms exist
that creates a course of relationship
between what I want to have for the
global good and what I do so for
instance if I think that we should fly
less and I stay at home there is not a
single plane that is going to not start
because of me right it's not going to
have an influence but I don't get from A
to B so the way to implement this would
be to have a government that is sharing
this idea that you should fly less and
is then imposing a regulation that for
instance makes flying more expensive and
it gives incentives for inventing other
forms of transportation that are less
putting the strain on the environment
for instance so there's so much optimism
and so many things you described and yet
there's the pessimism of you think our
civilization is gonna come to an end so
that's not a hundred percent probability
nothing in this world is so what's the
trajectory out of self-destruction do
you think I suspect that in some sense
we are both too smart and not smart
enough which means we are very good at
solving near-term problems and at the
same time we are unwilling to submit to
the end
to the imperatives of that we would have
to follow in if you want to stick around
right so that makes it difficult if you
were unable to solve everything
technologically you can probably
understand how it the child mortality
needs to be to absorb the mutation rate
and tell why the mutation mutation rate
needs to be to adapt to a slowly
changing ecosystemic environment right
so you could in principle compute all
these things game theoretically and
adapt to it but if you all cannot do
this because you are like me and you
have children you don't want them to die
you will use any kind of medical
information to keep travel to a
mortality low even if it means that our
visit a few generations we have enormous
genetic drift and most of us have
allergies as a result of not being
adapted the changes that we made to our
food supply that's for now I say
technologically speaking which is a very
very very young you know 300 years
industrial revolution we're very new to
this idea so you're attached to your
kids being alive and not being murdered
for the greater good of society but that
might be a very temporary moment of time
yes that we might move might evolve in
our thinking so like you said when we're
both smart and not smart enough you're
probably not this first human
civilization that has discovered
technology that allows to efficiently
over grace our resources and this
overgrazing is think at some point we
think they can compensate this because
if we have eaten all the grass we will
find a way to grow mushrooms right but
it could also be that the ecosystems tip
and so what really concerns me is not so
much the end of the civilization because
we will invent a new one but what
concerns me is the fact that for
instance the oceans might tip so for
instance maybe the plankton dies because
of ocean acidification and cyanobacteria
take over and as a result we can no
longer raise the atmosphere this would
be really concerning so basically a
major reboot of most complex organisms
on earth and I think this is a
possibility I don't know if what the
percentage for this possibility is but
it doesn't seem to be our language to me
if you look at the scale of the changes
that we've already triggered on this
planet and so Danny Hillis suggests that
for instance we may be able to put chalk
into the stratosphere to
solar radiation maybe it works maybe
there's a sufficient to counter the
effects of what we've done maybe it
won't be maybe we won't be able to
implement it by the time it's prevalent
I have no idea how how the future is
going to play out in this regard it's
just I think it's quite likely that we
cannot continue like this all our cousin
species the other home units are gone
so the right step would be to what to
rewind rewind towards a destro
Revolution and slow the the so it's to
try to contain the technological process
that leads to the overconsumption of
resources imagine you had get to choose
you have one lifetime yes you get born
into a sustainable agricultural
civilization 300 maybe 400 million
people on the planet tops or before this
some kind of nomadic species feels like
a million or two million and so you
don't meet new people unless you give
birth to them you cannot travel to other
places in the world there is no internet
there is no interesting intellectual
tradition that reaches considerably deep
so you would not discover your own
completeness probably and so on so we
wouldn't exist and the alternative is
you get born into an insane world one
that is doomed to die because it has
just burned 100 million years worth of
trees in a single century which one do
you like I think I like this one it's a
very weird thing then when you find
yourself on a Titanic and you see this
iceberg and it looks like we are not
going to miss it
and a lot of people are in denial and
most of the counter arguments sound like
denial to me that don't seem to be
rational arguments and the other thing
is we were born on this Titanic without
this Titanic we wouldn't have been born
we wouldn't be here we wouldn't be
talking we wouldn't be on the internet
we wouldn't do all the things that we
enjoy and if you're not responsible for
this happening it's basically if he had
the choice we would probably try to
prevent it but when we were born we were
never asked when we want to be born in
which society we want to be born but
incentive structures we want to be
exposed to we have relatively little
agency in the entire thing
humanity has relatively daily machine
the whole thing it's basically a giant
machine it's tumbling down a hill and
everybody is Fanta Klee trying to push
some buttons nobody knows what these
buttons are meaning what they connect
- and most of them are not stopping this
tumbling down the hill is impossible the
artificial intelligence will give us an
escape latch somehow so the you know
there's a lot of worry about existential
threats of artificial intelligence but
what AI also allows in general forms of
automation allows the potential of
extreme productivity growth that will
also perhaps in a positive way transform
society
that may allow us to inadvertently to
return to the more to the same kind of
ideals of closer to nature that's
represented in hunter-gatherer societies
you know that's not destroying the
planet that's not doing overconsumption
and so on I mean generally speaking do
you have hope that a I can help them uh
I think it is not fun to be very close
to nature until you completely subdue
nature so our idea of being close to
nature means being close to agriculture
basically forests that don't have
anything in them that eats us see I mean
I want to disagree with that I I think
the niceness of being close to nature is
to being fully present and in like
Wirthlin survival becomes your primary
not just your goal but your whole
existence mm-hmm it I mean that is a in
I'm not just romanticizing I can just
speak for myself I am self-aware enough
that that is uh that is a fulfilling
existence that's one that's very to be
in nature ah and not fight for my
survival
I think fighting in yourself for your
survival well being in the cold and in
the rain and being hunted by animals and
having open wounds it's very unpleasant
well there's a contradiction in there
yes I in you just as you said would not
choose it but if I was forced into it it
would be a fulfilling existence
Lemar adapted to it basically
if your brain is fed up in such a way
that you get rewards optimally in such
an environment and there's some evidence
for this that for a certain degree of
complexity basically people are more
happy in such environment because it's
what we largely have evolved for in
between we had a few thousand years in
which I think we have evolved for a
slightly more comfortable environment so
there is probably something like an
intermediate stage in which people would
be more happy than there would be if
they would have to fend for themselves
in small groups in the forest and often
die versus something like this very now
have basically a big machine a big of
Mordor in which we run concrete boxes
and press buttons and machines and
largely don't feel well cared for as the
monkeys that we are so returning briefly
to not briefly but returning to AI what
let me ask a romanticized question what
is the most beautiful - you silly ape
the most beautiful or surprising idea in
the development of artificial
intelligence well there in your own life
or in the history of artificial
intelligence that you've come across if
you built an AI it probably can make
models at an arbitrary degree of detail
right of the world and then it would try
to understand its own nature it's
tempting to think that at some point
when we have general intelligence we
have competitions very evil that the AIS
wake up in different kinds of physical
universes and we measure how many
movements of the rubik's cube it takes
until it's figured out what's going on
in its universe and what it is and its
own nature and its own physics and so on
right so what if we exists in the memory
of an AI that is trying to understand
its own nature and remembers its own
genesis and remembers lex and Yasha
sitting in hotel sparking some of the
ideas of that led to the development of
general each other so we're a kind of
simulation is running in an AI system is
trying to understand itself
it's not that I believe that but as I
think it's a beautiful I mean it you
kind of return to this idea with the
Turing test of intelligence being of
intelligence being the process of asking
and answering what is intelligence I
mean what why do you think there's there
is an answer what why is there such a
search for an answer what so does there
have to be and I can I can answer you
just had an AI system that's trying to
understand the why of what you know
understand itself is that a fundamental
process of greater and greater
complexity greater greater intelligence
is the continuous trying of
understanding itself no I think you will
find that most people don't care about
that because they're well adjusted
enough to not care and the reason why
people like you and me occur about it
probably has to do with the need to
understand ourselves it's because we are
in fundamental disagreement is the
universe that we wake up in what looks
like me and I see oh my god I'm caught
in a monkey what's that sorry that's the
feeling right it's just the government
and I'm unhappy with the entire universe
that I fight myself in so you don't
think that's a fundamental aspect of
human nature that some people are just
suppressing that they're they wake up
shocked they're there in the body of a
monkey no there is clear adaptive value
to not be confused by that and by well
no no that's our air so oh so you have
to clear adaptive value then there's
clear adaptive value to while
fundamentally your brain is confused by
that by creating an illusion another
layer of the narrative that says you
know that tries to suppress that and
instead say that you know what's going
on with the government right now is the
most important thing what's going on
with my football team is the most
important thing but it seems to me the
like I would like for me it was a really
interesting moment reading Ernest
Becker's denial of death
the you know there's this kind of idea
that we're all you know the fundamental
thing from which most of our human mind
Springs is this fear of mortality being
cognizant of your mortality and the fear
of that mortality and then you construct
illusions on top of that I guess I'm you
being just a push on it you you really
don't think it's possible that this
worry of the big existential questions
is actually fundamental as of as the
existentialist thought to our existence
I think that the fear of death only
plays a role as long as you don't see
the big picture the thing is that Minds
our software States right software
doesn't have identity software in some
sense is a physical law but if last like
a brief yeah right so but it feels like
there's an identity I thought that was
the for this particular piece of
software and then narrative it tells
there's a fundamental property of
assigning it maintenance of the identity
is not terminal it's instrumental to
something else you maintain your
identity so you can serve your meaning
so you can do the things that you're
supposed to do before your bad died and
I suspect that for most people the fear
of death is the fear of dying before
they're done with the things that they
feel they have to do even though they
cannot quite put their finger on it what
it is what that is right but in the
software world okay they return to the
question then what happens after we die
because what you care you will not be
longer there the point of trying is that
you're gone or maybe I'm not and this is
what you know it it seems like there's
so much any idea that this is just the
mind is just the simulation is
constructing a narrative around some
particular aspects of the quantum
mechanical wave function world that we
can't quite get direct access to then
like the idea of mortality seems to be a
little fuzzy as well it doesn't maybe
there's not a clear and the quasi idea
is the one of continued
existence we don't have continuous
existence how do you know that like that
it's not computable because you're
saying it's good it's no process the
only thing that binds you together with
the leg Sweetman from yesterday is the
illusion that you have memories about
him so if you want to upload it's very
easy you make a machine that thinks it's
you because this the same thing that you
are you are a machine that thinks it's
you but that's that's more and that's
immortality yeah but it's just a belief
you can create this body very easily
once you realize that the question
whether you are immortal or not depends
entirely on your beliefs and your own
continuity but then it then then you can
be immortal by the continuity of the
belief you cannot be immortal but you
can stop being afraid of your mortality
because you realize you were never
continued ously existing in the first
place well I don't know if I'd be more
terrified or less terrified with that it
seems like the fact that I existed also
you don't know this state in which you
don't have itself you can turn off
yourself you know I can't turn you can
turn it off you can turn it off I can
yes and you can basically meditate
yourself in a state where you are still
conscious there's still things are
happening where you know everything that
you knew before but you no longer
identified was changing anything and
this means that yourself and way it
dissolves there is no longer this person
you know that this person construct
exists in other states and it runs on
this brain of legs Freedman but it's
it's not a real thing it's a construct
it's an idea and you can change that
idea and if you let go of this idea if
you don't think that you are special you
realize it's just one of many people and
it's not your favorite person even right
it's just one of many and it's the one
that you are doomed to control for the
most part and that is basically
informing the actions of this organism
yeah as a control model and this is all
there is and you are somehow afraid that
this control model gets interrupted or
loses the identity of continuity
yeah so I'm attached I mean yeah there
is a very popular
it's a somehow compelling notion that
being being attached like there's no
need to be attached to this idea of an
identity
but that in itself could be a an
illusion that you construct so the
process of meditation while popular is
thought of as getting under the concept
of identity it could be just putting a
cloak over it just telling it to be
quiet for the moment you know it I think
that meditation is eventually just a
bunch of techniques that let you control
attention and when you can control the
attention you can get access to your own
source code hopefully not before you
understand what you're doing and then
you can change the way it works
temporarily or permanently
so yeah meditations in get a glimpse at
the source code get under there so
basically how much role or is it that
you learn to control attention so yeah
everything else is downstream from
controlling attention and control the
attention that's looking at the
attention not only only get attention in
the parts of our mind that create heat
where you have a mismatch between model
and the results that are happening and
so most people are not self-aware
because their control is too good if
everything works out roughly the way you
want and the only things that don't work
out is whether your football team vents
then you will mostly have models about
these domains and it's only when for
instance your fundamental relationships
to the world around you don't work
because the ideology of your country is
insane and the other kids are not nerds
and don't understand why you understand
physics and you don't why you want to
understand physics and you don't
understand why somebody would not want
to understand physics so we kind of
brought up neurons in the brain as
reinforcement learning agents and
there's been some successes as you
brought up with go with alpha go alpha
zero with ideas of self play which I
think are incredibly interesting ideas
those systems playing each other and in
an automated way to improve by playing
other systems of in a particular
construct of a game that are a little
bit better than itself and then thereby
improving continuously all the
competitors in the game are improving
gradually so being just challenging
enough and from learning from the
process of
competition do you've hoped for that
reinforcement learning process to
achieve greater and greater level of
intelligence so we talked about
different ideas in AI then we need to be
solved is RL a part of that process of
trying to create a GI system so it forms
of unsupervised learning but the many
algorithms that can achieve that and I
suspect that ultimately the algorithms
that work there will be a class of them
or many of them and they might have
small differences of like a magnitude in
efficiency but eventually what matters
is the type of model that you form and
the types of models that we form right
now are not sparse enough just bars that
what does it mean to be sparse so it
means that ideally every potential model
State should correspond to a potential
world state so if I see if you vary
States in your model you always end up
as valid world States and all mind is
not quite there so an indication
especially what we see in dreams the
older we get the more boring our dreams
become because we incorporate more and
more constraints that we learned about
how the world works so many of the
things that we imagined to be possible
as children turn out to be constrained
by physical and social dynamics and as a
result fewer and fewer things remain
possible it's not because our
imagination scales back but the
constraints under which it operates
become tighter and tighter and so the
constraints under which our neural
networks operate are almost limitless
which means it's very difficult to get a
neural network to imagine things that
look real right so as a SPECT part of
what we need to do is we probably need
to build dreaming systems I suspect that
part of the purpose of dreams is to
similar to a generative adversarial
network to learn certain constraints and
then it produces alternative
perspectives on the same set of
constraints so you can recognize it
under different circumstances maybe we
have flying dreams as children because
we recreate the objects that we know on
the maps that we know from different
perspectives which also means from the
bird's eye perspective so I mean aren't
we doing that anyway I mean not without
with our eyes and
with our eyes closed and when we're
sleeping are we just constantly running
dreams and simulations in our mind as we
try to interpret the environment I mean
it's sort of considering all the
different possibilities there's the way
we interact with the environment it
seems like essentially like you said of
creating a bunch of simulations that are
consistent with our expectations with
previous experiences with the things we
just saw recently and through that
hallucination process we are able to
then somehow stitch together what
actually we see in the world with the
simulations that match it well and
thereby interpret it I suspect it you're
in my brain are slightly unusual in this
regard which is probably what got you
into MIT
so this obsession of constantly
pondering possibilities and solutions to
problems I'll stop I think I I'm not
talking about intellectual stuff I'm
talking about just doing the kind of
stuff it takes to walk and not fall I
guess this is largely automatic yes but
the process is mean it's not complicated
it's very easy to pull the neural
network that in some sense learns the
dynamics the fact that we haven't done
it right so far it doesn't mean it's
hard because you can see that a
biological organism does it
there's relatively few neurons yeah as
you build a bunch of neural oscillators
that in train themselves this the
dynamics of your body in such a way that
the regulator becomes isomorphic and
it's modeled through the dynamics that
are regulates and then is automatic and
it's only interesting the sense that it
captures attention when the system is
off see but thinking of the kind of
mechanism that's required to do walking
as a controller as like a as a neural
network I think I think it's a
compelling notion but it's discards
quietly or at least makes implicit the
fact that you need to have something
like common sense reasoning to walk it's
not as an open question whether you do
or not but my intuition
to be to act in this world there's a
huge knowledge base that's underlying it
somehow there's so much information of
the kind we have never been able to
construct in our in your networks on an
artificial intelligence systems period
which is like it's humbling at least in
my imagination the amount of information
required to act in this world humbles me
and I think saying that your levels can
accomplish it is missing is missing the
fact that we don't yeah we don't have
yet a mechanism for constructing
something like common sense reasoning I
mean what's your sense about to linger
on how much if you know to linger on the
idea of what kind of mechanism would be
effective at walking you said just a
neural network not maybe the kind we
have but something a little bit better
we'll be able to walk easily don't you
think it also needs to know like a huge
amount of knowledge that's represented
under the flag of common sense reasoning
how much common sense knowledge to be
actually have imagine that you are
pretty hard working through all your
life and you form two new concepts every
half hour or so yes you end up with
something like a million concepts
because you don't get that old so a
million concept that's not a lot it's
not just a million concepts I think
you'll be a lot I personally think it
might be much more than a million if you
think just about the numbers
you don't live that long if you think
about how many cycles do your neurons
have in your life it's quite limited you
don't get that all yeah but the the
powerful thing is a number of concepts
and they're probably deeply hierarchical
in nature the relations as you described
between them is the key thing so it's
like even if it's the chameleon concepts
the the graph of relations that's formed
and some kind of perhaps some kind of
probabilistic relationships that's the
that's what's common-sense reasoning is
a relationship between things that yeah
so but in some sense I think of the
concepts as the
space for our behavior programs and the
waiver poems allow us to recognize
objects and interact with them also
mental objects and a large part of that
is the physical world that we interact
with which is this res extend Lansing
which is basically navigation of
information in space and basically it's
similar to a game engine it's a physics
engine that you can use to describe and
predict how things that look in a
particular way that feel when you touch
them particular way they love
proprioception I love auditory
perception and so on how they work out
so basically the geometry of all these
things and this is probably 80% of what
our brain is doing is dealing with debt
with this real-time simulation and by
itself a game engine is fascinating but
it's not that hard to understand what
it's doing right and our game engines
are already in some sense approximating
the Magna deep fidelity of what we can
perceive so if we put on an oculus quest
we get something that is still
qualitatively crude with respect to what
we can perceive but it's also in the
same ballpark already right it's just a
couple order of magnitudes away to home
saturating our perception jumps of the
complexity that it can produce so in
some sense it's reasonable to say that
our the computer that you can buy it the
put into your home is able to give a
perceptual reality that has a teacher
that is already in the same ballpark as
what your brain can process and
everything else our ideas about the
world and I suspect that they are
relatively sparse and also the intuitive
models that we form about social
interaction social interaction is it's
not so hard it's just hard for us nerds
because we all have our wires crossed so
we need to use them but the priors are
present in most social animals so it's
interesting thing to notice that many
domestic social animals like cats and
dogs have better social cognition than
children right I hope so I hope it's not
that many concepts fundamentally and -
due to existence world social sorry it's
more like I'm afraid so because this
thing that we only appear to be so
complex to each other because we are so
stupid it's a little bit interesting
now one that yeah to me that's inspiring
if we're indeed as as as stupid as it
seems so thinks our brains don't scale
and the information processing that we
built tend to scale very well yeah but I
mean one of the things that worries me
is that the you know that the fact that
the brain doesn't scale means that
that's actually a fundamental feature of
the brain you know the all the flaws of
the brain everything we see that we see
has limitations perhaps there's a
fundamental the constraints on the
system could be the requirement of its
power which is like different than our
current understanding of intelligent
systems were scale especially with deep
learning especially with reinforcement
learning the hope behind open a eye deep
mind all the major results really have
to do with huge compute and it also be
that our brains are so small not just
because they take up so much glucose in
our body like 20% of the glucose so they
don't arbitrarily scale there's some
animals like elephants which have larger
brains than us and atoms need to be
smarter all right elephants seem to be
autistic they have very very good motor
control and they're really good with
details but they really struggle to see
the big picture so you can make them
recreate drawings stroke by stroke they
can do that but they cannot reproduce a
still life so they cannot make a drawing
of a scene that I see there will always
be only able to reproduce the line drawn
at least as far away from what I could
see in the experiments yeah by is that
maybe smarter elephants would meditate
themselves out of existence because
their brains are too large so they
basically the elephants that were not
autistic they didn't reproduce yet so we
have to remember that the brain is
fundamentally interlinked with the body
and our human and biological system do
you think that a GI systems that we try
to create or greater intelligence
systems would need to have a body so I
think that should be able to make use of
a body if you give it to them but I
don't think that a fundamentally new
body so I suspect if you can interact
with the world by moving your eyes and
your head you can make controlled
experiments and this allows you to have
many magnitudes fewer observations
in order to reduce the uncertainty in
your models alright so you can pinpoint
the areas in your models but you're not
quite sure and you just move your head
and see what's doing what's going on
over there and you get additional
information if you just have to use
YouTube as an input and you cannot do
anything beyond this you probably need
just much more data but if we have much
more data so if you can build a system
that has enough time and attention to
browse all of YouTube and extract all
the information that there is to be
found I don't think that's an obvious
limit to what it can do yeah but it
seems that the interactivity is a
fundamental thing that the physical body
allows you to do but let me ask on that
topic sort of that does what a body is
is allowing the brain to like touch
things and move things and interact with
the weather the physical world exists or
not
whatever but interact with someone
interface to the physical world what
about a virtual world do you think do
you think we can do the same kind of
reasoning consciousness intelligence if
we put on a VR headset and move over to
that world do you think there's any
fundamental difference between the
interface the physical world that is
here in this hotel and if we were
sitting in the same hotel in a virtual
world the question is just as physical
this non-physical world with this other
environment near entice you to solve
problems that require general
intelligence if it doesn't then you
probably will not develop general
intelligence and arguably most people
are not genuinely intelligent because
they don't have to solve problems that
make them generally intelligent and even
for us it's not yet clear if we are
smart enough to put AI and understand
our own nature to this degree right so
it could be a matter of capacity and for
most people it's in the first place a
matter of interest they don't see the
point because the benefit of attempting
this project are marginal because you're
probably not going to succeed in it and
the cost of trying to do a requires
complete dedication of your entire life
all right but it seems like the
possibilities of what you can do in a
virtual world so imagine a cut is much
greater than you can in the real world
so imagine a situation maybe interesting
option for me if somebody came to me and
offered what I'll do is yeah so from now
on you can only exist in the virtual
world
and so you put on this headset and when
you eat we'll make sure to connect your
body up in a way that when you eat in
the virtual world your body will be
nourished in the same way in the virtual
world so the aligning incentives between
the our common sort of real world in the
virtual world but then the possibilities
become much bigger like I could be other
kinds of creatures I could do I can
break the laws of physics as we know
them I can do a lot I mean the
possibilities are endless right it
that's as far as we think it's an
interesting thought whether like what
existence would be like what kind of
intelligence would emerge there what
kind of consciousness what kind of maybe
greater intelligence even me and me Lex
even I'm at this stage in my life if I
spend the next 20 years in our world to
see how that intelligence emerges and if
I was if that happened at the very
beginning before I was even cognizant of
my existence in this physical world it's
interesting to think how that child
would develop and the way virtuality and
digitization of everything is moving
it's not completely out of the realm of
possibility that we're all that some
part of our lives will be if not
entirety of it we'll live in a virtual
world to a greater degree than we
currently have living on Twitter and
social media and so on do you have I
mean it does something draw you
intellectually or naturally in terms of
thinking about AI to this virtual world
we're more possible easier I think that
currently it's a waste of time to deal
with the physical world before we have
mechanisms that can automatically learn
how to deal with it the body gives you a
second order agency but you conserve
what constitutes the body is the things
that you can indirectly control I third
or our tools right and the second order
is the things that are basically always
present but you operate on them with
first order things which are mental
operators yes and the zero order is in
some sense the direct sense of what you
are deciding right so you in you observe
yourself initiating an action there
features but that you interpret as the
initiation of an action then you are
the operations that you perform to make
that happen and then you see the
movement of your limbs and you learn to
associate those and thereby model your
own agency over this feedback right but
the first feedback that you get is from
this first order thing already basically
you decide to think a thought and the
thought is being thought you decide to
change the thought and you observe how
the thought is being changed yes and in
some sense this is you could say an
embodiment already right and I suspect
it's sufficient as an embodiment really
origins and so it's not that important
at least at this time to consider
variations in the second order yes but
the thing that you also put a mentioned
just now as physics that you could
change in any way you want so you need
an environment that puts up resistance
against you if you if there's nothing to
control you cannot make models right
there needs to be a particular way that
resists you and by the way your
motivation is usually outside of your
mind it resists your motivation is what
gets you up in the morning even though
it would be much less work to stay in
bed and so it's basically forcing you to
resist the environment and it forces
your mind to serve it to serve this
resistance to the environment so in some
sense it is also putting up resistance
against the natural tendency of the mind
to not do anything yeah but some of that
resistance just like you described as
motivation is like in the first order
space in the mind some resistance is in
the second order like the actual
physical objects pushing against you so
ah yeah it seems that the second order
stuff and virtuality could be recreated
of course but it might be sufficient
that you just do mathematics and
mathematics is already putting up enough
resistance against you so basically just
visiting a static motive this could may
be sufficient to form a type of
intelligence it would probably not be a
very human intelligence but it might be
one that is already general so to to
mess with this 0th order may be first
order what do you think about ideas of
brain computer interfaces so again
returning to our friend Elon Musk and
your link a company that's trying to of
course there's a lot of trying to cure
diseases and so on with a near term but
the long term vision is to add an extra
layer to so basically expand the
capacity of the brain
and connected to the computational world
aha do you think one that's possible -
how does that change the fundamentals of
the zeroth order in the first order it's
technically possible but I don't see
that the FDA would ever allow me to
drill holes on my skull to interface my
neocortex the veyron mask envisions so
at the moment I can do horrible things
to mice but I'm not able to do useful
things to people except maybe at some
point down the line in medical
applications so this thing that we are
envisioning which means recreational and
creational brain computer interfaces are
probably not going to happen in the
present legal system I love it how I'm
asking you out there philosophical and
sort of engineering questions and for
the first time ever he jumped to the
legal FDA there would be enough people
that would be crazy enough to have holes
drilled in their skull to try a new type
of brain computer interface but also if
it works it FDA will approve it I mean
it's the yes you're it's like exert on
most vehicles yes you can say that's
gonna be very difficult regulatory
process of approving with honesty but it
doesn't mean autonomous vehicles are
never gonna happen
so no devil totally happen as soon as we
create jobs for at least we lawyers and
one regulator per car yes lawyers that's
actually like lawyers is the fundamental
substrate of reality it's a very good
system it's not Universal in the world
the law is a very interesting software
once you realize it right these circuits
are in some sense streams of software
and this is largely works by exception
handling so you make decisions on the
ground and they get synchronized with
the next level structure as soon as an
exception as being wrong is a yeah so so
isolates the exception handing the
process is very expensive especially
since it's incentivizes the lawyers for
producing lot of work for lawyers
yes so the exceptions are actually
incentivize for for firing often but but
to return outside of lawyers
is there anything fundamentally like is
there anything interesting insightful
about the possibility of this extra
layer of intelligence a little rain I do
think so but I don't think that you need
technically invasive procedures to do so
we can already interface with other
people by observing them very very
closely and getting in some kind of
empathetic resonance and I'm a nerd so
I'm not very good at this but I noticed
that people are able to do this to some
degree and it basically means that we
model an interface lay off the other
person in real time and it works despite
our neurons being slow because most of
the things that we do are built on
periodic process these two just need to
entrain yourself with the oscillation
that happens and if the Association
itself changes slowly enough you can
basically follow along right but the
bandwidth of the interaction the you
know it seems like you can do a lot more
computation one yes of course the but
the other thing is that the event was
that our brain our own mind is running
on is actually quite slow so the number
of thoughts that I can productively
think in any given day is quite limited
but it's much if they had the discipline
to write it down and the speed to write
it down maybe it would be a book every
day or so but if you think about the
computers that we can build the
magnitudes at which they operate right
this would be nothing it's something
that it can put out in a second well I
don't know so as possible sort of the
number of thoughts you have in your
brain is it could be several orders of
magnitude higher than what you're
possibly able to express through your
fingers or through your voice like so
most of them are going to be repetitive
because they how do you know that I mean
they have to control the same problems
every day when I walk they are going to
be processed this in my brain that model
my walking pattern and regulate them and
so on but it's going to be pretty much
the same every day but that movies every
step but I'm talking about intellectual
reasoning like thinking so the question
what is the best system of government so
you sit down and start thinking about
that one of the constraints is that you
don't have access to a lot of like you
you don't have access to a lot of facts
a lot of studies you have to do you
always have to interface with something
else to learn more to to aid in your
reasoning process if you can direct
access all over Kapadia in trying to
understand what is the best form of
government then every thought won't be
stuck in a loop like every thought that
requires some extra piece of information
will be able to grab it really quickly
that that's the possibility of if the
bottleneck is literally the information
that you know the bottleneck of
breakthrough ideas is just being able to
quickly access huge amounts of
information then the possibility of
connecting your brain to the computer
could lead to totally new like you know
totally new breakthroughs you can think
of mathematicians being able to you know
just up the orders of magnitude of power
in their reasoning about that matter
what humanity has already discovered the
optimal form of government to a
revolutionary process is an evolution
and so what we discover is that maybe
the problem of government doesn't have
stable solutions for us right as a
species because we are not designed in
such a way that we can make everybody
conform to them so but there could be
solutions that work under given
circumstances or that are the best for
certain environment and depends on for
instance the primary forms of ownership
and the means of production so if the
main means of production is lent then
the forms of government will be
regulated by the landowners and you get
a monarchy if you also want to have a
form of government in which a subset you
depend on some form of slavery for
instance where the peasants have to work
very long hours for very little gain so
very few people had enough plumbing then
maybe you need to promise them that we
had paid in in the afterlife there over
time right so you need a theocracy and
so for much of human history in the West
we had a combination of monarchy and
theocracy that was our form of
governance right at the same time the
Catholic Church implemented game
theoretic principles I recently reread
Thomas or kindness it's very interesting
to see this because he was not duelist
he was translating Aristotle in a
particular way for the designing an
operating system for the Catholic
society and he says that basically
people
our animals and very much the same way
as Aristotle envisions which basically
organisms with cybernetic control and
then he says that there are additional
rational principles that humans can
discover and everybody can discover them
so they are universal if you are saying
you should understand you should submit
to them because you can rationally
deduce them and these principles are
roughly you should be willing to
self-regulate correctly you should be
willing to do correct social regulation
it's intro organismic you should be
willing to act on your models so we have
skin in the game and you should have
called rationality you should be
choosing the right to calls to work on
and so basically these three rational
principles call rationality he calls
prudence or wisdom the social regulation
is justice the correct social one and
the internal regulation is temperance
and this thing to be willingness to act
on your models is courage and then he
says that they are additionally to these
four cardinal virtues three divine
virtues and these three divine virtues
cannot be resonated used but they reveal
themselves by the harmony which means if
you assume them and you extrapolate
what's going to happen you will see that
that makes sense and it's often been
misunderstood as God has to tell you
that these are the things so they're a
see there's something nefarious going on
with the christian conspiracy forces you
to believe some guy with a long beard
that they discovered this but so these
principles are relatively simple again
you need it's for high level
organization for the resulting
civilization that you form commitment to
unity so basically you serve this higher
larger thing this structural principle
on the next level and he calls that
phase then there needs to be a
commitment to shared purpose this is
basically this global reward that you
try to figure out what that should be
and now you can facilitate this and this
is love the commitment to shared purpose
is the core of love right you see the
sacred thing that is more important than
your own organism ayk interests in the
other and you serve this together and
this is how you see the sacred and the
other and the last one is hope which
means you need to be willing to act on
that prayer
principle without getting rewards in the
here and now because it doesn't exist
yet then you start out building the
civilization right so you need to be
able to do this in the absence of its
actual existence yet so it can come into
being so yes so the way it comes into
being is by you accepting those notions
and then you see there these these three
divine concepts then you see them and
realized now the most divine is the
loaded concept and olive oil and ice
because we are outside of this cart and
we are still scarred from breaking free
of it but the idea is basically we need
to have a civilization that acts as an
intentional agent like an insect State
and we are not actually a tribal species
we are state building species and was
what enabled State Building is basic the
formation of religious states and other
forms of rule-based administration in
which the individual doesn't matter as
much as the rule or the higher goal
right we got there by the question
what's the optimal form of governance so
I don't think that chaos or Catholicism
is the optimal form of governance
because it's obviously on the way out
right so it is for the present type of
society that we are in religious
institutions don't seem to be optimal to
organize that so what we discovered
right now that we live in in the West is
democracy and democracy is the rule of
oligarchs there are the people that
currently own the means of production
that is administered not by the
oligarchs themselves because they
there's too much distraction right here
so much innovation that we have in every
generation new means of production let
me invent and corporations dive usually
after 30 years or so and something
either takes the leading role in our
societies
so it's administered by institutions and
these institutions themselves are not
elected but they provide continuity and
they are led by electable politicians
and this makes it possible that you can
adapt to change without having to kill
people right so you can tell for
instance of a change in government's if
people think that the current government
is too corrupt or is not up-to-date you
can just elect new people or if a
journalist finds out something
inconvenient about the institution and
the institution is has no plan B like in
Russia the journalist has to die this is
what but when you run society by the
deep state so ideally you have a
administration layer that you can change
if something bad happens right so you
will have a continuity in the whole
thing and this is the system that we
came up in in the West and the way it's
set up in the US is largely result of
low-level models was mostly just second
third order consequences that people are
modeling in the design of these
institutions it's relatively young
society that doesn't really care take
care of the downstream effects of many
of the decisions that are being made and
I suspect that AI can help us this in a
way if you can fix the incentives the
Society of the u.s. is a society of
teeters it's basically cheating so
indistinguishable from innovation and we
want to encourage innovation can you
elaborate on what you mean by cheating
especially people do things that they
know are wrong it's acceptable to do
things that you know are wrong in this
society who a certain degree you can for
instance suggest some non sustainable
business models and implement them right
but you're always pushing the boundaries
I mean yeah you're yes you're and yes
this is seen as a good thing largely yes
and this is different from other
societies so for instance social
mobility is an aspect of this social
mobility is the result of individual
innovation that would not be sustainable
at scale for everybody else right
normally you should not go up you should
go deep right we need Baker's and if you
are very good bakers but in a society
that innovates maybe you can replace all
the Baker's with a really good machine
right and that's not a bad thing and
it's a thing that made us so successful
right but it also means that the u.s. is
not optimizing for sustainability but
for innovation and so it's not obvious
as the evolutionary processes unrolling
is not obvious that that long term would
be better it's it has side effect so you
basically if you cheat you will have a
certain layer of toxic sludge that
covers everything there is a result of
cheating and we have to unroll this
evolutionary process to figure out if
these side effects are so damaging that
the system is horrible or if the
benefits actually outweigh the the the
negative effects how do we get to the
which system of government is best
that was from I'm trying to trace back
like five minutes I suspect that we can
find a way back to AI by thinking about
the way in which our brain has to
organize it
right in some sense our brain is a
society of neurons and our mind is a
society of behaviors and they need to be
organizing themselves into a structure
that implements regulation and
government is social regulation we often
see government is the manifestation of
power or local interests but it's
actually a platform for negotiating the
conditions of human survival and this
platform emerges over the current needs
and possibilities in the trajectory that
we have so given the present state there
are only so many options on how we can
move into the next stage without
completely disrupting everything and we
mostly agree that it's a bad idea to
disrupt everything because it will
endanger our food supply for a while and
the entire infrastructure and fabric of
society so we do try to find natural
transitions and they're not that many
natural transitions available at any
given point Murray you're a natural
transition so we try to not to have
revolutions if he can have it right so
speaking of revolutions and the
connection between in government systems
in the mind you've also said that you
said that in some sense becoming an
adult means you take charge of your
emotions maybe never said that maybe I
just made that up but in context of the
mind what's the role of emotion and what
is it first of all what is emotion was
its role it's several things so
psychologists often distinguish between
emotion and feeling and in common day
parlance we don't don't I think that in
motion is a configuration of the
cognitive system and that's especially
true for the lowest level for the
affective state so when you have an
effect it's the configuration of certain
modulation parameters like arousal
valence your your attentional focus
whether it's right or narrow
interception or extra reception and so
on and all these parameters together put
you in a certain way to you relate to
the environment and to yourself and this
is in some sense an emotional
configuration and the more narrow sense
an emotion is an affective state it has
an object and the relevance of that
object is given by motivation and
motivation is a bunch of needs that are
associated with rewards things that give
you pleasure and pain
and you don't actually act on your needs
you act on models of your needs because
when the pleasure and pain manifest it's
too late you've done everything but so
you act on expectations what will give
you a pleasure and pain and these are
your purposes the needs don't form a
hierarchy they just coexist and compete
and your organism is why brain has to
find it on dynamic homeostasis between
them but the purposes need to be
consistent so you basically can create a
story for your life and make plans and
so we organize them all into hierarchies
and there is not a unique solution for
this and people eat to make art and
other people regard to eat and they
might up be end up doing the same things
but they cooperate in very different
ways because they automate codes are
different and vie cooperate based on
shared purpose everything else it is not
cooperation on shared purpose is
transactional I don't think I understood
the last piece of the achieving the
homeostasis are you distinguishing
between the experience of emotion and
the expression of emotion of course so
the experience of emotion is a feeling
and in the sense what you feel is an
appraisal that your perceptual system is
made of the situation at hand and it
makes this based on your motivation yes
and on the you are estimates not your
but of the subconscious geometric parts
of your mind that assess the situation
in the world with something like a
neural network and this neural network
is making itself known to the symbolic
parts of your mind to your conscious
attention by our mapping the them as
features into a space so what you will
feel about your emotion is a projection
usually enjoy your body map you might
feel anxiety in your solar plexus and
you might feel it as a contraction which
is all geometry right your body map is
the space that is always instantiate and
always available so it's a very obvious
cheat if your non-symbolic parts of your
brain try to talk to your symbolic parts
of your brain to map the feelings into
the body map and then you perceive them
as pleasant and unpleasant depending on
whether the appraisal has a negative or
positive valence and then you have
different features of them that give you
more knowledge about the nature of what
you're feeling so for instance when you
feel
connected to other people you typically
feel this new chest region around your
heart and you feel this is an expansive
feeling in which you're reaching out
right and it's very intuitive to encode
it like this that's why it's encoded
like it's incredible it's in code it's a
code in which the non symbolic parts of
your mind
talk to the symbolic ones and then the
expression of emotion is then the final
step that could be sort of gestural or
visual yeah so on that's part of this
MOOC is probably evolved as part of an
adversarial communication so as soon as
you started to observe the facial
expression and poster of others to
understand what emotional state they're
in
others started to use this as signalling
and also to subvert your model of the
emotional state so we now look at the
inflections at the difference between
the standard face that they're going to
make in this situation right when you
were at the funeral everybody expects
you to make a solemn face but the solemn
face doesn't express whether you're said
or not it just expresses that you
understand what face you have to make it
a funeral nobody should know that you
are Trump triumphant so when you try to
read the emotion of another person you
try to look at the Delta between said
truly said expression and the things
that are animated mating this face
behind the curtain so the interesting
thing is so having done these having
them as podcast and the video component
one of the things I've learned is that
now I'm Russian and I don't know how to
express emotion on my face when I see
that as weakness but whatever the people
look to me after you say something they
look to my face - just to help them see
how they should feel about we said which
is fascinating because then they'll
often comment on why did you look bored
or why did you particularly enjoy that
part or why did you whatever it's a kind
of interesting
it makes me cognizant of on part like
you're basically saying a bunch of
brilliant things but I am part of the
play that you're the key actor and by
making my facial expressions and then do
and therefore telling the narrative of
what the big like the big point is which
is fascinating
makes me makes me cognizant I'm supposed
to be making facial expressions even
this conversation is hard because my
preference will be
to wear a mask with sunglasses to wear I
could just listen yes which is
understand this because it's intrusive
to interact with others this way and
basically Eastern European society have
a taboo against that and especially
Russia the further you go to the east
and in the u.s. it's the opposite you
are expected to be hyper animated in
your face and you're also expected to
show positive affect yes and if you show
positive effect without a good reason
in Russia they people will think you are
a stupid and sophisticated person
exactly and here positive effect without
reason goes either appreciate or goes
unnoticed no it's the default it's being
expected everything is amazing have you
seen these lego movie no there was a
diagram where somebody gave the
appraisals that exist in the US and
Russia so you have your black curve and
the lower 10% in u.s. yeah are it's a
good start
everything about the lowest 10% is it's
amazing it's amazing and for Russians
yeah everything below the top 10% is
it's terrible and then everything except
the top percent is I don't like it and
the 10% is even so yeah it's funny but
it's kind of true no yeah there's a
deeper aspect to this it's also how we
construct meaning in the u.s. usually
you focus on the positive aspects and
you just suppress the negative aspects
and and our Eastern European traditions
we emphasize the fact that if you hold
something above the waterline you also
need to put something below the
waterline because existence by itself is
as best neutral right that's the basic
intuition if at best neutral yes or can
is just suffering the default there are
moments of beauty but these moments of
beauty are in is inextricably linked to
the reality of suffering and to not
acknowledge the reality of suffering
means that you are really stupid unaware
of the fact that basically every
conscious being spends most of the times
of
yeah you just summarized the ethos of
the Eastern Europe yeah most of life is
suffering with an occasional mobile to
beauty and if your facial expressions
don't acknowledge the abundance of
suffering in the world and in existence
itself then you must be an idiot it's an
interesting thing when you raise
children in the yes and you in some
sense preserve the identity of the
intellectual and cultural traditions
that are embedded in your own families
and your daughter asks you about Arielle
the mermaid yeah and ask you why is Aria
not allowed to play with the humans and
you tell her the truth she was a siren
siren see people you don't play with
your does not end well and then you tell
her the original story which is not the
one by Anderson which is the romantic
one and there's a much darker one Eugene
a story what happened so when Dean is a
mermaid or a water woman she lives on
ground off a river and she meets this
prince and they fall enough and the
prince really really wants to be with
her and she says okay but the deal is
you cannot have any other woman if you
marry somebody else even though you
cannot be with me because obviously you
cannot breathe and the water and I have
other things to do then managing your
Kingdom busy up here you will die and
eventually after a few years he falls in
love with some princess and marries her
and she shows up and quietly goes into
his chamber and nobody is able to stop
her or willing to do so because she is
fierce and she comes quietly and said
out of his chamber and they asked her
what has happened what did you do when
she said I kissed him to death all done
and do you know the end is in story
right in the Anderson story the mermaid
is playing with this prince that she
saves and she falls in love with him and
she cannot live out there so she is
giving up her voice and her tail for a
human-like appearance so she can walk
among the humans but this guy does not
recognize that she is the one that you
would marry instead he marries somebody
who has a kingdom and economical and
political relationships to his own
kingdom and so on as he shoots quite
tragic she dies
so yeah instead Disney The Little
Mermaid story has a little bit of a
happy ending that's the Western that's
the American Way my own problem is
business of course that I read Oscar
Wilde before I read the other things so
I mean doctor II needed inoculated with
this romanticism and I think that the
mermaid is right you sacrifice your life
for romantic love that's what you do
because if you are confronted with
either serving the Machine and doing the
the obviously right thing under the
economic and social and all other human
incentives that's wrong you should
follow your heart so do you think
suffering is fundamental to happiness
along these lines suffering is the
result of caring about things that you
cannot change and if you are able to
change what you care about to those
things that you can't change you will
not suffer well then would you then be
able to experience happiness yes
but happiness itself is not important
happiness is like a cookie when you are
a child you think cookies are very
important and you want to have all the
cookies in the world you look forward to
being an adult because then you have as
many cookies as you want right yes but
as an adult you realize the cookie is a
tool it's a tool to make you eat
vegetables and once you eat your
vegetables any way you stop eating
cookies for the most part because
otherwise you will get diabetes and will
not be around for your kids yes but then
the cookie the scarcity of a cookie if
scarcity is enforced nevertheless so
like the pleasure comes from the
scarcity yes but the happiness is a
cookie that your brain bakes for itself
it's not made by the environment the
moment cannot make you happy it's your
appraisal of the environment that makes
you happy and if you can change the
appraisal of the environment which you
can learn to then you can create
arbitrary states of happiness and some
meditators fall into this trap so they
discover the room this basement room in
their brain where the cookies are made
and they indulge in stuff themselves and
after a few months it gets really old
and the big crisis of meaning comes
because they saw before that their
unhappiness was the result of not being
happy enough so they fixed this right
they can release the neurotransmitters
at will if they train and then the
crisis of meaning
pops up at a deeper layer and the
question is why do I live how can I make
a sustainable
that is meaningful to me how kinda
insert myself would do this and this was
the problem that you couldn't solve in
the first place well at the end of all
this let me then ask that same question
what is that the answer to that what
could but possibly answer be of the
meaning of life what what could an
answer be what is it to you I think that
if you look at the limiting of life you
look at what the cell is the life is the
cell is cell yes or this principle the
cell it's this self-organizing thing
that can participate in evolution in
order to make it work it's a molecular
machine
it needs a self replicator and entropy
extractor and the Turing machine if any
of these parts is missing you don't have
a cell and it is not living right and
life is facing the emergent complexity
over that principle once you have this
intelligent super molecule the cell
there is very little as you cannot make
it to it's probably the optimal compute
for human especially in terms of
resilience it's very hard to sterilize
the plant at once it's infected with
life so it's active function of these
three components or the super cell of
cell is as present in the cell is
present in us and it's just the are just
an expression of the cells a certain
layer of complexity and the organization
of cells that so in a way it's tempting
to think of the cell as a von neumann
probe if you want to build intelligence
on other planets the best way to do this
is to infect them b-cells and wait for
long enough and visit reasonable chance
the stuff is going to evolve into an
information processing principle that is
general enough to become sentient
whether that idea is very akin to sort
of the the same dream and beautiful
ideas that are expressed the cellular
automata in their most simple
mathematical form you just inject the
system with some basic mechanisms of
replication so our basic rules amazing
things would emerge that the cell is
able to do something that James Hardy
calls existential design he points out
that in technical design we go from the
outside in we work in a highly
controlled environment in which
everything is deterministic like about
computers of our labs or our engineering
workshops and then we use this
determinism to implement a particular
kind of function that
dream up and that seamlessly interfaces
with all the other deterministic
functions that we already have in our
world so it's basically from the outside
in and biological systems designed from
the inside out as seed will become a
seedling by taking some of the
relatively unorganized matter around it
and turn it into its own structure and
thereby subdue the environment and cells
can cooperate if they can rely on other
cells having a similar organization that
is already compatible but unless that's
that's there the cell needs to divide to
create that structure by itself right so
it's a self organizing principle that
works on a somewhat chaotic environment
and the purpose of life in the sense is
to produce complexity and the complexity
allows you to harvest negentropy
gradients that you couldn't harvest
without the complexity and in the sense
intelligence and life are very strongly
connected because the purpose of
intelligence is to allow control and the
conditions of complexity so basic you
shift the boundary between the ordered
systems into the realm of the Kay of
chaos you build bridgeheads into a chaos
with complexity and this is what we are
doing this is not necessarily a deeper
meaning I think the meaning that we have
priors for that we evolved for outside
of the priors there is no meaning
meaning only exists if a mind protects
it right yeah there is only civilization
I think that what feels most meaningful
to me is to try to build and maintain
the sustainable civilization and taking
a sliced Abad outside of that we talked
about a man with a beard and God but
something some mechanism perhaps must
have planted the seed the initial seed
of the cell do you think there is a God
what is a God and what would that look
like so if there was no spontaneous
abiogenesis in the sense that the first
cell formed by some happy random
accidents where the molecules just
happened to be in the right consolation
to each other but there could also be
the mechanism of that allows for the
random I mean there's like turtles all
the way down there seems to be there has
to be a head turtle at the bottom
consider something really wild imagine
is it possible that a gas giant could
become intelligent but would that
involve so imagine you jet you have
vortices that spontaneously emerge on
the gas giants like big storm systems
that endure for thousands of years and
some of these form systems produce
electromagnetic fields because some of
the clouds are ferromagnetic or
something and as a result they can
change how certain clouds react rather
than other clouds and thereby produce
some self-stabilizing patterns that
eventually to regulation feedback loops
nested feedback loops and control so
imagine you have such this thing that
basically has emergent self-sustaining
self-organizing complexity and at some
point this wakes up and realizes and
basically LEM Solaris I am a thinking
planet yes but I will not replicate
because I cannot recreate the conditions
of my own existence somewhere else I'm
just basically an intelligence that has
spontaneously formed because it could
and now it was a von Lohmann probe and
the best von Neumann purpose at resting
might be the cell so maybe it will
because it's very very clever and very
enduring create cells and sends them out
and one of them has infected our planet
and I'm not suggesting that this is the
case but it would be compatible with the
prints Permian hypothesis and with my
intuition that abiogenesis is very
unlikely it's possible but it's you
probably need to all the cosmic dice
very often maybe more often than they
are planetary surfaces I don't know
so god is just a large enough a system
that's large enough that allows
randomness now I don't think that God
has anything to do with creation I think
it's a mistranslation of the time wood
into the Catholic mythology I think that
Genesis is actually the childhood
memories of a God so the when sorry that
he Anna says is the world the childhood
memories of a God it's basically a mind
that is memory remembering how it came
into being and we typically interpret
Genesis is the creation of a physical
universe by a supernatural being yes and
I think when you'll read it there's
light and darkness that is being create
it and then you discover sky and ground
you create them you will construct the
plants and the animals and you give
everything
their names and so on that's basically
cognitive development it's a sequence of
steps that every mind is to go through
then it makes sense of the world and
then you have children you can see how
initially they distinguish light and
darkness and then they make out
directions in it and they discover sky
and ground and they discover the plants
and the animals and they give everything
their name and it's an creative process
that happens in every mind because it's
not given right your mind has to invent
these structures to make sense of the
patterns on your retina also if there
was some big nerd who set up a server
and runs this world on it
this would not create a special
relationship between us and the nerd
this nerd would not have the magical
power to give meaning to our existence
right so this equation of a Creator God
is the God of meaning is a slate off
hand you shouldn't do it the other one
that is done in Catholicism is the
equation of the first mover the prime
mover of Aristotle which is basically
automaton that runs the universe earth
total says if things are moving and
things seem to be moving here
something must move them right if
something moves them something must move
the thing that is moving it so there
must be a prime mover this idea to say
that this prime mover is a supernatural
being is complete nonsense
right it's an automaton in the simplest
case so we have to explain the enormity
that this automaton exists at all but
again we don't have any possibility to
infer anything about its properties
except that it's able to produce change
in information right so there needs to
be some kind of computational principle
this is all there is but to say this
automaton is identical again with the
creator of first cause over the thing
that gives meaning to our life is
confusion now I think that what we
perceive is the higher being that we are
part of and the higher being that we are
part of is the civilization it's the
thing in which you have a similar
relationship as the cell has 12 a body
and we have this prior because we have
evolved to organize in these structures
so basically the Christian God in its
natural form without the mythology if
you to undress it it's basically the
Platonic form of the civilization
is the is the ideal it's this ideal that
you try to approximate when you interact
with others not based on your incentives
but on what you think is right
Wow we covered a lot of ground and we
left with one of my favorite lines and
there's many which is happiness is a
cookie that the brain bakes itself it's
been a huge honor and a pleasure to talk
to you I'm sure our paths will cross
many times again Joshua thank you so
much for talking today or they protect
your necks yeah it's so much fun I
enjoyed it awesome
thanks for listening to this
conversation with Yoshi Bach and thank
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Twitter at lex friedman and yes try to
figure out how to spell it without the e
and now let me leave you with some words
of wisdom from your Shabak if you take
this as a computer game metaphor this is
the best level for humanity to play and
this best level happens to be the last
level as it happens against the backdrop
of a dying world but it's still the best
level thank you for listening and hope
to see you next time
you