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Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality | Lex Fridman Podcast #101


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The following is a conversation with Yosha Bach, VP of Research at the AI Foundation,
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with a history of research positions at MIT and Harvard. Yosha is one of the most unique
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and brilliant people in the artificial intelligence community, exploring the workings
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of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly simulated
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fabric of our universe. I could see myself talking to Yosha many times in the future.
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And now here's my conversation with Joscha Bach. As you've said, you grew up in a forest in East
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Germany, just as we're talking about off mic, to parents who are artists. And now I think,
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at least to me, you've become one of the most unique thinkers in the AI world.
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So can we try to reverse engineer your mind a little bit?
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What were the key philosopher, scientist ideas, maybe even movies or just realizations that
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had an impact on you when you were growing up that kind of led to the trajectory,
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or were the key sort of crossroads in the trajectory of your intellectual development?
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My father came from a long tradition of architects, a distant branch of the Bach family.
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And so basically, he was technically a nerd. And nerds need to interface in society with
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nonstandard ways. Sometimes I define a nerd as somebody who thinks that the purpose of
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communication is to submit your ideas to peer review. And normal people understand that the
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primary purpose of communication is to negotiate alignment. And these purposes tend to conflict,
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which means that nerds have to learn how to interact with society at large.
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Who is the reviewer in the nerd's view of communication?
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Everybody who you consider to be a peer. So whatever hapless individual is around,
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well, you would try to make him or her the gift of information.
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Okay. So you're now, by the way, my research malinformed me. So you're architect or artist?
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So he did study architecture. But basically, my grandfather made the wrong decision. He married
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an aristocrat and was drawn into the war. And he came back after 15 years. So basically, my father
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was not parented by a nerd, but by somebody who tried to tell him what to do, and expected him
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to do what he was told. And he was unable to. He's unable to do things if he's not intrinsically
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motivated. So in some sense, my grandmother broke her son. And her son responded when he became an
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architect to become an artist. So he built 100 Wasser architecture. He built houses without
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right angles. He built lots of things that didn't work in the more brutalist traditions of eastern
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Germany. And so he bought an old watermill, moved out to the countryside, and did only what he wanted
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to do, which was art. Eastern Germany was perfect for Boheme, because you had complete material
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safety. Food was heavily subsidized, healthcare was free. You didn't have to worry about rent or
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pensions or anything. So it's a socialized communist side. Yes. And the other thing is,
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it was almost impossible not to be in political disagreement with your government, which is very
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productive for artists. So everything that you do is intrinsically meaningful, because it will
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always touch on the deeper currents of society of culture and be in conflict with it and tension
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with it. And you will always have to define yourself with respect to this. So what impacted
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your father, this outside of the box thinker against the government, against the world artists?
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He was actually not a thinker. He was somebody who only got self aware to the degree that he
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needed to make himself functional. So in some sense, he was also in the late 1960s. And he was
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in some sense a hippie. So he became a one person cult. He lived out there in his kingdom. He built
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big sculpture gardens and started many avenues of art and so on and convinced a woman to live with
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him. She was also an architect and she adored him and decided to share her life with him.
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And I basically grew up in a big cave full of books. I'm almost feral. And I was bored out
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there. It was very, very beautiful, very quiet, and quite lonely. So I started to read. And by
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the time I came to school, I've read everything until fourth grade and then some. And there was
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not a real way for me to relate to the outside world. And I couldn't quite put my finger on why.
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And today I know it was because I was a nerd, obviously, and it was the only nerd around. So
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there was no other kids like me. And there was nobody interested in physics or computing or
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mathematics and so on. And this village school that I went to was basically a nice school.
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Kids were nice to me. I was not beaten up, but I also didn't make many friends or
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build deep relationships. They only happened in starting from ninth grade when I went into a
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school for mathematics and physics. Do you remember any key books from this moment?
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I basically read everything. So I went to the library and I worked my way through the
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children's and young adult sections. And then I read a lot of science fiction,
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for instance, Stanislav Lem, basically the great author of Cybernetics, has influenced me. Back
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then, I didn't see him as a big influence because everything that he wrote seemed to be so natural
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to me. And it's only later that I contrasted it with what other people wrote. Another thing that
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was very influential on me were the classical philosophers and also the literature of romanticism.
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So German poetry and art, Troste Hilshoff and Heine and up to Hesse and so on.
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Hesse. I love Hesse. So at which point do the classical philosophers end? At this point,
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we're in the 21st century. What's the latest classical philosopher? Does this stretch through
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even as far as Nietzsche or is this, are we talking about Plato and Aristotle?
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I think that Nietzsche is the classical equivalent of a shit poster.
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He's very smart and easy to read, but he's not so much trolling others. He's trolling himself
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because he was at odds with the world. Largely his romantic relationships didn't work out.
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He got angry and he basically became a nihilist.
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Isn't that a beautiful way to be as an intellectual is to constantly be trolling yourself,
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to be in that conflict, in that tension?
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I think it's a lack of self awareness. At some point, you have to understand the
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comedy of your own situation. If you take yourself seriously and you are not functional,
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it ends in tragedy as it did for Nietzsche.
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I think you think he took himself too seriously in that tension.
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And as you find the same thing in Hesse and so on, this Steppenwolf syndrome is classic
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adolescence where you basically feel misunderstood by the world and you don't understand that all the
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misunderstandings are the result of your own lack of self awareness because you think that you are
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a prototypical human and the others around you should behave the same way as you expect them
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based on your innate instincts and it doesn't work out and you become a transcendentalist
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to deal with that. So it's very, very understandable and have great sympathies for this
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to the degree that I can have sympathy for my own intellectual history.
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But you have to grow out of it.
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So as an intellectual, a life well lived, a journey well traveled is one where you don't
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take yourself seriously from that perspective?
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No, I think that you are neither serious or not serious yourself because you need to become
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unimportant as a subject. That is, if you are a philosopher, belief is not a verb.
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You don't do this for the audience and you don't do it for yourself.
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You have to submit to the things that are possibly true and you have to follow wherever
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your inquiry leads. But it's not about you. It has nothing to do with you.
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So do you think then people like Ayn Rand believed sort of an idea of there's objective
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truth. So what's your sense in the philosophical, if you remove yourself as objective from the
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picture, you think it's possible to actually discover ideas that are true or are we just
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in a mesh of relative concepts that are either true nor false? It's just a giant mess.
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You cannot define objective truth without understanding the nature of truth in the first
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place. So what does the brain mean by saying that discover something as truth? So for instance,
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a model can be predictive or not predictive. Then there can be a sense in which a mathematical
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statement can be true because it's defined as true under certain conditions. So it's basically
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a particular state that a variable can have in a simple game. And then you can have a
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correspondence between systems and talk about truth, which is again, a type of model correspondence.
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And there also seems to be a particular kind of ground truth. So for instance,
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you're confronted with the enormity of something existing at all. It's stunning when you realize
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something exists rather than nothing. And this seems to be true. There's an absolute truth in
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the fact that something seems to be happening. Yeah, that to me is a showstopper. I could just
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think about that idea and be amazed by that idea for the rest of my life and not going any farther
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because I don't even know the answer to that. Why does anything exist at all?
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Well, the easiest answer is existence is the default, right? So this is the lowest number of
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bits that you would need to encode this. Whose answer?
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The simplest answer to this is that existence is the default.
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What about nonexistence? I mean, that seems...
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Nonexistence might not be a meaningful notion in this sense. So in some sense,
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if everything that can exist exists, for something to exist, it probably needs to be implementable.
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The only thing that can be implemented is finite automata. So maybe the whole of existence is the
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superposition of all finite automata and we are in some region of the fractal that has the properties
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that it can contain us. What does it mean to be a superposition of finite automata?
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Superposition of all possible rules? Imagine that every automaton is basically an operator
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that acts on some substrate and as a result, you get emergent patterns.
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What's the substrate?
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I have no idea to know. But some substrate.
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It's something that can store information.
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Something that can store information, there's a automaton.
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Something that can hold state.
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Still, it doesn't make sense to me the why that exists at all. I could just sit there
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with a beer or a vodka and just enjoy the fact, pondering the why.
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It may not have a why. This might be the wrong direction to ask into this. So there could be no
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relation in the why direction without asking for a purpose or for a cause. It doesn't mean
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that everything has to have a purpose or cause. So we mentioned some philosophers in that early,
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just taking a brief step back into that. So we asked ourselves when did classical philosophy end?
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I think for Germany, it largely ended with the first revolution.
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That's basically when we entered the monarchy and started a democracy. And at this point,
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we basically came up with a new form of government that didn't have a good sense of
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this new organism that society wanted to be. And in a way, it decapitated the universities.
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So the universities went on through modernism like a headless chicken.
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At the same time, democracy failed in Germany and we got fascism as a result.
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And it burned down things in a similar way as Stalinism burned down intellectual traditions
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in Russia. And Germany, both Germanys have not recovered from this. Eastern Germany had this
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vulgar dialectic materialism and Western Germany didn't get much more edgy than Habermas. So in
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some sense, both countries lost their intellectual traditions and killing off and driving out the
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Jews didn't help. Yeah. So that was the end of really rigorous what you would say is classical
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philosophy. There's also this thing that in some sense, the low hanging foods in philosophy
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were mostly wrapped. And the last big things that we discovered was the constructivist turn
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in mathematics. So to understand that the parts of mathematics that work are computation,
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there was a very significant discovery in the first half of the 20th century. And it hasn't
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fully permeated philosophy and even physics yet. Physicists checked out the code libraries
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for mathematics before constructivism became universal. What's constructivism? What are you
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referring to, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, those kinds of ideas? So basically, Gödel himself,
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I think, didn't get it yet. Hilbert could get it. Hilbert saw that, for instance, countries
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set theoretic experiments and mathematics led into contradictions. And he noticed that with the
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current semantics, we cannot build a computer in mathematics that runs mathematics without crashing.
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And Gödel could prove this. And so what Gödel could show is using classical mathematical
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semantics, you run into contradictions. And because Gödel strongly believed in these semantics and
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more than what he could observe and so on, he was shocked. It basically shook his world to the core
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because in some sense, he felt that the world has to be implemented in classical mathematics.
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And for Turing, it wasn't quite so bad. I think that Turing could see that the solution is to
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understand that mathematics was computation all along, which means you, for instance, pi
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in classical mathematics is a value. It's also a function, but it's the same thing. And in
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computation, a function is only a value when you can compute it. And if you cannot compute the last
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digit of pi, you only have a function. You can plug this function into your local sun, let it run
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until the sun burns out. This is it. This is the last digit of pi you will know. But it also means
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there can be no process in the physical universe or in any physically realized computer that depends
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on having known the last digit of pi. Which means there are parts of physics that are defined in
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such a way that cannot strictly be true, because assuming that this could be true leads into
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contradictions. So I think putting computation at the center of the world view is actually the
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right way to think about it. Yes. And Wittgenstein could see it. And Wittgenstein basically preempted
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the logitist program of AI that Minsky started later, like 30 years later. Turing was actually
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a pupil of Wittgenstein. I didn't know there's any connection between Turing and Wittgenstein.
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Wittgenstein even cancelled some classes when Turing was not present because he thought it
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was not worth spending the time with the others. If you read the Tractatus, it's a very beautiful
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book, like basically one thought on 75 pages. It's very non typical for philosophy because it doesn't
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have arguments in it and it doesn't have references in it. It's just one thought that is not intending
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to convince anybody. He says, it's mostly for people that had the same insight as me,
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just spell it out. And this insight is there is a way in which mathematics and philosophy
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ought to meet. Mathematics tries to understand the domain of all languages by starting with those
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that are so formalizable that you can prove all the properties of the statements that you make.
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But the price that you pay is that your language is very, very simple. So it's very hard to say
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something meaningful in mathematics. And it looks complicated to people, but it's far less complicated
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than what our brain is casually doing all the time when it makes sense of reality. And philosophy is
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coming from the top. So it's mostly starting from natural languages with vaguely defined concepts.
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And the hope is that mathematics and philosophy can meet at some point. And Wittgenstein was trying
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to make them meet. And he already understood that, for instance, you could express everything with
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the NAND calculus, that you could reduce the entire logic to NAND gates as we do in our modern
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computers. So in some sense, he already understood Turing universality before Turing spelled it out.
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I think when he wrote the Tractatus, he didn't understand yet that the idea was so important
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and significant. And I suspect then when Turing wrote it out, nobody cared that much. Turing was
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not that famous when he lived. It was mostly his work in decrypting the German codes that made him
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famous or gave him some notoriety. But this saint status that he has to computer science right now
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and the AI is something that I think he could acquire later. That's kind of interesting. Do
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you think of computation and computer science? And you kind of represent that to me is maybe
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that's the modern day. You in a sense are the new philosopher by sort of the computer scientist
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who dares to ask the bigger questions that philosophy originally started is the new
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philosopher. Certainly not me. I think I'm mostly still this child that grows up in a
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very beautiful valley and looks at the world from the outside and tries to understand what's going
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on. And my teachers tell me things and they largely don't make sense. So I have to make my
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own models. I have to discover the foundations of what the others are saying. I have to try to fix
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them to be charitable. I try to understand what they must have thought originally or what their
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teachers or their teacher's teachers must have thought until everything got lost in translation
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and how to make sense of the reality that we are in. And whenever I have an original idea,
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I'm usually late to the party by say 400 years. And the only thing that's good is that the parties
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get smaller and smaller the older I get and the more I explore it. The parties get smaller and
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more exclusive and more exclusive. So it seems like one of the key qualities of your upbringing
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was that you were not tethered, whether it's because of your parents or in general,
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maybe something within your mind, some genetic material, you were not tethered to the ideas
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of the general populace, which is actually a unique property. We're kind of the education
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system and whatever, not education system, just existing in this world forces certain sets of
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ideas onto you. Can you disentangle that? Why are you not so tethered? Even in your work today,
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you seem to not care about perhaps a best paper in Europe, right? Being tethered to particular
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things that current today in this year, people seem to value as a thing you put on your CV and
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resume. You're a little bit more outside of that world, outside of the world of ideas that people
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are especially focused in the benchmarks of today, the things. Can you disentangle that?
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Because I think that's inspiring. And if there were more people like that,
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we might be able to solve some of the bigger problems that AI dreams to solve.
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And there's a big danger in this because in a way you are expected to marry into an
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intellectual tradition and visit this tradition into a particular school. If everybody comes up
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with their own paradigms, the whole thing is not cumulative as an enterprise. So in some sense,
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you need a healthy balance. You need paradigmatic thinkers and you need people that work within
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given paradigms. Basically, scientists today define themselves largely by methods. And it's almost a
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disease that we think as a scientist, as somebody who was convinced by their guidance counselor,
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that they should join a particular discipline and then they find a good mentor to learn the
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right methods. And then they are lucky enough and privileged enough to join the right team. And then
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their name will show up on influential papers. But we also see that there are diminishing returns
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with this approach. And when our field, computer science and AI started, most of the people that
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joined this field had interesting opinions. And today's thinkers in AI either don't have interesting
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opinions at all, or these opinions are inconsequential for what they're actually
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doing. Because what they're doing is they apply the state of the art methods with a small epsilon.
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And this is often a good idea if you think that this is the best way to make progress. And for me,
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it's first of all, very boring. If somebody else can do it, why should I do it? If the current
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methods of machine learning lead to strong AI, why should I be doing it? I will just wait until
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they're done and wait until they do this on the beach or read interesting books or write some
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and have fun. But if you don't think that we are currently doing the right thing, if we are missing
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some perspectives, then it's required to think outside of the box. It's also required to understand
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the boxes. But it's necessary to understand what worked and what didn't work and for what reasons.
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So you have to be willing to ask new questions and design new methods whenever you want to
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answer them. And you have to be willing to dismiss the existing methods if you think that they're
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not going to yield the right answers. It's very bad career advice to do that. So maybe to briefly
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stay for one more time in the early days, when would you say for you was the dream
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before we dive into the discussions that we just almost started, when was the dream to understand
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or maybe to create human level intelligence born for you?
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I think that you can see AI largely today as advanced information processing. If you would
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change the acronym of AI into that, most people in the field would be happy. It would not change
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anything what they're doing. We're automating statistics and many of the statistical models
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are more advanced than what statisticians had in the past. And it's pretty good work. It's very
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productive. And the other aspect of AI is philosophical project. And this philosophical
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project is very risky and very few people work on it and it's not clear if it succeeds.
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So first of all, you keep throwing sort of a lot of really interesting ideas and I have to
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pick which ones we go with. But first of all, you use the term information processing,
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just information processing as if it's the mere, it's the muck of existence as if it's the epitome
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of existence, that the entirety of the universe might be information processing, that consciousness
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and intelligence might be information processing. So that maybe you can comment on if the advanced
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information processing is a limiting kind of a round of ideas. And then the other one is,
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what do you mean by the philosophical project? So I suspect that general intelligence is the
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result of trying to solve general problems. So intelligence, I think, is the ability to model.
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00:25:00.800
It's not necessarily goal directed rationality or something. Many intelligent people are bad at this,
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but it's the ability to be presented with a number of patterns and see a structure in those patterns
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and be able to predict the next set of patterns, to make sense of things. And
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some problems are very general. Usually intelligence serves control, so you make these
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models for a particular purpose of interacting as an agent with the world and getting certain results.
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00:25:26.720
But the intelligence itself is in the sense instrumental to something, but by itself it's
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just the ability to make models. And some of the problems are so general that the system that makes
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them needs to understand what itself is and how it relates to the environment. So as a child,
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for instance, you notice you do certain things despite you perceiving yourself as wanting
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different things. So you become aware of your own psychology. You become aware of the fact that you
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have complex structure in yourself and you need to model yourself, to reverse engineer yourself,
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00:25:57.840
to be able to predict how you will react to certain situations and how you deal with yourself
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00:26:02.640
in relationship to your environment. And this process, this project, if you reverse engineer
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00:26:08.000
yourself and your relationship to reality and the nature of a universe that can continue, if you go
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all the way, this is basically the project of AI, or you could say the project of AI is a very
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important component in it. The Turing test, in a way, is you ask a system, what is intelligence?
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If that system is able to explain what it is, how it works, then you should assign it the property
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of being intelligent in this general sense. So the test that Turing was administering
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00:26:36.320
in a way, I don't think that he couldn't see it, but he didn't express it yet in the original 1950
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paper, is that he was trying to find out whether he was generally intelligent. Because in order to
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take this test, the rub is, of course, you need to be able to understand what that system is saying.
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And we don't yet know if we can build an AI. We don't yet know if we are generally intelligent.
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Basically, you win the Turing test by building an AI. Yes. So in a sense, hidden within the Turing
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test is a kind of recursive test. Yes, it's a test on us. The Turing test is basically
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a test of the conjecture, whether people are intelligent enough to understand themselves.
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00:27:14.240
Okay. But you also mentioned a little bit of a self awareness and then the project of AI.
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00:27:18.800
Do you think this kind of emergent self awareness is one of the fundamental aspects of intelligence?
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00:27:25.200
So as opposed to goal oriented, as you said, kind of puzzle solving, is
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00:27:31.200
coming to grips with the idea that you're an agent in the world.
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00:27:37.280
I find that many highly intelligent people are not very self aware, right? So self awareness
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00:27:42.400
and intelligence are not the same thing. And you can also be self aware if you have good priors,
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especially, without being especially intelligent. So you don't need to be very good at solving
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00:27:52.480
puzzles if the system that you are already implements the solution.
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00:27:56.080
But I do find intelligence, you kind of mentioned children, right? Is that the fundamental project
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00:28:03.600
of AI is to create the learning system that's able to exist in the world. So you kind of drew
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a difference between self awareness and intelligence. And yet you said that the self
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00:28:18.320
awareness seems to be important for children. So I call this ability to make sense of the
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00:28:23.600
world and your own place in it. So to make you able to understand what you're doing in this world,
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sentience. And I would distinguish sentience from intelligence because sentience is
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00:28:34.560
possessing certain classes of models. And intelligence is a way to get to these models
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00:28:39.200
if you don't already have them. I see. So can you maybe pause a bit and try to
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answer the question that we just said we may not be able to answer? And it might be a recursive
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meta question of what is intelligence? I think that intelligence is the ability to make models.
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00:28:59.840
So models. I think it's useful as examples. Very popular now. Neural networks form representations
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00:29:08.000
of a large scale data set. They form models of those data sets. When you say models and look
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at today's neural networks, what are the difference of how you're thinking about what is intelligent
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00:29:22.560
in saying that intelligence is the process of making models? Two aspects to this question. One
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00:29:29.120
is the representation. Is the representation adequate for the domain that we're talking about?
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00:29:33.760
One is the representation. Is the representation adequate for the domain that we want to represent?
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00:29:39.920
The other one is the type of the model that you arrive at adequate. So basically, are you
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00:29:45.760
modeling the correct domain? I think in both of these cases, modern AI is lacking still. I think
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that I'm not saying anything new here. I'm not criticizing the field. Most of the people that
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design our paradigms are aware of that. One aspect that we're missing is unified learning.
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00:30:05.040
When we learn, we at some point discover that everything that we sense is part of the same
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00:30:10.960
object, which means we learn it all into one model and we call this model the universe.
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00:30:14.800
So the experience of the world that we are embedded on is not a secret direct via to physical
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00:30:19.680
reality. Physical reality is a weird quantum graph that we can never experience or get access to.
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00:30:24.720
But it has these properties that it can create certain patterns that are systemic interface to
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00:30:29.600
the world. And we make sense of these patterns and the relationship between the patterns that
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00:30:33.520
we discover is what we call the physical universe. So at some point in our development as a nervous
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00:30:40.960
system, we discover that everything that we relate to in the world can be mapped to a region in the
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00:30:47.120
same three dimensional space, by and large. We now know in physics that this is not quite true.
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00:30:52.720
The world is not actually three dimensional, but the world that we are entangled with at the level
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00:30:56.960
which we are entangled with is largely a flat three dimensional space. And so this is the
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00:31:02.720
model that our brain is intuitively making. And this is, I think, what gave rise to this intuition
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00:31:07.840
of res extensa of this material world, this material domain. It's one of the mental domains,
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but it's just the class of all models that relate to this environment, this three dimensional
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00:31:17.440
physics engine in which we are embedded. Physics engine which we're embedded. I love that. Just
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00:31:22.800
slowly pause. So the quantum graph, I think you called it, which is the real world, which you
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00:31:32.800
can never get access to, there's a bunch of questions I want to sort of disentangle that.
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00:31:37.280
But maybe one useful one, one of your recent talks I looked at, can you just describe the basics?
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00:31:43.840
Can you talk about what is dualism? What is idealism? What is materialism? What is functionalism?
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00:31:49.920
And what connects with you most in terms of, because you just mentioned there's a reality
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00:31:53.600
we don't have access to. Okay. What does that even mean? And why don't we get access to it?
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00:32:00.160
Aren't we part of that reality? Why can't we access it? So the particular trajectory that
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00:32:05.040
mostly exists in the West is the result of our indoctrination by a cult for 2000 years.
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00:32:11.120
A cult? Which one? Oh, 2000 years. The Catholic cult mostly. And for better or worse,
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00:32:15.600
it has created or defined many of the modes of interaction that we have that has created
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00:32:20.800
the society. But it has also in some sense scarred our rationality. And the intuition that exists,
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00:32:29.920
if you would translate the mythology of the Catholic church into the modern world is that
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00:32:35.520
the world in which you and me interact is something like a multiplayer role playing adventure. And the
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00:32:41.680
money and the objects that we have in this world, this is all not real. Or as Eastern philosophers
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00:32:48.080
would say, it's Maya. It's just stuff that appears to be meaningful. And this embedding in this
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00:32:54.320
meaning, if you believe in it, is samsara. It's basically the identification with the needs of
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00:33:00.160
the mundane, secular, everyday existence. And the Catholics also introduced the notion of
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00:33:06.880
higher meaning, the sacred. And this existed before, but eventually the natural shape of God
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00:33:12.480
is the Platonic form of the civilization that you're part of. It's basically the superorganism
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00:33:17.040
that is formed by the individuals as an intentional agent. And basically, the Catholics
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00:33:22.640
used a relatively crude mythology to implement software on the minds of people and get the
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00:33:28.240
software synchronized to make them walk on lockstep, to basically get this God online
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00:33:34.240
and to make it efficient and effective. And I think God technically is just a self that
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00:33:40.320
spends multiple brains as opposed to your and my self, which mostly exists just on one brain.
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00:33:45.280
Right? And so in some sense, you can construct a self functionally as a function is implemented
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00:33:50.240
by brains that exists across brains. And this is a God with a small g.
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00:33:54.720
That's one of the, if you, Yuval Harari kind of talking about,
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00:33:59.920
this is one of the nice features of our brains. It seems to that we can
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00:34:03.600
all download the same piece of software like God in this case and kind of share it.
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00:34:07.680
Yeah. So basically you give everybody a spec and the mathematical constraints
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00:34:12.240
that are intrinsic to information processing,
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00:34:16.080
make sure that given the same spec, you come up with a compatible structure.
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00:34:20.160
Okay. So that's, there's the space of ideas that we all share. And we think that's kind
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00:34:24.160
of the mind, but that's separate from the idea is from Christianity for,
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00:34:32.160
from religion is that there's a separate thing between the mind.
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00:34:35.200
There is a real world. And this real world is the world in which God exists.
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00:34:39.600
God is the coder of the multiplayer adventure, so to speak. And we are all players in this game.
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00:34:45.840
And that's dualism.
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00:34:47.280
Yes. But the aspect is because the mental realm exists in a different implementation
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00:34:53.680
than the physical realm. And the mental realm is real. And a lot of people have this intuition
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00:34:59.280
that there is this real room in which you and me talk and speak right now, then comes a layer of
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00:35:04.880
physics and abstract rules and so on. And then comes another real room where our souls are
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00:35:10.160
and our true form isn't a thing that gives us phenomenal experience. And this is, of course,
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00:35:14.400
a very confused notion that you would get. And it's basically, it's the result of connecting
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00:35:20.880
materialism and idealism in the wrong way.
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00:35:24.800
So, okay. I apologize, but I think it's really helpful if we just try to define,
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00:35:30.240
try to define terms. Like what is dualism? What is idealism? What is materialism? For
link |
00:35:34.160
people that don't know.
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00:35:34.960
So the idea of dualism in our cultural tradition is that there are two substances, a mental
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00:35:40.000
substance and a physical substance. And they interact by different rules. And the physical
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00:35:46.000
world is basically causally closed and is built on a low level causal structure. So
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00:35:51.600
they're basically a bottom level that is causally closed. That's entirely mechanical
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00:35:56.160
and mechanical in the widest sense. So it's computational. There's basically a physical
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00:36:00.240
world in which information flows around and physics describes the laws of how information
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00:36:05.200
flows around in this world.
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00:36:06.560
Would you compare it to like a computer where you have hardware and software?
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00:36:10.400
The computer is a generalization of information flowing around. Basically,
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00:36:14.080
but if you want to discover that there is a universal principle, you can define this
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00:36:17.760
universal machine that is able to perform all the computations. So all these machines
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00:36:23.680
have the same power. This means that you can always define a translation between them,
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00:36:27.840
as long as they have unlimited memory to be able to perform each other's computations.
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00:36:33.680
So would you then say that materialism is this whole world is just the hardware and
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00:36:38.480
idealism is this whole world is just the software?
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00:36:40.800
Not quite. I think that most idealists don't have a notion of software yet because software
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00:36:46.640
also comes down to information processing. So what you notice is the only thing that
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00:36:51.920
is real to you and me is this experiential world in which things matter, in which things
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00:36:56.000
have taste, in which things have color, phenomenal content, and so on.
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00:37:00.080
You are bringing up consciousness. Okay.
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00:37:02.160
This is distinct from the physical world in which things have values only in an abstract
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00:37:07.760
sense. And you only look at cold patterns moving around. So how does anything feel like
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00:37:15.040
something? And this connection between the two things is very puzzling to a lot of people,
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00:37:19.200
of course, too many philosophers. So idealism starts out with the notion that mind is primary,
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00:37:23.360
materialism, things that matter is primary. And so for the idealist, the material patterns that
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00:37:30.320
we see playing out are part of the dream that the mind is dreaming. And we exist in a mind
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00:37:37.120
on a higher plane of existence, if you want. And for the materialist, there is only this
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00:37:43.360
material thing, and that generates some models, and we are the result of these models. And in
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00:37:49.600
some sense, I don't think that we should understand, if we understand it properly,
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00:37:53.600
materialism and idealism as a dichotomy, but as two different aspects of the same thing.
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00:37:59.760
So the weird thing is we don't exist in the physical world. We do exist inside of a story
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00:38:04.000
that the brain tells itself. Okay. Let my information processing take that in.
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00:38:15.040
We don't exist in the physical world. We exist in the narrative.
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00:38:18.080
Basically, a brain cannot feel anything. A neuron cannot feel anything. They're physical
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00:38:22.160
things. Physical systems are unable to experience anything. But it would be very useful for the
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00:38:26.720
brain or for the organism to know what it would be like to be a person and to feel something.
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00:38:30.960
Yeah. So the brain creates a simulacrum of such a person that it uses to model the interactions
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00:38:36.720
of the person. It's the best model of what that brain, this organism thinks it is in relationship
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00:38:41.680
to its environment. So it creates that model. It's a story, a multimedia novel that the brain
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00:38:46.000
is continuously writing and updating. But you also kind of said that
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00:38:50.000
you said that we kind of exist in that story. Yes.
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00:38:53.760
In that story. What is real in any of this? So again, these terms are... You kind of said
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00:39:04.800
there's a quantum graph. I mean, what is this whole thing running on then? Is the story...
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00:39:11.040
And is it completely fundamentally impossible to get access to it? Because isn't the story
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00:39:16.640
supposed to... Isn't the brain in something existing in some kind of context?
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00:39:24.560
So what we can identify as computer scientists, we can engineer systems and test our theories this
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00:39:30.640
way that might have the necessary insufficient properties to produce the phenomena that we are
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00:39:36.480
observing, which is the self in a virtual world that is generated in somebody's neocortex that is
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00:39:44.240
contained in the skull of this primate here. And when I point at this, this indexicality is of
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00:39:48.480
course wrong. But I do create something that is likely to give rise to patterns on your retina
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00:39:55.440
that allow you to interpret what I'm saying. But we both know that the world that you and me are
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00:40:00.480
seeing is not the real physical world. What we are seeing is a virtual reality generated in your
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00:40:05.760
brain to explain the patterns on your retina. How close is it to the real world? That's kind
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00:40:10.000
of the question. Is it when you have people like Donald Hoffman that say that you're really far
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00:40:18.400
away. The thing we're seeing, you and I now, that interface we have is very far away from anything.
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00:40:24.960
We don't even have anything close to the sense of what the real world is. Or is it a very surface
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00:40:29.840
piece of architecture? I imagine you look at the Mandelbrot fractal, this famous thing that
link |
00:40:35.840
Bernard Mandelbrot discovered. You see an overall shape in there. But if you truly understand it,
link |
00:40:43.040
you know it's two lines of code. It's basically in a series that is being tested for complex
link |
00:40:50.080
numbers in the complex number plane for every point. And for those where the series is diverging,
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00:40:56.240
you paint this black. And where it's converging, you don't. And you get the intermediate colors
link |
00:41:04.160
by taking how far it diverges. This gives you this shape of this fractal. But imagine you live
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00:41:13.040
inside of this fractal and you don't have access to where you are in the fractal. Or you have not
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00:41:18.160
discovered the generator function even. So what you see is, all I can see right now is a spiral.
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00:41:23.520
And this spiral moves a little bit to the right. Is this an accurate model of reality? Yes, it is.
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00:41:28.000
It is an adequate description. You know that there is actually no spiral in the Mandelbrot fractal.
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00:41:33.680
It only appears like this to an observer that is interpreting things as a two dimensional space and
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00:41:39.200
then defines certain regularities in there at a certain scale that it currently observes. Because
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00:41:44.000
if you zoom in, the spiral might disappear and turn out to be something different at a different
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00:41:47.680
resolution. So at this level, you have the spiral. And then you discover the spiral moves to the
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00:41:52.240
right and at some point it disappears. So you have a singularity. At this point, your model is no
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00:41:56.960
longer valid. You cannot predict what happens beyond the singularity. But you can observe again
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00:42:01.520
and you will see it hit another spiral and at this point it disappeared. So we now have a second
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00:42:06.320
order law. And if you make 30 layers of these laws, then you have a description of the world
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00:42:11.040
that is similar to the one that we come up with when we describe the reality around us.
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00:42:14.720
It's reasonably predictive. It does not cut to the core of it. It does not explain how it's
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00:42:19.440
being generated, how it actually works. But it's relatively good to explain the universe that we
link |
00:42:24.560
are entangled with. But you don't think the tools of computer science, the tools of physics could
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00:42:28.560
get, could step outside, see the whole drawing and get at the basic mechanism of how the pattern,
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00:42:35.040
the spirals are generated. Imagine you would find yourself embedded into a motherboard fractal and
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00:42:40.320
you try to figure out what works and you somehow have a Turing machine with enough memory to think.
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00:42:46.000
And as a result, you come to this idea, it must be some kind of automaton. And maybe you just
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00:42:51.920
enumerate all the possible automata until you get to the one that produces your reality.
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00:42:56.320
So you can identify necessary and sufficient condition. For instance,
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00:42:59.920
we discover that mathematics itself is the domain of all languages. And then we see that most of
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00:43:05.440
the domains of mathematics that we have discovered are in some sense describing the same fractals.
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00:43:10.320
This is what category theory is obsessed about, that you can map these different domains to each
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00:43:14.320
other. So they're not that many fractals. And some of these have interesting structure and
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00:43:19.360
symmetry breaks. And so you can discover what region of this global fractal you might be embedded
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00:43:26.480
in from first principles. But the only way you can get there is from first principles. So basically
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your understanding of the universe has to start with automata and then number theory and then
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00:43:35.760
spaces and so on. Yeah. I think like Stephen Wolfram still dreams that he'll be able to arrive
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at the fundamental rules of the cellular automata or the generalization of which
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00:43:46.560
is behind our universe. Yeah. You've said on this topic, you said in a recent conversation
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that quote, some people think that a simulation can't be conscious and only a physical system can,
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00:44:00.560
but they got it completely backward. A physical system cannot be conscious. Only a simulation can
link |
00:44:05.920
be conscious. Consciousness is a simulated property that simulates itself. Just like you said,
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00:44:11.920
the mind is kind of the, we'll call it story narrative. There's a simulation. So our mind
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is essentially a simulation. Usually I try to use the terminology so that the mind is basically
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00:44:24.560
a principles that produce the simulation. It's the software that is implemented by your brain.
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And the mind is creating both the universe that we are in and the self, the idea of a person that
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is on the other side of attention and is embedded in this world. Why is that important that
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idea of a self, why is that an important feature in the simulation? It's basically a result of
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the purpose that the mind has. It's a tool for modeling, right? We are not actually monkeys. We
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are side effects of the regulation needs of monkeys. And what the monkey has to regulate is
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00:45:00.560
the relationship of an organism to an outside world that is in large part also consisting of
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00:45:06.240
other organisms. And as a result, it basically has regulation targets that it tries to get to.
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00:45:12.400
These regulation targets start with priors. They're basically like unconditional reflexes
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that we are more or less born with. And then we can reverse engineer them to make them more
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consistent. And then we get more detailed models about how the world works and how to interact with
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00:45:24.720
it. And so these priors that you commit to are largely target values that our needs should
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approach set points. And this deviation to the set point creates some urge, some tension. And we find
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ourselves living inside of feedback loops, right? Consciousness emerges over dimensions of
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00:45:42.640
disagreements with the universe, things that you care, things are not the way they should be,
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00:45:48.000
but you need to regulate. And so in some sense, the sense self is the result of all the
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identifications that you're having. And that identification is a regulation target that
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00:45:56.560
you're committing to. It's a dimension that you care about, you think is important. And this is
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00:46:01.440
also what locks you in. If you let go of these commitments, of these identifications, you get
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00:46:07.040
free. There's nothing that you have to do anymore. And if you let go of all of them, you're completely
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00:46:12.000
free and you can enter nirvana because you're done. And actually, this is a good time to pause and say
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00:46:17.920
thank you to a friend of mine, Gustav Soderström, who introduced me to your work. I wanted to give
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00:46:23.440
him a shout out. He's a brilliant guy. And I think the AI community is actually quite amazing. And
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00:46:29.360
Gustav is a good representative of that. You are as well. So I'm glad, first of all, I'm glad the
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00:46:34.160
internet exists, YouTube exists, where I can watch your talks and then get to your book and study
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00:46:40.640
your writing and think about, you know, that's amazing. Okay. But you've kind of described
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00:46:46.800
sort of this emergent phenomenon of consciousness from the simulation. So what about the hard
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00:46:52.720
problem of consciousness? Can you just linger on it? Why does it still feel like, I understand
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00:47:02.960
you're kind of, the self is an important part of the simulation, but why does the simulation
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00:47:08.800
feel like something? So if you look at a book by, say, George R. R. Martin, where the characters
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00:47:14.880
have plausible psychology and they stand on a hill because they want to conquer the city below
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00:47:19.840
the hill and they're done in it. And they look at the color of the sky and they are apprehensive
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00:47:24.080
and feel empowered and all these things. Why do they have these emotions? It's because it's
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00:47:27.920
written into the story, right? And it's written to the story because there's an adequate model of the
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00:47:32.080
person that predicts what they're going to do next. And the same thing is true for us. So it's
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00:47:37.680
basically a story that our brain is writing. It's not written in words. It's written in perceptual
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00:47:43.040
content, basically multimedia content. And it's a model of what the person would feel if it existed.
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00:47:50.560
So it's a virtual person. And you and me happen to be this virtual person. So this virtual person
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00:47:56.160
gets access to the language center and talks about the sky being blue. And this is us.
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00:48:01.760
But hold on a second. Do I exist in your simulation?
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You do exist in an almost similar way as me. So there are internal states that are less
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00:48:13.120
accessible for me that you have and so on. And my model might not be completely adequate.
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00:48:20.640
There are also things that I might perceive about you that you don't perceive. But in some sense,
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00:48:25.120
both you and me are some puppets, two puppets that enact a play in my mind. And I identify
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00:48:31.360
with one of them because I can control one of the puppets directly. And with the other one,
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00:48:36.080
I can create things in between. So for instance, we can go on an interaction that even leads to
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00:48:41.680
a coupling to a feedback loop. So we can think things together in a certain way or feel things
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00:48:46.400
together. But this coupling is itself not a physical phenomenon. It's entirely a software
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00:48:50.880
phenomenon. It's the result of two different implementations interacting with each other.
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00:48:54.960
So that's interesting. So are you suggesting, like the way you think about it, is the entirety
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00:49:02.080
of existence a simulation and where kind of each mind is a little subsimulation,
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00:49:08.640
that like, why don't you, why doesn't your mind have access to my mind's full state?
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00:49:18.640
Like, for the same reason that my mind doesn't have access to its own full state.
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00:49:22.880
So what, I mean,
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00:49:25.760
There is no trick involved. So basically, when I know something about myself,
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00:49:29.280
it's because I made a model. So one part of your brain is tasked with modeling what other parts of
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00:49:33.760
your brain are doing.
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00:49:35.200
Yes. But there seems to be an incredible consistency about this world in the physical
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00:49:40.480
sense that there's repeatable experiments and so on. How does that fit into our silly,
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00:49:46.560
the center of apes simulation of the world? So why is it so repeatable? Why is everything so
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00:49:50.960
repeatable? And not everything. There's a lot of fundamental physics experiments that are repeatable
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00:49:59.520
for a long time, all over the place and so on. Laws of physics. How does that fit in?
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00:50:05.040
It seems that the parts of the world that are not deterministic are not long lived.
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00:50:10.320
So if you build a system, any kind of automaton, so if you build simulations of something,
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00:50:17.040
you'll notice that the phenomena that endure are those that give rise to stable dynamics.
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00:50:23.520
So basically, if you see anything that is complex in the world, it's the result of usually of some
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00:50:28.000
control of some feedback that keeps it stable around certain attractors. And the things that
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00:50:32.640
are not stable that don't give rise to certain harmonic patterns and so on, they tend to get
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00:50:37.200
weeded out over time. So if we are in a region of the universe that sustains complexity, which is
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00:50:44.400
required to implement minds like ours, this is going to be a region of the universe that is very
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00:50:50.160
tightly controlled and controllable. So it's going to have lots of interesting symmetries and also
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00:50:55.680
symmetry breaks that allow the creation of structure. But they exist where? So there's
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00:51:02.800
such an interesting idea that our mind is simulation that's constructing the narrative.
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00:51:06.240
But my question is, just to try to understand how that fits with this, with the entirety of the
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universe, you're saying that there's a region of this universe that allows enough complexity to
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00:51:19.360
create creatures like us. But what's the connection between the brain, the mind, and the broader
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00:51:27.280
universe? Which comes first? Which is more fundamental? Is the mind the starting point,
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00:51:32.720
the universe is emergent? Is the universe the starting point, the minds are emergent?
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00:51:37.680
I think quite clearly the latter. That's at least a much easier explanation because it allows us to
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make causal models. And I don't see any way to construct an inverse causality.
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00:51:47.440
So what happens when you die to your mind simulation?
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00:51:51.760
My implementation ceases. So basically the thing that implements myself will no longer be present,
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00:51:57.600
which means if I am not implemented on the minds of other people, the thing that I identify with,
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00:52:01.680
the weird thing is I don't actually have an identity beyond the identity that I construct.
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00:52:07.680
If I was the Dalai Lama, he identifies as a form of government. So basically the Dalai Lama gets
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00:52:14.160
reborn, not because he's confused, but because he is not identifying as a human being. He runs on
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00:52:21.760
a human being. He's basically a governmental software that is instantiated in every new
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00:52:27.040
generation and you. So his advice is to pick someone who does this in the next generation.
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00:52:31.680
So if you identify with this, you are no longer a human and you don't die in the sense that what
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dies is only the body of the human that you run on. To kill the Dalai Lama, you would have to kill
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00:52:42.320
his tradition. And if we look at ourselves, we realize that we are to a small part like this,
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00:52:48.160
most of us. So for instance, if you have children, you realize something lives on in them. Or if you
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00:52:53.360
spark an idea in the world, something lives on, or if you identify with the society around you,
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00:52:58.400
because you are in part that you're not just this human being.
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00:53:01.280
Yeah. So in a sense, you are kind of like a Dalai Lama in the sense that you,
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00:53:07.040
Joshua Bach, is just a collection of ideas. So like you have this operating system on which
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00:53:12.160
a bunch of ideas live and interact. And then once you die, they kind of part, some of them
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00:53:17.760
jump off the ship.
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00:53:18.880
You put it put it the other way. Identity is a software state. It's a construction.
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00:53:23.360
It's not physically real. Identity is not a physical concept.
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00:53:27.920
It's basically a representation of different objects on the same world line.
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00:53:32.160
But identity lives and dies. Are you attached? What's the fundamental thing? Is it the ideas
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00:53:41.120
that come together to form identity? Or is each individual identity actually a fundamental thing?
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00:53:46.400
It's a representation that you can get agency over if you care. So basically,
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00:53:49.920
you can choose what you identify with if you want to.
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00:53:53.120
No, but it just seems if the mind is not real, that the birth and death is not a crucial part
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of it. Well, maybe I'm silly. Maybe I'm attached to this whole biological organism. But it seems
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that being a physical object in this world is an important aspect of birth and death.
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00:54:23.840
Like it feels like it has to be physical to die. It feels like simulations don't have to die.
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00:54:30.000
The physics that we experience is not the real physics. There is no color and sound in the real
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00:54:34.640
world. Color and sound are types of representations that you get if you want to model reality with
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00:54:40.560
oscillators. So colors and sound in some sense have octaves, and it's because they are represented
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00:54:45.920
probably with oscillators. So that's why colors form a circle of use. And colors have harmonics,
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00:54:52.320
sounds have harmonics as a result of synchronizing oscillators in the brain. So the world that we
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subjectively interact with is fundamentally the result of the representation mechanisms in our
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00:55:03.680
brain. They are mathematically to some degree universal. There are certain regularities that
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00:55:08.000
you can discover in the patterns and not others. But the patterns that we get, this is not the real
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00:55:12.720
world. The world that we interact with is always made of too many parts to count. So when you look
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00:55:18.400
at this table and so on, it's consisting of so many molecules and atoms that you cannot count
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00:55:23.440
them. So you only look at the aggregate dynamics, at limit dynamics. If you had almost infinitely
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00:55:29.120
many particles, what would be the dynamics of the table? And this is roughly what you get. So
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00:55:34.400
geometry that we are interacting with is the result of discovering those operators that
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00:55:39.680
work in the limit that you get by building an infinite series that converges. For those parts
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00:55:44.480
where it converges, it's geometry. For those parts where it doesn't converge, it's chaos.
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00:55:48.960
Right. And then so all of that is filtered through the consciousness that's emergent in our
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00:55:55.200
narrative. The consciousness gives it color, gives it feeling, gives it flavor.
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00:56:00.000
So I think the feeling, flavor and so on is given by the relationship that a feature has to all the
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00:56:06.720
other features. It's basically a giant relational graph that is our subjective universe. The color
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00:56:12.720
is given by those aspects of the representation or this experiential color where you care about,
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00:56:18.720
where you have identifications, where something means something, where you are the inside of a
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00:56:22.880
feedback loop. And the dimensions of caring are basically dimensions of this motivational system
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00:56:28.320
that we emerge over. The meaning of the relations, the graph. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
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00:56:34.880
Like where does the, maybe we can even step back and ask the question of what is consciousness to
link |
00:56:41.120
be sort of more systematic. Like what do you, how do you think about consciousness?
link |
00:56:47.120
I think that consciousness is largely a model of the contents of your attention. It's a mechanism
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00:56:52.240
that has evolved for a certain type of learning. At the moment, our machine learning systems
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00:56:58.000
largely work by building chains of weighted sums of real numbers with some nonlinearity.
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00:57:05.120
And you learn by piping an error signal through these different chained layers and adjusting the
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00:57:13.360
weights in these weighted sums. And you can approximate most polynomials with this
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00:57:19.680
if you have enough training data. But the price is you need to change a lot of these weights.
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00:57:24.640
Basically, the error is piped backwards into the system until it accumulates at certain junctures
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00:57:30.000
in the network. And everything else evens out statistically. And only at these junctures,
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00:57:34.800
this is where you had the actual error in the network, you make the change there. This is a
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very slow process. And our brains don't have enough time for that because we don't get old
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00:57:42.720
enough to play Go the way that our machines learn to play Go. So instead, what we do is
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00:57:47.600
an attention based learning. We pinpoint the probable region in the network where we can
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00:57:52.960
make an improvement. And then we store this binding state together with the expected outcome
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00:57:58.800
in a protocol. And this ability to make index memories for the purpose of learning to revisit
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00:58:03.600
these commitments later, this requires a memory of the contents of our attention.
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00:58:10.160
Another aspect is when I construct my reality, I make mistakes. So I see things that turn out to
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00:58:15.120
be reflections or shadows and so on, which means I have to be able to point out which features of
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00:58:20.400
my perception gave rise to a present construction of reality. So the system needs to pay attention to
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00:58:28.000
the features that are currently in its focus. And it also needs to pay attention to whether
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00:58:33.360
it pays attention itself, in part because the attentional system gets trained with the same
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00:58:37.200
mechanism, so it's reflexive, but also in part because your attention lapses if you don't pay
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00:58:41.840
attention to the attention itself. So it's the thing that I'm currently seeing, just a dream
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00:58:46.960
that my brain has spun off into some kind of daydream, or am I still paying attention to my
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00:58:52.000
percept? So you have to periodically go back and see whether you're still paying attention. And
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00:58:56.800
if you have this loop and you make it tight enough between the system becoming aware of the contents
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00:59:01.520
of its attention and the fact that it's paying attention itself and makes attention the object
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00:59:05.680
of its attention, I think this is the loop over which we wake up. So there's this attentional
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00:59:12.720
mechanism that's somehow self referential that's fundamental to what consciousness is. So just
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00:59:19.600
ask you a question, I don't know how much you're familiar with the recent breakthroughs in natural
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00:59:23.760
language processing, they use attentional mechanism, they use something called transformers to
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00:59:31.040
learn patterns and sentences by allowing the network to focus its attention to particular
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00:59:37.920
parts of the sentence and each individual. So like parameterize and make it learnable
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00:59:42.960
the dynamics of a sentence by having like a little window into the sentence. Do you think
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00:59:51.200
that's like a little step towards that eventually will take us to the attentional mechanisms from
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00:59:58.160
which consciousness can emerge? Not quite. I think it models only one aspect of attention.
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01:00:03.600
In the early days of automated language translation, there was an example that I
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01:00:08.960
found particularly funny where somebody tried to translate a text from English into German
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01:00:13.840
and it was a bat broke the window. And the translation in German was
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01:00:25.760
to translate back into English a bat, this flying mammal broke the window with a baseball bat.
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01:00:31.520
Yes. And it seemed to be the
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01:00:34.160
most similar to this program because it somehow maximized the possibility of translating the
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01:00:39.840
concept bat into German in the same sentence. And this is a mistake that the transformer model is
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01:00:45.280
not doing because it's tracking identity. And the attentional mechanism in the transformer
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01:00:49.840
model is basically putting its finger on individual concepts and make sure that these concepts pop up
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01:00:56.160
later in the text and tracks basically the individuals through the text. And it's why
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01:01:02.560
the system can learn things that other systems couldn't before it, which makes it, for instance,
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01:01:07.120
possible to write a text where it talks about the scientist, then the scientist has a name
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01:01:10.960
and has a pronoun and it gets a consistent story about that thing. What it does not do,
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01:01:16.160
it doesn't fully integrate this. So this meaning falls apart at some point, it loses track of this
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01:01:20.800
context. It does not yet understand that everything that it says has to refer to the same universe.
link |
01:01:25.920
And this is where this thing falls apart. But the attention in the transformer model does not go
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01:01:31.520
beyond tracking identity. And tracking identity is an important part of attention, but it's a
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01:01:36.240
different, very specific attentional mechanism. And it's not the one that gives rise to the type
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01:01:41.360
of consciousness that we have. Just to linger on, what do you mean by
link |
01:01:44.800
identity in the context of language? So when you talk about language,
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01:01:49.360
you have different words that can refer to the same concept.
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01:01:52.640
Got it. And in the sense that...
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01:01:53.680
The space of concepts. So... Yes. And it can also be in a nominal sense
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01:01:59.040
or in an inexical sense that you say this word does not only refer to this class of objects,
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01:02:05.520
but it refers to a definite object, to some kind of agent that waves their way through the story.
link |
01:02:11.520
And it's only referred by different ways in the language. So the language is basically a
link |
01:02:16.720
projection from a conceptual representation from a scene that is evolving into a discrete string
link |
01:02:23.680
of symbols. And what the transformer is able to do, it learns aspects of this projection
link |
01:02:29.680
mechanism that other models couldn't learn. So have you ever seen an artificial intelligence
link |
01:02:34.720
or any kind of construction idea that allows for, unlike neural networks or perhaps within
link |
01:02:40.720
neural networks, that's able to form something where the space of concepts continues to be
link |
01:02:47.440
integrated? So what you're describing, building a knowledge base, building this consistent,
link |
01:02:54.080
larger and larger sets of ideas that would then allow for deeper understanding.
link |
01:02:59.200
Wittgenstein thought that we can build everything from language,
link |
01:03:02.640
from basically a logical grammatical construct. And I think to some degree,
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01:03:07.360
this was also what Minsky believed. So that's why he focused so much on common sense reasoning and
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01:03:12.560
so on. And a project that was inspired by him was Psych. That was basically going on.
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01:03:19.600
Yes. Of course, ideas don't die. Only people die.
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01:03:25.760
That's true.
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01:03:27.120
And Alt Psych is a productive project. It's just probably not one that is going to
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01:03:31.760
converge to general intelligence. The thing that Wittgenstein couldn't solve,
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01:03:35.440
and he looked at this in his book at the end of his life, Philosophical Investigations,
link |
01:03:40.080
was the notion of images. So images play an important role in Tractatus. The Tractatus is
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01:03:44.960
an attempt to basically turn philosophy into logical probing language, to design a logical
link |
01:03:49.360
language in which you can do actual philosophy that's rich enough for doing this. And the
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01:03:54.240
difficulty was to deal with perceptual content. And eventually, I think he decided that he was
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01:04:00.480
not able to solve it. And I think this preempted the failure of the logitist program in AI.
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01:04:06.400
And the solution, as we see it today, is we need more general function approximation. There are
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01:04:11.280
geometric functions that we learn to approximate that cannot be efficiently expressed and computed
link |
01:04:16.960
in a grammatical language. We can, of course, build automata that go via number theory and so on
link |
01:04:22.240
to learn in algebra and then compute an approximation of this geometry.
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01:04:26.080
But to equate language and geometry is not an efficient way to think about it.
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01:04:32.080
So function, well, you kind of just said that neural networks are sort of, the approach that
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01:04:37.360
neural networks takes is actually more general than what can be expressed through language.
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01:04:44.640
Yes. So what can be efficiently expressed through language at the data rates at which
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01:04:49.840
we process grammatical language?
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01:04:51.360
Okay. So you don't think languages, so you disagree with Wittgenstein,
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01:04:56.880
that language is not fundamental to...
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01:04:58.720
I agree with Wittgenstein. I just agree with the late Wittgenstein.
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01:05:03.680
And I also agree with the beauty of the early Wittgenstein. I think that the Tractatus itself
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01:05:09.520
is probably the most beautiful philosophical text that was written in the 20th century.
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01:05:13.920
But language is not fundamental to cognition and intelligence and consciousness.
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01:05:18.480
So I think that language is a particular way or the natural language that we're using is a
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01:05:23.520
particular level of abstraction that we use to communicate with each other. But the languages
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01:05:28.800
in which we express geometry are not grammatical languages in the same sense. So they work slightly
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01:05:35.040
differently, more general expressions of functions. And I think the general nature of a model is you
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01:05:41.120
have a bunch of parameters. These have a range, these are the variances of the world, and you have
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01:05:47.280
relationships between them, which are constraints, which say if certain parameters have these values,
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01:05:52.400
then other parameters have to have the following values. And this is a very early insight in
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01:05:58.880
computer science. And I think some of the earliest formulations is the Boltzmann machine.
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01:06:03.600
And the problem with the Boltzmann machine is that it has a measure of whether it's good. This
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01:06:07.680
is basically the energy on the system, the amount of tension that you have left in the constraints
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01:06:11.600
where the constraints don't quite match. It's very difficult to, despite having this global
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01:06:16.960
measure, to train it. Because as soon as you add more than trivially few elements,
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01:06:22.720
parameters into the system, it's very difficult to get it settled in the right architecture.
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01:06:27.760
And so the solution that Hinton and Zanofsky found was to use a restricted Boltzmann machine,
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01:06:34.960
which uses the hidden links, the internal links in the Boltzmann machine and only has
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01:06:39.760
basically input and output layer. But this limits the expressivity of the Boltzmann machine. So now
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01:06:44.960
he builds a network of these primitive Boltzmann machines. And in some sense, you can see almost
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01:06:50.320
continuous development from this to the deep learning models that we're using today,
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01:06:54.640
even though we don't use Boltzmann machines at this point. But the idea of the Boltzmann
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01:06:58.400
machine is you take this model, you clamp some of the values to perception, and this forces
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01:07:02.640
the entire machine to go into a state that is compatible with the states that you currently
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01:07:06.240
perceive. And this state is your model of the world. I think it's a very general way of thinking
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01:07:12.960
about models, but we have to use a different approach to make it work. We have to find
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01:07:19.920
different networks that train the Boltzmann machine. So the mechanism that trains the Boltzmann
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01:07:23.920
machine and the mechanism that makes the Boltzmann machine settle into its state
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01:07:28.320
are distinct from the constrained architecture of the Boltzmann machine itself.
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01:07:33.360
The kind of mechanisms that we want to develop, you're saying?
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01:07:36.480
Yes. So the direction in which I think our research is going to go
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01:07:40.320
is going to, for instance, what you notice in perception is our perceptual models of the world
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01:07:45.920
are not probabilistic, but possibilistic, which means you should be able to perceive things that
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01:07:50.880
are improbable, but possible. A perceptual state is valid, not if it's probable, but if it's
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01:07:57.200
possible, if it's coherent. So if you see a tiger coming after you, you should be able to see this
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01:08:02.560
even if it's unlikely. And the probability is necessary for convergence of the model. So
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01:08:09.120
given the state of possibilities that is very, very large and a set of perceptual features,
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01:08:15.520
how should you change the states of the model to get it to converge with your perception?
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01:08:21.840
But the space of ideas that are coherent with the context that you're sensing
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01:08:29.680
is perhaps not as large. I mean, that's perhaps pretty small.
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01:08:34.160
The degree of coherence that you need to achieve depends, of course, how deep your models go.
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01:08:39.920
That is, for instance, politics is very simple when you know very little about game theory and
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01:08:44.560
human nature. So the younger you are, the more obvious it is how politics would work, right?
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01:08:49.600
And because you get a coherent aesthetics from relatively few inputs. And the more layers you
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01:08:55.520
model, the more layers you model reality, the harder it gets to satisfy all the constraints.
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01:09:00.880
So, you know, the current neural networks are fundamentally supervised learning system with
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01:09:07.040
a feed forward neural network is back propagation to learn. What's your intuition about what kind
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01:09:12.240
of mechanisms might we move towards to improve the learning procedure?
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01:09:18.640
I think one big aspect is going to be meta learning and architecture search starts in
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01:09:22.960
this direction. In some sense, the first wave of classical AI work by identifying a problem
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01:09:28.560
and a possible solution and implementing the solution, right? A program that plays chess.
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01:09:32.880
And right now we are in the second wave of AI. So instead of writing the algorithm that
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01:09:37.840
implements the solution, we write an algorithm that automatically searches
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01:09:41.600
for an algorithm that implements the solution. So the learning system in some sense is an
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01:09:46.400
algorithm that itself discovers the algorithm that solves the problem, like Go. Go is too hard
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01:09:51.600
to implement the solution by hand, but we can implement an algorithm that finds the solution.
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01:09:56.240
Yeah. So now let's move to the third stage, right? The third stage would be meta learning.
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01:10:00.880
Find an algorithm that discovers a learning algorithm for the given domain.
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01:10:05.040
Our brain is probably not a learning system, but a meta learning system.
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01:10:08.640
This is one way of looking at what we are doing. There is another way. If you look at the way our
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01:10:13.840
brain is, for instance, implemented, there is no central control that tells all the neurons how
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01:10:18.160
to wire up. Instead, every neuron is an individual reinforcement learning agent. Every neuron is a
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01:10:24.000
single celled organism that is quite complicated and in some sense quite motivated to get fed.
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01:10:28.960
And it gets fed if it fires on average at the right time. And the right time depends on the
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01:10:36.160
context that the neuron exists in, which is the electrical and chemical environment that it has.
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01:10:42.080
So it basically has to learn a function over its environment that tells us when to fire to get fed.
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01:10:48.240
Or if you see it as a reinforcement learning agent, every neuron is in some sense making a
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01:10:52.720
hypothesis when it sends a signal and tries to pipe a signal through the universe and tries to
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01:10:57.440
get positive feedback for it. And the entire thing is set up in such a way that it's robustly
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01:11:02.560
self organizing into a brain, which means you start out with different neuron types
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01:11:07.200
that have different priors on which hypothesis to test and how to get its reward.
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01:11:12.080
And you put them into different concentrations in a certain spatial alignment,
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01:11:16.320
and then you entrain it in a particular order. And as a result, you get a well organized brain.
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01:11:22.080
Yeah, so okay, so the brain is a meta learning system with a bunch of reinforcement learning
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01:11:29.120
agents. And what I think you said, but just to clarify, there's no centralized government that
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01:11:40.000
tells you, here's a loss function, here's a loss function, here's a loss function. Who says what's
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01:11:48.240
the objective? There are also governments which impose loss functions on different parts of the
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01:11:52.560
brain. So we have differential attention. Some areas in your brain get specially rewarded when
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01:11:56.880
you look at faces. If you don't have that, you will get prosopagnosia, which basically
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01:12:01.600
the inability to tell people apart by their faces. And the reason that happens is because
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01:12:07.360
it had an evolutionary advantage. So like evolution comes into play here. But it's basically an
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01:12:12.240
extraordinary attention that we have for faces. I don't think that people with prosopagnosia have a
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01:12:17.440
perceived defective brain, the brain just has an average attention for faces. So people with
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01:12:22.240
prosopagnosia don't look at faces more than they look at cups. So the level at which they resolve
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01:12:27.040
the geometry of faces is not higher than for cups. And people that don't have prosopagnosia look
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01:12:34.400
obsessively at faces, right? For you and me, it's impossible to move through a crowd
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01:12:38.080
without scanning the faces. And as a result, we make insanely detailed models of faces that allow
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01:12:43.440
us to discern mental states of people. So obviously, we don't know 99% of the details
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01:12:49.840
of this meta learning system. That's our mind. Okay. But still, we took a leap from something
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01:12:55.920
much dumber to that from through the evolutionary process. Can you first of all, maybe say how hard
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01:13:04.000
the, how big of a leap is that from our brain, from our ancestors to multi cell organisms? And
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01:13:14.560
is there something we can think about? As we start to think about how to engineer intelligence,
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01:13:21.680
is there something we can learn from evolution? In some sense, life exists because of the market
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01:13:28.880
opportunity of controlled chemical reactions. We compete with dump chemical reactions and we win
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01:13:34.960
in some areas against this dump combustion because we can harness those entropy gradients where you
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01:13:40.000
need to add a little bit of energy in a specific way to harvest more energy. So we out competed
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01:13:44.640
combustion. Yes, in many regions we do and we try very hard because when we are in direct
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01:13:49.520
competition, we lose, right? So because the combustion is going to close the entropy
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01:13:55.120
gradients much faster than we can run. So basically we do this because every cell has
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01:14:02.800
a Turing machine built into it. It's like literally a read write head on the tape.
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01:14:09.680
So everything that's more complicated than a molecule that just is a vortex around attractors
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01:14:16.400
that needs a Turing machine for its regulation. And then you bind cells together and you get next
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01:14:21.920
level organizational organism where the cells together implement some kind of software.
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01:14:28.880
For me, a very interesting discovery in the last year was the word spirit because I realized that
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01:14:33.120
what spirit actually means is an operating system for an autonomous robot. And when the word was
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01:14:38.640
invented, people needed this word. But they didn't have robots that they built themselves yet. The
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01:14:43.520
only autonomous robots that were known were people, animals, plants, ecosystems, cities,
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01:14:48.080
and so on. And they all had spirits. And it makes sense to say that the plant has an operating
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01:14:53.040
system, right? If you pinch the plant in one area, then it's going to have repercussions
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01:14:57.280
throughout the plant. Everything in the plant is in some sense connected into some global aesthetics
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01:15:02.160
like in other organisms. An organism is not a collection of cells, it's a function that
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01:15:07.120
tells cells how to behave. And this function is not implemented as some kind of supernatural thing,
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01:15:13.600
like some morphogenetic field. It is an emergent result of the interactions of each cell with each
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01:15:19.360
other cell. Oh my God. So what you're saying is the organism is a function that tells what to do
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01:15:31.040
and the function emerges from the interaction of the cells. Yes. So it's basically a description
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01:15:39.840
of what the plant is doing in terms of microstates. And the microstates, the physical implementation
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01:15:46.640
are too many of them to describe them. So the software that we use to describe what the plant is
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01:15:51.760
doing, the spirit of the plant is the software, the operating system of the plant, right? This is
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01:15:57.520
a way in which we, the observers, make sense of the plant. And the same is true for people. So
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01:16:03.120
people have spirits, which is their operating system in a way, right? And there's aspects of
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01:16:07.120
that operating system that relate to how your body functions and others, how you socially interact,
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01:16:12.080
how you interact with yourself and so on. And we make models of that spirit. And we think it's a
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01:16:18.480
loaded term because it's from a pre scientific age. But it took the scientific age a long time
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01:16:24.320
to rediscover a term that is pretty much the same thing. And I suspect that the differences that we
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01:16:29.440
still see between the old word and the new word are translation errors that have happened over
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01:16:33.840
the centuries. Can you actually linger on that? Why do you say that spirit, just to clarify,
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01:16:39.760
because I'm a little bit confused. So the word spirit is a powerful thing. But why did you say
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01:16:45.120
in the last year or so that you discovered this? Do you mean the same old traditional idea of a
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01:16:50.160
spirit? I try to find out what people mean by spirit. When people say spirituality in the US,
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01:16:56.240
it usually refers to the phantom limb that they develop in the absence of culture.
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01:17:00.240
And a culture is in some sense, you could say the spirit of a society that is long game. This thing
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01:17:06.880
that is become self aware at a level above the individuals where you say, if you don't do the
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01:17:12.720
following things, then the grand, grand, grand grandchildren of our children will have nothing
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01:17:16.960
to eat. So if you take this long scope, where you try to maximize the length of the game that you
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01:17:22.800
are playing as a species, you realize that you're part of a larger thing that you cannot fully
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01:17:27.040
control. You probably need to submit to the ecosphere instead of trying to completely control
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01:17:32.560
it. There needs to be a certain level at which we can exist as a species if you want to endure.
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01:17:39.440
And our culture is not sustaining this anymore. We basically made this bet with the industrial
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01:17:44.320
revolution that we can control everything. And the modernist societies with basically unfettered
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01:17:48.800
growth led to a situation in which we depend on the ability to control the entire planet.
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01:17:54.800
And since we are not able to do that, as it seems, this culture will die. And we realize that it
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01:18:00.960
doesn't have a future, right? We called our children generation Z. That's a very optimistic
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01:18:06.320
thing to do. Yeah. So you can have this kind of intuition that our civilization, you said culture,
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01:18:13.920
but you really mean the spirit of the civilization, the entirety of the civilization may not exist
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01:18:22.640
for long. Yeah. Can you untangle that? What's your intuition behind that? So you kind of offline
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01:18:29.840
mentioned to me that the industrial revolution was kind of the moment we agreed to accept
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01:18:36.400
the offer sign on the paper on the dotted line with the industrial revolution, we doomed ourselves.
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01:18:42.640
Can you elaborate on that? This is a suspicion. I, of course, don't know how it plays out. But
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01:18:47.520
it seems to me that in a society in which you leverage yourself very far over an entropic abyss
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01:18:55.840
without land on the other side, it's relatively clear that your cantilever is at some point
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01:19:00.560
going to break down into this entropic abyss. And you have to pay the bill. Okay. Russia is
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01:19:06.240
my first language. And I'm also an idiot. Me too. This is just two apes.
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01:19:13.840
Instead of playing with a banana, trying to have fun by talking. Okay. Anthropic what? And what's
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01:19:21.840
entropic? Entropic. So entropic in the sense of entropy. Oh, entropic. Got it. And entropic,
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01:19:29.200
what was the other word you used? Abyss. What's that? It's a big gorge. Oh, abyss. Abyss, yes.
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01:19:35.360
Entropic abyss. So many of the things you say are poetic. It's hurting my ears. And this one
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01:19:39.920
is amazing, right? It's mispronounced, which makes you more poetic. Wittgenstein would be proud. So
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01:19:50.080
entropic abyss. Okay. Let's rewind then. The industrial revolution. So how does that get us
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01:19:58.320
into the entropic abyss? So in some sense, we burned a hundred million years worth of trees
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01:20:04.640
to get everybody plumbing. Yes. And the society that we had before that had a very limited number
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01:20:10.480
of people. So basically since zero BC, we hovered between 300 and 400 million people. Yes. And this
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01:20:18.560
only changed with the enlightenment and the subsequent industrial revolution. And in some
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01:20:24.480
sense, the enlightenment freed our rationality and also freed our norms from the preexisting order
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01:20:30.560
gradually. It was a process that basically happened in feedback loops. So it was not that
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01:20:35.600
just one caused the other. It was a dynamic that started. And the dynamic worked by basically
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01:20:41.440
increasing productivity to such a degree that we could feed all our children. And I think the
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01:20:48.560
definition of poverty is that you have as many children as you can feed before they die, which is
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01:20:55.760
in some sense, the state that all animals on earth are in. The definition of poverty is having
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01:21:01.600
enough. So you can have only so many children as you can feed and if you have more, they die. Yes.
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01:21:06.480
And in our societies, you can basically have as many children as you want, they don't die. Right.
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01:21:12.240
So the reason why we don't have as many children as we want is because we also have to pay a price
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01:21:17.680
in terms of we have to insert ourselves in a lower social stratum if we have too many children.
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01:21:22.080
So basically everybody in the under middle and lower upper class has only a limited number of
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01:21:28.240
children because having more of them would mean a big economic hit to the individual families.
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01:21:33.680
Yes. Because children, especially in the US, super expensive to have. And you only are taken out of
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01:21:39.040
this if you are basically super rich or if you are super poor. If you're super poor, it doesn't
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01:21:43.440
matter how many kids you have because your status is not going to change. And these children allow
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01:21:48.080
you not going to die of hunger. So how does this lead to self destruction? So there's a lot of
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01:21:54.320
unpleasant properties about this process. So basically what we try to do is we try to
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01:21:58.800
let our children survive, even if they have diseases. Like I would have died before my
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01:22:06.240
mid twenties without modern medicine. And most of my friends would have as well. And so many of us
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01:22:12.080
wouldn't live without the advantages of modern medicine and modern industrialized society. We
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01:22:18.880
get our protein largely by subduing the entirety of nature. Imagine there would be some very clever
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01:22:25.760
microbe that would live in our organisms and would completely harvest them and change them into a
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01:22:32.960
thing that is necessary to sustain itself. And it would discover that for instance,
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01:22:38.640
brain cells are kind of edible, but they're not quite nice. So you need to have more fat in them
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01:22:43.440
and you turn them into more fat cells. And basically this big organism would become a
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01:22:47.600
vegetable that is barely alive and it's going to be very brittle and not resilient when the
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01:22:52.000
environment changes. Yeah, but some part of that organism, the one that's actually doing all the
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01:22:57.280
using of the, there'll still be somebody thriving. So it relates back to this original question
link |
01:23:04.560
I suspect that we are not the smartest thing on this planet. I suspect that basically every complex
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01:23:10.400
system has to have some complex regulation if it depends on feedback loops. And so for instance,
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01:23:17.840
it's likely that we should describe a certain degree of intelligence to plants. The problem is
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01:23:24.320
that plants don't have a nervous system. So they don't have a way to telegraph messages over large
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01:23:28.960
distances almost instantly in the plant. And instead, they will rely on chemicals between
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01:23:34.640
adjacent cells, which means the signal processing speed depends on the signal processing with a
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01:23:40.160
rate of a few millimeters per second. And as a result, if the plant is intelligent,
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01:23:46.320
it's not going to be intelligent at similar timescales as this.
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01:23:49.200
Yeah, the time scale is different. So you suspect we might not be the most intelligent
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01:23:55.200
but we're the most intelligent in this spatial scale in our timescale.
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01:24:00.000
So basically, if you would zoom out very far, we might discover that there have been intelligent
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01:24:05.440
ecosystems on the planet that existed for thousands of years in an almost undisturbed state. And it
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01:24:12.080
could be that these ecosystems actively related their environment. So basically change the course
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01:24:16.880
of the evolution vision, this ecosystem to make it more efficient in the future.
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01:24:20.640
So it's possible something like plants is actually a set of living organisms,
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01:24:25.440
an ecosystem of living organisms that are just operating a different timescale and are far
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01:24:30.080
superior in intelligence than human beings. And then human beings will die out and plants will
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01:24:34.560
still be there and they'll be there.
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01:24:36.880
Yeah, there's an evolutionary adaptation playing a role at all of these levels. For instance,
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01:24:41.920
if mice don't get enough food and get stressed, the next step is to
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01:24:45.840
get more sparse and more scrawny. And the reason for this is because they in a natural
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01:24:51.280
environment, the mice have probably hidden a drought or something else. And if they're overgrazed,
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01:24:56.400
then all the things that sustain them might go extinct. And there will be no mice a few
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01:25:01.200
generations from now. So to make sure that there will be mice in five generations from now,
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01:25:05.600
basically the mice scale back. And a similar thing happens with the predators of mice.
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01:25:10.640
They should make sure that the mice don't completely go extinct. So in some sense, if the predators are
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01:25:15.840
smart enough, they will be tasked with shepherding their food supply. Maybe the reason why lions have
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01:25:22.800
much larger brains than antelopes is not so much because it's so hard to catch an antelope as
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01:25:27.920
opposed to run away from the lion. But the lions need to make complex models of their environment,
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01:25:33.680
more complex than the antelopes.
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01:25:35.360
So first of all, just describing that there's a bunch of complex systems and human beings may not
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01:25:40.560
even be the most special or intelligent of those complex systems, even on Earth, makes me feel a
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01:25:45.600
little better about the extinction of human species that we're talking about.
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01:25:48.800
Yes, maybe you're just Guy Astploit to put the carbon back into the atmosphere.
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01:25:52.160
Yeah, this is just a nice, we tried it out.
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01:25:54.880
The big stain on evolution is not us, it was trees. Earth evolved trees before there could be
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01:26:00.160
digested again. There were no insects that could break all of them apart. Cellulose is so robust
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01:26:05.680
that you cannot get all of it with microorganisms. So many of these trees fell into swamps and all
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01:26:11.520
this carbon became inert and could no longer be recycled into organisms. And we are the species
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01:26:16.160
that is destined to take care of that.
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01:26:17.920
So this is kind of...
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01:26:20.160
To get out of the ground, put it back into the atmosphere and the Earth is already greening.
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01:26:24.320
So we have to be careful about that.
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01:26:26.400
To get out of the ground, put it back into the atmosphere and the Earth is already greening.
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01:26:30.240
So within a million years or so when the ecosystems have recovered from the rapid changes,
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01:26:35.680
that they're not compatible with right now, the Earth is going to be awesome again.
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01:26:39.600
And there won't be even a memory of us, of us little apes.
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01:26:42.400
I think there will be memories of us. I suspect we are the first generally intelligent species
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01:26:46.480
in the sense. We are the first species within industrial society because we will leave more
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01:26:51.040
phones than bones in the stratosphere.
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01:26:53.360
Phones than bones. I like it. But then let me push back. You've kind of suggested that
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01:27:01.040
we have a very narrow definition of... I mean, why aren't trees a higher level of general
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01:27:08.800
intelligence?
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01:27:09.440
If trees were intelligent, then they would be at different timescales, which means within
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01:27:13.760
a hundred years, the tree is probably not going to make models that are as complex as
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01:27:17.520
the ones that we make in 10 years.
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01:27:18.800
But maybe the trees are the ones that made the phones, right?
link |
01:27:25.520
You could say the entirety of life did it. The first cell never died. The first cell
link |
01:27:31.120
only split, right? And every cell in our body is still an instance of the first cell that
link |
01:27:36.640
split off from that very first cell. There was only one cell on this planet as far as
link |
01:27:40.240
we know. And so the cell is not just a building block of life. It's a hyperorganism. And we
link |
01:27:46.480
are part of this hyperorganism.
link |
01:27:49.600
So nevertheless, this hyperorganism, no, this little particular branch of it, which is us
link |
01:27:56.720
humans, because of the industrial revolution and maybe the exponential growth of technology
link |
01:28:02.480
might somehow destroy ourselves. So what do you think is the most likely way we might
link |
01:28:07.840
destroy ourselves? So some people worry about genetic manipulation. Some people, as we've
link |
01:28:13.200
talked about, worry about either dumb artificial intelligence or super intelligent artificial
link |
01:28:18.400
intelligence destroying us. Some people worry about nuclear weapons and weapons of war in
link |
01:28:25.200
general. What do you think? If you were a betting man, what would you bet on in terms
link |
01:28:29.920
of self destruction? And then would it be higher than 50%?
link |
01:28:34.800
So it's very likely that nothing that we bet on matters after we win our bets. So I
link |
01:28:40.960
don't think that bets are literally the right way to go about this.
link |
01:28:44.000
I mean, once you're dead, you won't be there to collect the wings.
link |
01:28:47.440
So it's also not clear if we as a species go extinct. But I think that our present
link |
01:28:53.040
civilization is not sustainable. So the thing that will change is there will be probably
link |
01:28:57.120
fewer people on the planet than there are today. And even if not, then still most of
link |
01:29:01.920
people that are alive today will not have offspring in 100 years from now because of
link |
01:29:05.600
the geographic changes and so on and the changes in the food supply. It's quite likely
link |
01:29:10.880
that many areas of the planet will only be livable with a close cooling chain in 100
link |
01:29:15.760
years from now. So many of the areas around the equator and in subtropical climates that
link |
01:29:22.400
are now quite pleasant to live in, will stop to be inhabitable without air conditioning.
link |
01:29:27.520
So you honestly, wow, cooling chain, close knit cooling chain communities. So you think
link |
01:29:33.840
you have a strong worry about the effects of global warming?
link |
01:29:38.000
By itself, it's not a big issue. If you live in Arizona right now, you have basically three
link |
01:29:42.480
months in the summer in which you cannot be outside. And so you have a close cooling chain.
link |
01:29:47.440
You have air conditioning in your car and in your home and you're fine. And if the air
link |
01:29:50.560
conditioning would stop for a few days, then in many areas you would not be able to survive.
link |
01:29:56.560
Can we just pause for a second? You say so many brilliant, poetic things. Do people use
link |
01:30:03.520
that term closed cooling chain? I imagine that people use it when they describe how they get
link |
01:30:08.640
meat into a supermarket, right? If you break the cooling chain and this thing starts to thaw,
link |
01:30:13.840
you're in trouble and you have to throw it away. That's such a beautiful way to put it. It's like
link |
01:30:19.760
calling a city a closed social chain or something like that. I mean, that's right. I mean, the
link |
01:30:25.120
locality of it is really important. It basically means you wake up in a climatized room, you go
link |
01:30:28.720
to work in a climatized car, you work in a climatized office, you shop in a climatized
link |
01:30:32.720
supermarket and in between you have very short distance in which you run from your car to the
link |
01:30:37.360
supermarket, but you have to make sure that your temperature does not approach the temperature of
link |
01:30:42.560
the environment. The crucial thing is the wet barb temperature. The wet barb temperature. It's
link |
01:30:46.960
what you get when you take a wet cloth and you put it around your thermometer and then you move
link |
01:30:54.560
it very quickly through the air so you get the evaporation heat. And as soon as you can no longer
link |
01:31:01.920
cool your body temperature via evaporation to a temperature below something like I think 35
link |
01:31:08.240
degrees, you die. Which means if the outside world is dry, you can still cool yourself down
link |
01:31:15.440
by sweating. But if it has a certain degree of humidity or if it goes over a certain temperature,
link |
01:31:20.720
then sweating will not save you. And this means even if you're a healthy, fit individual within
link |
01:31:26.320
a few hours, even if you try to be in the shade and so on, you'll die unless you have
link |
01:31:31.040
some climatizing equipment. And this itself, as long as you maintain civilization and you have
link |
01:31:37.360
energy supply and you have foot trucks coming to your home that are climatized, everything is fine.
link |
01:31:41.840
But what if you lose large scale open agriculture at the same time? So basically you run into foot
link |
01:31:47.440
insecurity because climate becomes very irregular or weather becomes very irregular and you have a
link |
01:31:52.480
lot of extreme weather events. So you need to roll most of your foot maybe indoor or you need to
link |
01:31:59.760
import your foot from certain regions. And maybe you're not able to maintain the civilization
link |
01:32:04.720
throughout the planet to get the infrastructure to get the foot to your home.
link |
01:32:09.040
Right. But there could be significant impacts in the sense that people begin to suffer.
link |
01:32:13.920
There could be wars over resources and so on. But ultimately, do you not have a, not a faith, but
link |
01:32:20.960
what do you make of the capacity of technological innovation to help us prevent some of the worst
link |
01:32:30.560
damages that this condition can create? So as an example, as an almost out there example,
link |
01:32:38.480
is the work that SpaceX and Elon Musk is doing of trying to also consider our propagation
link |
01:32:45.280
throughout the universe in deep space to colonize other planets. That's one technological step.
link |
01:32:51.360
But of course, what Elon Musk is trying on Mars is not to save us from global warming,
link |
01:32:56.160
because Mars looks much worse than Earth will look like after the worst outcomes of global warming
link |
01:33:01.760
imaginable, right? Mars is essentially not habitable.
link |
01:33:06.000
It's exceptionally harsh environment, yes. But what he is doing, what a lot of people throughout
link |
01:33:10.480
history since the Industrial Revolution are doing, are just doing a lot of different technological
link |
01:33:15.200
innovation with some kind of target. And when it ends up happening, it's totally unexpected new
link |
01:33:20.240
things come up. So trying to terraform or trying to colonize Mars, extremely harsh environment,
link |
01:33:27.840
might give us totally new ideas of how to expand or increase the power of this closed cooling
link |
01:33:36.240
circuit that empowers the community. So it seems like there's a little bit of a race between our
link |
01:33:44.880
open ended technological innovation of this communal operating system that we have and our
link |
01:33:55.280
general tendency to want to overuse resources and thereby destroy ourselves. You don't think
link |
01:34:02.800
technology can win that race? I think the probability is relatively low, given that our
link |
01:34:08.960
technology is, for instance, the US is stagnating since the 1970s roughly, in terms of technology.
link |
01:34:15.040
Most of the things that we do are the result of incremental processes. What about Intel?
link |
01:34:19.920
What about Moore's Law? It's basically, it's very incremental. The things that we're doing is,
link |
01:34:24.480
so the invention of the microprocessor was a major thing, right? The miniaturization
link |
01:34:31.760
of transistors was really major. But the things that we did afterwards largely were not that
link |
01:34:38.880
innovative. We had gradual changes of scaling things from CPUs into GPUs and things like that.
link |
01:34:48.960
But I don't think that there are, basically there are not many things. If you take a person that
link |
01:34:54.080
died in the 70s and was at the top of their game, they would not need to read that many books
link |
01:34:59.040
to be current again. But it's all about books. Who cares about books? There might be things that are
link |
01:35:05.040
beyond books. Or say papers. No, papers. Forget papers. There might be things that are, so papers
link |
01:35:11.040
and books and knowledge, that's a concept of a time when you were sitting there by candlelight
link |
01:35:16.400
and individual consumers of knowledge. What about the impact that we're not in the middle of,
link |
01:35:21.280
might not be understanding of Twitter, of YouTube? The reason you and I are sitting here today
link |
01:35:27.760
is because of Twitter and YouTube. So the ripple effect, and there's two minds, sort of two dumb
link |
01:35:35.600
apes coming up with a new, perhaps a new clean insights, and there's 200 other apes listening
link |
01:35:42.160
right now, 200,000 other apes listening right now. And that effect, it's very difficult to understand
link |
01:35:48.800
what that effect will have. That might be bigger than any of the advancements of the microprocessor
link |
01:35:53.360
or any of the industrial revolution, the ability of spread knowledge. And that knowledge,
link |
01:36:02.880
like it allows good ideas to reach millions much faster. And the effect of that, that might be the
link |
01:36:09.840
new, that might be the 21st century, is the multiplying of ideas, of good ideas. Because if
link |
01:36:16.880
you say one good thing today, that will multiply across huge amounts of people, and then they will
link |
01:36:24.160
say something, and then they will have another podcast, and they'll say something, and then they'll
link |
01:36:27.840
write a paper. That could be a huge, you don't think that? Yeah, we should have billions for
link |
01:36:33.360
Neumann's right now in two rings, and we don't for some reason. I suspect the reason is that
link |
01:36:38.960
we destroy our attention span. Also the incentives, of course, different. Yeah, we have extreme
link |
01:36:43.200
Kardashians, yeah. So the reason why we're sitting here and doing this as a YouTube video is because
link |
01:36:48.000
you and me don't have the attention span to write a book together right now. And you guys probably
link |
01:36:52.160
don't have the attention span to read it. So let me tell you, it's very short. But we're an hour
link |
01:37:01.600
and 40 minutes in, and I guarantee you that 80% of the people are still listening. So there is an
link |
01:37:06.240
attention span. It's just the form. Who said that the book is the optimal way to transfer information?
link |
01:37:13.520
This is still an open question. That's what we're... It's something that social media could be doing
link |
01:37:17.440
that other forms could not be doing. I think the end game of social media is a global brain.
link |
01:37:22.240
And Twitter is in some sense a global brain that is completely hooked on dopamine, doesn't have any
link |
01:37:26.560
kind of inhibition, and as a result is caught in a permanent seizure. It's also in some sense a
link |
01:37:32.320
multiplayer role playing game. And people use it to play an avatar that is not like them,
link |
01:37:38.000
as they were in this sane world, and they look through the world through the lens of their phones
link |
01:37:41.600
and think it's the real world. But it's the Twitter world that is distorted by the popularity
link |
01:37:45.280
incentives of Twitter. Yeah, the incentives and just our natural biological, the dopamine rush
link |
01:37:52.640
of a like, no matter how... I try to be very kind of Zen like and minimalist and not be influenced
link |
01:38:01.920
by likes and so on, but it's probably very difficult to avoid that to some degree.
link |
01:38:07.280
Speaking at a small tangent of Twitter, how can Twitter be done better?
link |
01:38:15.760
I think it's an incredible mechanism that has a huge impact on society
link |
01:38:19.760
by doing exactly what you're doing. Sorry, doing exactly what you described, which is having this...
link |
01:38:25.040
We're like, is this some kind of game, and we're kind of our individual RL agents in this game,
link |
01:38:33.440
and it's uncontrollable because there's not really a centralized control. Neither Jack Dorsey nor
link |
01:38:37.440
the engineers at Twitter seem to be able to control this game. Or can they? That's sort
link |
01:38:44.800
of a question. Is there any advice you would give on how to control this game?
link |
01:38:49.760
I wouldn't give advice because I am certainly not an expert, but I can give my thoughts on this.
link |
01:38:53.440
And our brain has solved this problem to some degree. Our brain has lots of individual agents
link |
01:39:01.120
that manage to play together in a way. And we have also many contexts in which other organisms
link |
01:39:06.080
have found ways to solve the problems of cooperation that we don't solve on Twitter.
link |
01:39:12.480
And maybe the solution is to go for an evolutionary approach. So imagine that you
link |
01:39:18.720
have something like Reddit or something like Facebook and something like Twitter,
link |
01:39:23.520
and you think about what they have in common. What they have in common, they are companies
link |
01:39:27.440
that in some sense own a protocol. And this protocol is imposed on a community, and the
link |
01:39:32.960
protocol has different components for monetization, for user management, for user display, for rating,
link |
01:39:39.680
for anonymity, for import of other content, and so on. And now imagine that you take these
link |
01:39:44.320
components of the protocol apart, and you do it in some sense like communities within this
link |
01:39:50.960
social network. And these communities are allowed to mix and match their protocols and design new
link |
01:39:55.840
ones. So for instance, the UI and the UX can be defined by the community. The rules for sharing
link |
01:40:02.000
content across communities can be defined. The monetization can be redefined. The way you reward
link |
01:40:07.440
individual users for what can be redefined. The way users can represent themselves and to each
link |
01:40:13.040
other can redefined. Who could be the redefiner? So can individual human beings build enough
link |
01:40:18.720
intuition to redefine those things? This itself can become part of the protocol. So for instance,
link |
01:40:22.800
it could be in some communities, it will be a single person that comes up with these things.
link |
01:40:27.600
And others, it's a group of friends. Some might implement a voting scheme that has some interesting
link |
01:40:32.480
weighted voting. Who knows? Who knows what will be the best self organizing principle for this.
link |
01:40:36.640
But the process can't be automated. I mean, it seems like the brain.
link |
01:40:39.840
It can be automated so people can write software for this. And eventually the idea is,
link |
01:40:45.920
let's not make an assumption about this thing if you don't know what the right solution is. In
link |
01:40:50.240
those areas that we have no idea whether the right solution will be people designing this ad hoc,
link |
01:40:55.520
or machines doing this. Whether you want to enforce compliance by social norms like Wikipedia,
link |
01:41:01.200
or with software solutions, or with AI that goes through the posts of people, or with a
link |
01:41:06.480
legal principle, and so on. This is something maybe you need to find out. And so the idea would
link |
01:41:12.160
be if you let the communities evolve, and you just control it in such a way that you are
link |
01:41:17.840
incentivizing the most sentient communities. The ones that produce the most interesting
link |
01:41:24.400
behaviors that allow you to interact in the most helpful ways to the individuals.
link |
01:41:29.440
You have a network that gives you information that is relevant to you.
link |
01:41:32.640
It helps you to maintain relationships to others in healthy ways. It allows you to build teams. It
link |
01:41:37.680
allows you to basically bring the best of you into this thing and goes into a coupling into
link |
01:41:42.720
a relationship with others in which you produce things that you would be unable to produce alone.
link |
01:41:47.040
Yes, beautifully put. But the key process of that with incentives and evolution
link |
01:41:53.040
is things that don't adopt themselves to effectively get the incentives have to die.
link |
01:42:02.640
And the thing about social media is communities that are unhealthy or whatever you wanted that
link |
01:42:07.600
defines the incentives really don't like dying. One of the things that people really get aggressive,
link |
01:42:13.120
protest aggressively is when they're censored. Especially in America. I don't know much about
link |
01:42:19.280
the rest of the world, but the idea of freedom of speech, the idea of censorship is really painful
link |
01:42:24.880
in America. And so what do you think about that? Having grown up in East Germany, do you think
link |
01:42:38.480
censorship is an important tool in our brain and the intelligence and in social networks?
link |
01:42:45.520
So basically, if you're not a good member of the entirety of the system, they should be blocked
link |
01:42:53.200
away. Well, locked away, blocked. An important thing is who decides that you are a good member.
link |
01:42:59.040
Who? Is it distributed? And what is the outcome of the process that decides it,
link |
01:43:04.160
both for the individual and for society at large. For instance, if you have a high trust society,
link |
01:43:09.840
you don't need a lot of surveillance. And the surveillance is even in some sense undermining
link |
01:43:14.720
trust. Because it's basically punishing people that look suspicious when surveyed,
link |
01:43:21.280
but do the right thing anyway. And the opposite, if you have a low trust society,
link |
01:43:26.560
then surveillance can be a better trade off. And the US is currently making a transition from a
link |
01:43:30.960
relatively high trust or mixed trust society to a low trust society. So surveillance will increase.
link |
01:43:36.400
Another thing is that beliefs are not just inert representations. There are implementations that
link |
01:43:40.880
run code on your brain and change your reality and change the way you interact with each other
link |
01:43:45.600
at some level. And some of the beliefs are just public opinions that we use to display our
link |
01:43:52.240
alignment. So for instance, people might say, all cultures are the same and equally good,
link |
01:43:58.560
but still they prefer to live in some cultures over others, very, very strongly so. And it turns
link |
01:44:03.760
out that the cultures are defined by certain rules of interaction. And these rules of interaction
link |
01:44:08.240
lead to different results when you implement them. So if you adhere to certain rules,
link |
01:44:12.720
you get different outcomes in different societies. And this all leads to very tricky
link |
01:44:18.720
situations when people do not have a commitment to a shared purpose.
link |
01:44:22.640
And our societies probably need to rediscover what it means to have a shared purpose and how
link |
01:44:27.920
to make this compatible with a non totalitarian view. So in some sense, the US is caught in a
link |
01:44:34.320
conundrum between totalitarianism and diversity, and doesn't need to know how to resolve this.
link |
01:44:42.880
And the solutions that the US has found so far are very crude because it's a very young society
link |
01:44:47.280
that is also under a lot of tension. It seems to me that the US will have to reinvent itself.
link |
01:44:52.240
What do you think, just philosophizing, what kind of mechanisms of government do you think
link |
01:45:01.120
we as a species should be involved with, US or broadly? What do you think will work well
link |
01:45:07.200
as a system? Of course, we don't know. It all seems to work pretty crappily,
link |
01:45:11.360
some things worse than others. Some people argue that communism is the best. Others say,
link |
01:45:16.800
yeah, look at the Soviet Union. Some people argue that anarchy is the best and then completely
link |
01:45:22.720
discarding the positive effects of government. There's a lot of arguments. US seems to be doing
link |
01:45:29.920
pretty damn well in the span of history. There's a respect for human rights, which seems to be a
link |
01:45:36.240
nice feature, not a bug. And economically, a lot of growth, a lot of technological development.
link |
01:45:42.320
People seem to be relatively kind on the grand scheme of things.
link |
01:45:47.760
What lessons do you draw from that? What kind of government system do you think is good?
link |
01:45:52.400
Ideally, a government should not be perceivable. It should be frictionless. The more you notice the
link |
01:45:58.880
influence of the government, the more friction you experience, the less effective and efficient
link |
01:46:04.240
the government probably is. A government, game theoretically, is an agent that imposes
link |
01:46:10.560
an offset on your payout metrics to make your Nash equilibrium compatible with the common good.
link |
01:46:17.680
You have these situations where people act on local incentives and these local incentives,
link |
01:46:23.120
everybody does the thing that's locally the best for them, but the global outcome is not good.
link |
01:46:27.040
And this is even the case when people care about the global outcome, because a regulation mechanism
link |
01:46:31.760
exists that creates a causal relationship between what I want to have for the global good and what
link |
01:46:36.240
I do. For instance, if I think that we should fly less and I stay at home, there's not a single plane
link |
01:46:41.440
that is going to not start because of me, right? It's not going to have an influence, but I don't
link |
01:46:49.120
get from A to B. So the way to implement this would be to have a government that is sharing
link |
01:46:55.840
this idea that we should fly less and is then imposing a regulation that, for instance,
link |
01:46:59.600
makes flying more expensive and gives incentives for inventing other forms of transportation that
link |
01:47:06.800
are less putting that strain on the environment, for instance. So there's so much optimism and
link |
01:47:14.000
so many things you describe, and yet there's the pessimism of you think our civilization is going
link |
01:47:18.160
to come to an end. So that's not a hundred percent probability. Nothing in this world is.
link |
01:47:23.760
So what's the trajectory out of self destruction, do you think? I suspect that in some sense,
link |
01:47:30.960
we are both too smart and not smart enough, which means we are very good at solving near
link |
01:47:35.520
term problems. And at the same time, we are unwilling to submit to the imperatives that
link |
01:47:43.040
we would have to follow in if you want to stick around. So that makes it difficult. If you were
link |
01:47:48.720
unable to solve everything technologically, you can probably understand how high the child mortality
link |
01:47:53.760
needs to be to absorb the mutation rate and how high the mutation rate needs to be to adapt to a
link |
01:47:59.280
slowly changing ecosystemic environment. So you could in principle compute all these things game
link |
01:48:04.480
theoretically and adapt to it. But if you cannot do this, because you are like me and you have
link |
01:48:10.720
children, you don't want them to die, you will use any kind of medical information to keep
link |
01:48:16.320
mortality low. Even if it means that within a few generations, we have enormous genetic drift,
link |
01:48:22.000
and most of us have allergies as a result of not being adapted to the changes that we
link |
01:48:26.400
made to our food supply. That's for now, I say technologically speaking, we're just very young,
link |
01:48:31.760
300 years industrial revolution, we're very new to this idea. So you're attached to your kids being
link |
01:48:36.880
alive and not being murdered for the good of society. But that might be a very temporary
link |
01:48:41.680
moment of time that we might evolve in our thinking. So like you said, we're both smart
link |
01:48:48.800
and not smart enough. We are probably not the first human civilization that has discovered
link |
01:48:54.720
technology that allows us to efficiently overgraze our resources. And this overgrazing,
link |
01:48:59.840
this thing, at some point, we think we can compensate this because if we have eaten all
link |
01:49:04.320
the grass, we will find a way to grow mushrooms. But it could also be that the ecosystems tip.
link |
01:49:10.160
And so what really concerns me is not so much the end of the civilization, because we will
link |
01:49:14.240
invent a new one. But what concerns me is the fact that, for instance, the oceans might tip.
link |
01:49:21.920
So for instance, maybe the plankton dies because of ocean acidification and cyanobacteria take over,
link |
01:49:27.520
and as a result, we can no longer breathe the atmosphere. This would be really concerning.
link |
01:49:32.160
So basically a major reboot of most complex organisms on Earth. And I think this is a
link |
01:49:37.200
possibility. I don't know what the percentage for this possibility is, but it doesn't seem to be
link |
01:49:42.880
outlandish to me if you look at the scale of the changes that we've already triggered on this
link |
01:49:46.480
planet. And so Danny Hiller suggests that, for instance, we may be able to put chalk into the
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01:49:51.920
stratosphere to limit solar radiation. Maybe it works. Maybe this is sufficient to counter
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the effects of what we've done. Maybe it won't be. Maybe we won't be able to implement it by
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the time it's prevalent. I have no idea how the future is going to play out in this regard. It's
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just, I think it's quite likely that we cannot continue like this. All our cousin species,
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the other hominids are gone. So the right step would be to what? To rewind
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01:50:19.280
and to rewind towards the industrial revolution and slow the, so try to contain the technological
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01:50:28.320
process that leads to the overconsumption of resources? Imagine you get to choose,
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you have one lifetime. You get born into a sustainable agricultural civilization,
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01:50:38.640
300, maybe 400 million people on the planet tops. Or before this, some kind of nomadic
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01:50:45.840
species was like a million or 2 million. And so you don't meet new people unless you give birth
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01:50:51.440
to them. You cannot travel to other places in the world. There is no internet. There is no
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interesting intellectual tradition that reaches considerably deep. So you would not discover
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human completeness probably and so on. We wouldn't exist. And the alternative is you get born into an
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insane world. One that is doomed to die because it has just burned a hundred million years worth
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of trees in a single century. Which one do you like? I think I like this one. It's a very weird
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thing that when you find yourself on a Titanic and you see this iceberg and it looks like we
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are not going to miss it. And a lot of people are in denial. And most of the counter arguments
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sound like denial to me. They don't seem to be rational arguments. And the other thing is we
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are born on this Titanic. Without this Titanic, we wouldn't have been born. We wouldn't be here. We
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wouldn't be talking. We wouldn't be on the internet. We wouldn't do all the things that we enjoy.
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And we are not responsible for this happening. If we had the choice, we would probably try to
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prevent it. But when we were born, we were never asked when we want to be born, in which society
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we want to be born, what incentive structures we want to be exposed to. We have relatively
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little agency in the entire thing. Humanity has relatively little agency in the whole thing. It's
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01:52:00.080
basically a giant machine that's tumbling down a hill and everybody is frantically trying to push
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some buttons. Nobody knows what these buttons are meaning, what they connect to. And most of them
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01:52:09.840
are not stopping this tumbling down the hill. Is it possible that artificial intelligence will give
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us an escape latch somehow? So there's a lot of worry about existential threats of artificial
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intelligence. But what AI also allows, in general forms of automation, allows the potential of
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extreme productivity growth that will also perhaps in a positive way transform society,
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01:52:40.560
that may allow us to inadvertently to return to the more, to the same kind of ideals of closer to
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01:52:52.480
nature that's represented in hunter gatherer societies. That's not destroying the planet,
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01:52:59.600
that's not doing overconsumption and so on. I mean, generally speaking,
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do you have hope that AI can help somehow? I think it's not fun to be very close to nature
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until you completely subdue nature. So our idea of being close to nature means being close to
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agriculture, basically forests that don't have anything in them that eats us.
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TITO See, I mean, I want to disagree with that. I think the niceness of being close to nature
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01:53:30.000
is to being fully present and in like, when survival becomes your primary,
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not just your goal, but your whole existence. I'm not just romanticizing, I can just speak for
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myself. I am self aware enough that that is a fulfilling existence.
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I personally prefer to be in nature and not fight for my survival. I think fighting for your survival
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01:54:00.880
while being in the cold and in the rain and being hunted by animals and having open wounds
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is very unpleasant.
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01:54:07.760
There's a contradiction in there. Yes, I and you, just as you said, would not choose it.
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01:54:14.000
But if I was forced into it, it would be a fulfilling existence.
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01:54:17.680
Yes, if you are adapted to it, basically, if your brain is wired up in such a way that you
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get rewards optimally in such an environment. And there's some evidence for this that for
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a certain degree of complexity, basically, people are more happy in such an environment because
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it's what you largely have evolved for. In between, we had a few thousand years in which
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I think we have evolved for a slightly more comfortable environment. So
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there is probably something like an intermediate stage in which people would be more happy than
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they would be if they would have to fend for themselves in small groups in the forest and
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often die. Versus something like this, where we now have basically a big machine, a big
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Mordor in which we run through concrete boxes and press buttons and machines, and largely
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01:55:05.920
don't feel well cared for as the monkeys that we are. So returning briefly to, not briefly,
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but returning to AI, what, let me ask a romanticized question, what is the most beautiful
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to you, silly ape, the most beautiful or surprising idea in the development of artificial
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intelligence, whether in your own life or in the history of artificial intelligence that you've
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come across? If you built an AI, it probably can make models at an arbitrary degree of detail,
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01:55:37.120
right, of the world. And then it would try to understand its own nature. It's tempting to think
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that at some point when we have general intelligence, we have competitions where we
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will let the AIs wake up in different kinds of physical universes, and we measure how many
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01:55:51.040
movements of the Rubik's cube it takes until it's figured out what's going on in its universe and
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what it is in its own nature and its own physics and so on, right? So what if we exist in the
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memory of an AI that is trying to understand its own nature and remembers its own genesis and
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01:56:05.440
remembers Lex and Joscha sitting in a hotel room, sparking some of the ideas off that led to the
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development of general intelligence. So we're a kind of simulation that's running in an AI
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system that's trying to understand itself. It's not that I believe that, but I think it's a
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beautiful idea. I mean, you kind of returned to this idea with the Turing test of intelligence
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01:56:31.760
being the process of asking and answering what is intelligence. I mean, do you think there is an
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answer? Why is there such a search for an answer? So does there have to be like an answer? You just
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said an AI system that's trying to understand the why of what, you know, understand itself.
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01:57:04.880
Is that a fundamental process of greater and greater complexity, greater and greater
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intelligence is the continuous trying of understanding itself?
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01:57:13.840
No, I think you will find that most people don't care about that because they're well adjusted
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enough to not care. And the reason why people like you and me care about it probably has to
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do with the need to understand ourselves. It's because we are in fundamental disagreement with
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01:57:28.000
the universe that we wake up in. They look down on me and they see, oh my God, I'm caught in a
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01:57:32.720
monkey. What's that? Some people are unhappy with the government and I'm unhappy with the entire
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01:57:38.400
universe that I find myself in. Oh, so you don't think that's a fundamental aspect of human nature
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that some people are just suppressing? That they wake up shocked they're in the body of a monkey?
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01:57:51.200
No, there is a clear adaptive value to not be confused by that and by...
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01:57:56.960
Well, no, that's not what I asked. So you have this clear adaptive value, then there's clear
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there's clear adaptive value to while fundamentally your brain is confused by that,
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by creating an illusion, another layer of the narrative that says, you know, that tries to
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suppress that and instead say that, you know, what's going on with the government right now
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01:58:21.120
is the most important thing. What's going on with my football team is the most important thing.
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01:58:25.120
But it seems to me, like for me, it was a really interesting moment reading Ernest
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01:58:32.000
Becker's Denial of Death. That, you know, this kind of idea that we're all, you know,
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the fundamental thing from which most of our human mind springs is this fear of mortality
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01:58:49.680
and being cognizant of your mortality and the fear of that mortality. And then you construct
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illusions on top of that. I guess you being just a push on it, you really don't think it's possible
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that this worry of the big existential questions is actually fundamental as the existentialist
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thought to our existence. I think that the fear of death only plays a role as long as you don't
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see the big picture. The thing is that minds are software states, right? Software doesn't have
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01:59:22.560
identity. Software in some sense is a physical law. But it feels like there's an identity. I
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thought that was the for this particular piece of software and the narrative it tells, that's
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a fundamental property of it. The maintenance of the identity is not terminal. It's instrumental
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to something else. You maintain your identity so you can serve your meaning. So you can do the
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01:59:46.320
things that you're supposed to do before you die. And I suspect that for most people the fear of
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death is the fear of dying before they are done with the things that they feel they have to do,
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even though they cannot quite put their finger on it, what that is.
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01:59:59.280
Right. But in the software world, to return to the question, then what happens after we die?
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Why would you care? You will not be longer there. The point of dying is that you are gone.
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Well, maybe I'm not. This is what, you know, it seems like there's so much,
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in the idea that this is just, the mind is just a simulation that's constructing a narrative around
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some particular aspects of the quantum mechanical wave function world that we can't quite get direct
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access to. Then like the idea of mortality seems to be a little fuzzy as well. It doesn't, maybe
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there's not a clear answer. The fuzzy idea is the one of continuous existence. We don't have
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continuous existence. How do you know that? Because it's not computable. Because you're
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saying it's going to be directly infinite. There is no continuous process. The only thing that
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binds you together with the Lex Friedman from yesterday is the illusion that you have memories
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02:01:02.080
about him. So if you want to upload, it's very easy. You make a machine that thinks it's you.
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Because this is the same thing that you are. You are a machine that thinks it's you.
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02:01:10.000
But that's immortality. Yeah, but it's just a belief. You can create this belief very easily
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02:01:15.600
once you realize that the question whether you are immortal or not depends entirely on your beliefs
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02:01:21.840
and your own continuity. But then you can be immortal by the continuity of the belief.
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02:01:28.880
You cannot be immortal, but you can stop being afraid of your mortality because you realize you
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02:01:33.680
were never continuously existing in the first place. Well, I don't know if I'd be more terrified
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02:01:39.600
or less terrified by that. It seems like the fact that I existed.
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02:01:44.160
You don't know this state in which you don't have a self. You can't turn off yourself.
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I can't turn off myself.
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02:01:50.320
You can't turn it off. You can't turn it off.
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I can.
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02:01:52.640
Yes. And you can basically meditate yourself in a state where you are still conscious,
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02:01:57.120
where still things are happening, where you know everything that you knew before,
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02:02:00.800
but you're no longer identified with changing anything.
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02:02:03.120
And this means that yourself, in a way, dissolves. There is no longer this person. You know that this
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person construct exists in other states and it runs on this brain of Lex Friedman, but it's not
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02:02:15.520
a real thing. It's a construct. It's an idea. And you can change that idea. And if you let go of
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this idea, if you don't think that you are special, you realize it's just one of many people and it's
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02:02:26.800
not your favorite person even. It's just one of many. And it's the one that you are doomed to
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02:02:31.760
control for the most part. And that is basically informing the actions of this organism as a
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02:02:37.360
control model. And this is all there is. And you are somehow afraid that this control model gets
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interrupted or loses the identity of continuity.
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02:02:47.200
Yeah. So I'm attached. I mean, yeah, it's a very popular, it's a somehow compelling notion that
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02:02:52.880
being attached, like there's no need to be attached to this idea of an identity.
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02:02:58.720
But that in itself could be an illusion that you construct. So the process of meditation,
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02:03:03.040
while popular, is thought of as getting under the concept of identity. It could be just putting a
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02:03:08.480
cloak over it, just telling it to be quiet for the moment. I think that meditation is eventually just
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02:03:18.240
a bunch of techniques that let you control attention. And when you can control attention,
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02:03:22.720
you can get access to your own source code, hopefully not before you understand what you're
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02:03:31.200
doing. And then you can change the way it works temporarily or permanently.
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02:03:36.000
So yeah, meditation is to get a glimpse at the source code, get under, so basically control or
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02:03:41.920
turn off the attention.
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02:03:42.720
The entire thing is that you learn to control attention. So everything else is downstream
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from controlling attention.
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And control the attention that's looking at the attention.
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02:03:50.880
Normally we only get attention in the parts of our mind that create heat, where you have a
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mismatch between model and the results that are happening. And so most people are not self aware
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02:04:00.240
because their control is too good. If everything works out roughly the way you want, and the only
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things that don't work out is whether your football team wins, then you will mostly have
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02:04:09.920
models about these domains. And it's only when, for instance, your fundamental relationships to
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02:04:15.120
the world around you don't work, because the ideology of your country is insane, and you don't
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02:04:20.080
understand why it's insane, and the other kids are not nerds, and don't understand why you
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02:04:24.160
understand physics, and you don't, why you want to understand physics, and you don't understand
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02:04:29.280
why somebody would not want to understand physics.
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02:04:32.640
So we kind of brought up neurons in the brain as reinforcement learning agents.
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02:04:40.480
And there's been some successes as you brought up with Go, with AlphaGo, AlphaZero, with ideas
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02:04:46.240
which I think are incredibly interesting ideas of systems playing each other in an automated way
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02:04:52.400
to improve by playing other systems in a particular construct of a game that are a little
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02:05:00.560
bit better than itself, and then thereby improving continuously. All the competitors in the game
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02:05:05.920
are improving gradually. So being just challenging enough and from learning from the process of the
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02:05:11.520
competition. Do you have hope for that reinforcement learning process to achieve
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02:05:16.720
greater and greater level of intelligence? So we talked about different ideas in AI that need to
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02:05:21.200
be solved. Is RL a part of that process of trying to create an AGI system? What do you think?
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02:05:28.480
Definitely forms of unsupervised learning, but there are many algorithms that can achieve that.
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02:05:32.800
And I suspect that ultimately the algorithms that work, there will be a class of them or many of
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02:05:38.800
them. And they might have small differences of like a magnitude and efficiency, but eventually
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02:05:45.120
what matters is the type of model that you form and the types of models that we form right now
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02:05:49.760
are not sparse enough. What does it mean to be sparse? It means that ideally every potential
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02:05:59.200
model state should correspond to a potential world state. So basically if you vary states
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02:06:06.000
in your model, you always end up with valid world states and our mind is not quite there.
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02:06:10.400
So an indication is basically what we see in dreams. The older we get, the more boring our
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dreams become because we incorporate more and more constraints that we learned about how the
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02:06:19.840
world works. So many of the things that we imagine to be possible as children turn out to be
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02:06:25.280
constrained by physical and social dynamics. And as a result, fewer and fewer things remain
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02:06:31.600
possible. It's not because our imagination scales back, but the constraints under which it operates
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02:06:36.640
become tighter and tighter. And so the constraints under which our neural networks operate are
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02:06:42.800
almost limitless, which means it's very difficult to get a neural network to imagine things that
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02:06:47.360
look real. So I suspect part of what we need to do is we probably need to build dreaming systems.
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02:06:55.200
I suspect that part of the purpose of dreams is similar to a generative adversarial network,
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02:07:01.280
we learn certain constraints and then it produces alternative perspectives on the same set of
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constraints. So you can recognize it under different circumstances. Maybe we have flying
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02:07:11.520
dreams as children because we recreate the objects that we know and the maps that we know from
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different perspectives, which also means from a bird's eye perspective. So I mean, aren't we
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02:07:21.040
doing that anyway? I mean, not with our eyes closed and when we're sleeping, aren't we just
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constantly running dreams and simulations in our mind as we try to interpret the environment?
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02:07:32.560
I mean, sort of considering all the different possibilities, the way we interact with the
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environment seems like, essentially, like you said, sort of creating a bunch of simulations
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02:07:46.000
that are consistent with our expectations, with our previous experiences, with the things we just
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02:07:52.240
saw recently. And through that hallucination process, we are able to then somehow stitch
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together what actually we see in the world with the simulations that match it well and thereby
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interpret it. I suspect that you and my brain are slightly unusual in this regard,
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which is probably what got you into MIT. So this obsession of constantly pondering possibilities
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and solutions to problems. Oh, stop it. I think I'm not talking about intellectual stuff. I'm
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talking about just doing the kind of stuff it takes to walk and not fall. Yes, this is
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largely automatic. Yes, but the process is, I mean... It's not complicated. It's relatively
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02:08:43.600
easy to build a neural network that, in some sense, learns the dynamics. The fact that we
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02:08:48.480
haven't done it right so far doesn't mean it's hard, because you can see that a biological
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organism does it with relatively few neurons. So basically, you build a bunch of neural
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02:08:57.360
oscillators that entrain themselves with the dynamics of your body in such a way that the
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02:09:01.760
regulator becomes isomorphic in its model to the dynamics that it regulates, and then it's
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automatic. And it's only interesting in the sense that it captures attention when the system is off.
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02:09:12.160
See, but thinking of the kind of mechanism that's required to do walking as a controller,
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02:09:18.000
as a neural network, I think it's a compelling notion, but it discards quietly,
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02:09:27.840
or at least makes implicit, the fact that you need to have something like common sense reasoning
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02:09:33.040
to walk. It's an open question whether you do or not. But my intuition is to act in this world,
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02:09:40.400
there's a huge knowledge base that's underlying it somehow. There's so much information
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02:09:46.400
of the kind we have never been able to construct in neural networks in an artificial intelligence
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02:09:53.520
systems period, which is like, it's humbling, at least in my imagination, the amount of information
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02:10:00.000
required to act in this world humbles me. And I think saying that neural networks can accomplish
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it is missing the fact that we don't have yet a mechanism for constructing something like
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common sense reasoning. I mean, what's your sense about to linger on the idea of what kind of
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02:10:28.480
mechanism would be effective at walking? You said just a neural network, not maybe the kind we have,
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but something a little bit better, would be able to walk easily. Don't you think it also needs to know
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like a huge amount of knowledge that's represented under the flag of common sense reasoning?
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02:10:47.360
How much common sense knowledge do we actually have? Imagine that you are really hardworking
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02:10:51.680
for all your life and you form two new concepts every half hour or so. You end up with something
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02:10:56.640
like a million concepts because you don't get that old. So a million concepts, that's not a lot.
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02:11:02.320
So it's not just a million concepts. I think it would be a lot. I personally think it might be
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much more than a million. But if you think just about the numbers, you don't live that long.
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If you think about how many cycles do your neurons have in your life, it's quite limited.
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02:11:16.480
You don't get that old. Yeah, but the powerful thing is the number of concepts, and they're
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02:11:23.440
probably deeply hierarchical in nature. The relations, as you described between them,
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02:11:29.200
is the key thing. So it's like, even if it's a million concepts, the graph of relations that's
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02:11:35.120
formed and some kind of, perhaps, some kind of probabilistic relationships, that's what's common
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02:11:42.800
sense reasoning is the relationship between things. Yeah, so in some sense, I think of the concepts as
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02:11:48.960
the address space for our behavior programs. And the behavior programs allow us to recognize objects
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and interact with them, also mental objects. And a large part of that is the physical world that we
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02:11:59.840
interact with, which is this RAS extender thing, which is basically navigation of information in
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02:12:04.640
space. And basically, it's similar to a game engine. It's a physics engine that you can use to
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02:12:12.480
describe and predict how things that look in a particular way, that feel when you touch them in
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02:12:18.080
a particular way, that love proprioception, that love auditory, for example. So it's a
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02:12:22.480
lot of auditory perception and so on, how they work out. So basically, the geometry of all these
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02:12:27.200
things. And this is probably 80% of what our brain is doing is dealing with that, with this real time
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02:12:33.600
simulation. And by itself, a game engine is fascinating, but it's not that hard to understand
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02:12:39.360
what it's doing. And our game engines are already, in some sense, approximating the fidelity of what
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02:12:47.040
we can perceive. So if we put on an Oculus Quest, we get something that is still relatively crude
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02:12:54.000
with respect to what we can perceive, but it's also in the same ballpark already. It's just a
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couple order of magnitudes away from saturating our perception in terms of the complexity that
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02:13:04.640
it can produce. So in some sense, it's reasonable to say that the computer that you can buy and put
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02:13:10.800
into your home is able to give a perceptual reality that has a detail that is already in
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02:13:15.600
the same ballpark as what your brain can process. And everything else are ideas about the world.
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02:13:22.080
And I suspect that they are relatively sparse and also the intuitive models that we form about
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02:13:27.040
social interaction. Social interaction is not so hard. It's just hard for us nerds because we all
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02:13:32.480
have our wires crossed, so we need to deduce them. But the pyres are present in most social animals.
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02:13:37.760
So it's interesting thing to notice that many domestic social animals, like cats and dogs,
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02:13:44.560
have better social cognition than children. Right. I hope so. I hope it's not that many concepts
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02:13:51.440
fundamentally to do to exist in this world. For me, it's more like I'm afraid so because this
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02:13:57.760
thing that we only appear to be so complex to each other because we are so stupid is a little
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02:14:02.560
bit depressing. Yeah, to me that's inspiring if we're indeed as stupid as it seems. The things
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02:14:11.360
our brains don't scale and the information processing that we build tend to scale very well.
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02:14:16.800
Yeah, but I mean, one of the things that worries me is that the fact that the brain doesn't scale
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02:14:23.840
means that that's actually a fundamental feature of the brain. All the flaws of the brain,
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02:14:30.000
everything we see that we see as limitations, perhaps there's a fundamental, the constraints
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02:14:34.480
on the system could be a requirement of its power, which is different than our current
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02:14:43.040
understanding of intelligent systems where scale, especially with deep learning, especially with
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02:14:48.080
reinforcement learning, the hope behind OpenAI and DeepMind, all the major results really have
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02:14:55.440
to do with huge compute. It could also be that our brains are so small, not just because they
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02:15:01.680
take up so much glucose in our body, like 20% of the glucose, so they don't arbitrarily scale.
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02:15:07.520
There's some animals like elephants which have larger brains than us and they don't seem to be
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02:15:11.760
smarter. Elephants seem to be autistic. They have very, very good motor control and they're really
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02:15:16.560
good with details, but they really struggle to see the big picture. So you can make them
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02:15:21.120
recreate drawings stroke by stroke, they can do that, but they cannot reproduce a still life. So
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02:15:27.200
they cannot make a drawing of a scene that they see. They will always be only able to reproduce
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02:15:31.840
the line drawing, at least as far from what I could see in the experiments. So why is that?
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02:15:37.120
Maybe smarter elephants would meditate themselves out of existence because their brains are too
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02:15:41.680
large. So basically the elephants that were not autistic, they didn't reproduce.
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02:15:46.400
Yeah. So we have to remember that the brain is fundamentally interlinked with the body in our
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02:15:50.400
human and biological system. Do you think that AGI systems that we try to create or greater
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02:15:55.440
intelligent systems would need to have a body? I think they should be able to make use of a body
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02:16:00.960
if you give it to them. But I don't think that they fundamentally need a body. So I suspect if
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02:16:06.080
you can interact with the world by moving your eyes and your head, you can make controlled
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02:16:11.840
experiments. And this allows you to have many magnitudes, fewer observations in order to reduce
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02:16:19.920
the uncertainty in your models. So you can pinpoint the areas in your models where you're
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02:16:24.000
not quite sure and you just move your head and see what's going on over there and you get additional
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02:16:28.480
information. If you just have to use YouTube as an input and you cannot do anything beyond this,
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02:16:33.680
you probably need just much more data. But we have much more data. So if you can build a system that
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02:16:39.680
has enough time and attention to browse all of YouTube and extract all the information that there
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02:16:44.320
is to be found, I don't think there's an obvious limit to what it can do. Yeah, but it seems that
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02:16:50.080
the interactivity is a fundamental thing that the physical body allows you to do. But let me ask on
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02:16:55.280
that topic sort of that that's what a body is, is allowing the brain to like touch things and move
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02:17:00.640
things and interact with the whether the physical world exists or not, whatever, but interact with
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02:17:06.800
some interface to the physical world. What about a virtual world? Do you think we can do the same kind
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02:17:14.960
of reasoning, consciousness, intelligence if we put on a VR headset and move over to that world?
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02:17:23.760
Do you think there's any fundamental difference between the interface to the physical world that
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02:17:28.080
it's here in this hotel and if we were sitting in the same hotel in a virtual world? The question
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02:17:32.960
is, does this nonphysical world or this other environment entice you to solve problems that
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02:17:39.360
require general intelligence? If it doesn't, then you probably will not develop general intelligence
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02:17:44.800
and arguably most people are not generally intelligent because they don't have to solve
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02:17:48.240
problems that make them generally intelligent. And even for us, it's not yet clear if we are smart
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02:17:52.880
enough to build AI and understand our own nature to this degree. So it could be a matter of capacity
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02:17:58.720
and for most people, it's in the first place a matter of interest. They don't see the point
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02:18:02.320
because the benefit of attempting this project are marginal because you're probably not going
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02:18:06.960
to succeed in it and the cost of trying to do it requires complete dedication of your entire life.
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02:18:11.920
Right? But it seems like the possibilities of what you can do in the virtual world,
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02:18:15.760
so imagine that is much greater than you can in the real world. So imagine a situation,
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02:18:21.200
maybe interesting option for me. If somebody came to me and offered what I'll do is,
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02:18:27.840
so from now on, you can only exist in the virtual world. And so you put on this headset and when you
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02:18:34.720
eat, we'll make sure to connect your body up in a way that when you eat in the virtual world,
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02:18:41.040
your body will be nourished in the same way in the virtual world. So the aligning incentives
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02:18:45.760
between our common sort of real world and the virtual world, but then the possibilities become
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02:18:50.880
much bigger. Like I could be other kinds of creatures. I could do, I can break the laws
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02:18:57.120
of physics as we know them. I could do a lot. I mean, the possibilities are endless, right? As far
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02:19:02.320
as we think it's an interesting thought, whether like what existence would be like, what kind of
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02:19:08.640
intelligence would emerge there? What kind of consciousness? What kind of maybe greater
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02:19:13.840
intelligence, even in me, Lex, even at this stage in my life, if I spend the next 20 years in that
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02:19:19.920
world to see how that intelligence emerges. And if that happened at the very beginning,
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02:19:26.080
before I was even cognizant of my existence in this physical world, it's interesting to think
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02:19:31.040
how that child would develop. And the way virtual reality and digitization of everything is moving,
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02:19:37.440
it's not completely out of the realm of possibility that we're all, that some part of our lives will,
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02:19:44.800
if not entirety of it, will live in a virtual world to a greater degree than we currently have
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02:19:51.360
living on Twitter and social media and so on. Do you have, I mean, does something draw you
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02:19:56.800
intellectually or naturally in terms of thinking about AI to this virtual world where more
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02:20:03.360
possibilities are? I think that currently it's a waste of time to deal with the physical world
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02:20:09.200
before we have mechanisms that can automatically learn how to deal with it.
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02:20:13.280
The body gives you second order agency, but what constitutes the body is the things that
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02:20:18.320
you can indirectly control. The third order are tools, and the second order is the things that
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02:20:24.080
are basically always present, but you operate on them with first order things, which are mental
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02:20:29.680
operators. And the zero order is in some sense, the direct sense of what you're deciding. Right.
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02:20:36.800
So you observe yourself initiating an action, there are features that you interpret as the
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02:20:42.000
initiation of an action. Then you perform the operations that you perform to make that happen.
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02:20:47.520
And then you see the movement of your limbs and you learn to associate those and thereby model
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02:20:52.480
your own agency over this feedback, right? But the first feedback that you get is from this first
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02:20:56.800
order thing already. Basically, you decide to think a thought and the thought is being thought.
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02:21:01.280
You decide to change the thought and you observe how the thought is being changed.
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02:21:05.200
And in some sense, this is, you could say, an embodiment already, right? And I suspect it's
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02:21:10.000
sufficient as an embodiment for intelligence. And so it's not that important at least at
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02:21:14.560
this time to consider variations in the second order. Yes. But the thing that you also put
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02:21:20.800
mentioned just now is physics that you could change in any way you want.
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02:21:24.800
So you need an environment that puts up resistance against you. If there's nothing to control,
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02:21:29.920
you cannot make models, right? There needs to be a particular way that resists you.
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02:21:34.560
And by the way, your motivation is usually outside of your mind. It resists you. Motivation
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02:21:38.800
is what gets you up in the morning even though it would be much less work to stay in bed.
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02:21:43.840
So it's basically forcing you to resist the environment and it forces your mind to serve it,
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02:21:51.760
to serve this resistance to the environment. So in some sense, it is also putting up resistance
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02:21:56.640
against the natural tendency of the mind to not do anything. Yeah. So some of that resistance,
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02:22:01.200
just like you described with motivation is like in the first order, it's in the mind.
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02:22:05.520
Some resistance is in the second order, like actual physical objects pushing against you and so on.
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02:22:11.040
It seems that the second order stuff in virtual reality could be recreated.
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02:22:14.480
Of course. But it might be sufficient that you just do mathematics and mathematics is already
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02:22:19.360
putting up enough resistance against you. So basically just with an aesthetic motive,
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02:22:24.160
this could maybe sufficient to form a type of intelligence. It would probably not be a very
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02:22:29.760
human intelligence, but it might be one that is already general. So to mess with this zero order,
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02:22:37.760
maybe first order, what do you think about ideas of brain computer interfaces? So again, returning
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02:22:43.040
to our friend Elon Musk and Neuralink, a company that's trying to, of course, there's a lot of
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02:22:48.160
a trying to cure diseases and so on with a near term, but the longterm vision is to add an extra
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02:22:54.240
layer to basically expand the capacity of the brain connected to the computational world.
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02:23:03.120
Do you think one that's possible too, how does that change the fundamentals of the zeroth order
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02:23:07.120
in the first order? It's technically possible, but I don't see that the FDA would ever allow me to
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02:23:11.360
drill holes in my skull to interface my neocortex the way Elon Musk envisions. So at the moment,
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02:23:16.480
I can do horrible things to mice, but I'm not able to do useful things to people,
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02:23:21.760
except maybe at some point down the line in medical applications. So this thing that we
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02:23:26.960
are envisioning, which means recreational and creational brain computer interfaces
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02:23:33.440
are probably not going to happen in the present legal system.
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02:23:36.560
I love it how I'm asking you out there philosophical and sort of engineering
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02:23:43.200
questions. And for the first time ever, you jumped to the legal FDA.
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02:23:48.000
There would be enough people that would be crazy enough to have holes drilled in their skull to
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02:23:51.760
try a new type of brain computer interface. But also, if it works, FDA will approve it.
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02:23:57.680
I mean, yes, it's like, you know, I work a lot with autonomous vehicles. Yes,
link |
02:24:02.560
you can say that it's going to be a very difficult regulatory process of approving
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02:24:05.760
autonomous, but it doesn't mean autonomous vehicles are never going to happen.
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02:24:08.800
No, they will totally happen as soon as we create jobs for at least two lawyers
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02:24:14.080
and one regulator per car.
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02:24:17.120
Yes, lawyers, that's actually like lawyers is the fundamental substrate of reality.
link |
02:24:24.800
In the US, it's a very weird system. It's not universal in the world. The law is a very
link |
02:24:30.400
interesting software once you realize it, right? These circuits are in some sense streams of
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02:24:34.880
software and this is largely works by exception handling. So you make decisions on the ground
link |
02:24:39.600
and they get synchronized with the next level structure as soon as an exception is being
link |
02:24:43.120
thrown. So it escalates the exception handling. The process is very expensive,
link |
02:24:49.600
especially since it incentivizes the lawyers for producing work for lawyers.
link |
02:24:54.960
Yes, so the exceptions are actually incentivized for firing often. But to return, outside of
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02:25:02.960
lawyers, is there anything interesting, insightful about the possibility of this extra layer
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02:25:13.440
of intelligence added to the brain?
link |
02:25:15.280
I do think so, but I don't think that you need technically invasive procedures to do
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02:25:20.320
so. We can already interface with other people by observing them very, very closely and getting
link |
02:25:25.120
in some kind of empathetic resonance. And I'm not very good at this, but I noticed that
link |
02:25:31.360
people are able to do this to some degree. And it basically means that we model an interface
link |
02:25:37.360
layer of the other person in real time. And it works despite our neurons being slow because
link |
02:25:42.720
most of the things that we do are built on periodic processes. So you just need to entrain
link |
02:25:46.960
yourself with the oscillation that happens. And if the oscillation itself changes slowly
link |
02:25:51.600
enough, you can basically follow along.
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02:25:54.080
Right. But the bandwidth of the interaction, it seems like you can do a lot more computation
link |
02:26:03.360
when there's...
link |
02:26:04.080
Of course. But the other thing is that the bandwidth that our brain, our own mind is
link |
02:26:08.240
running on is actually quite slow. So the number of thoughts that I can productively
link |
02:26:12.320
think in any given day is quite limited. If they had the discipline to write it down
link |
02:26:18.400
and the speed to write it down, maybe it would be a book every day or so. But if you think
link |
02:26:22.400
about the computers that we can build, the magnitudes at which they operate, this would
link |
02:26:28.080
be nothing. It's something that it can put out in a second.
link |
02:26:30.640
Well, I don't know. So it's possible the number of thoughts you have in your brain is... It
link |
02:26:37.120
could be several orders of magnitude higher than what you're possibly able to express
link |
02:26:41.760
through your fingers or through your voice.
link |
02:26:45.040
Most of them are going to be repetitive because they...
link |
02:26:47.920
How do you know that?
link |
02:26:48.880
If they have to control the same problems every day. When I walk, there are going to
link |
02:26:53.440
be processes in my brain that model my walking pattern and regulate them and so on. But it's
link |
02:26:58.160
going to be pretty much the same every day.
link |
02:26:59.840
But that could be...
link |
02:27:00.400
Every step.
link |
02:27:01.360
But I'm talking about intellectual reasoning, thinking. So the question, what is the best
link |
02:27:04.960
system of government? So you sit down and start thinking about that. One of the constraints
link |
02:27:09.360
is that you don't have access to a lot of facts, a lot of studies. You always have to
link |
02:27:16.560
interface with something else to learn more, to aid in your reasoning process. If you can
link |
02:27:23.600
directly access all of Wikipedia in trying to understand what is the best form of government,
link |
02:27:28.160
then every thought won't be stuck in a loop. Every thought that requires some extra piece
link |
02:27:33.360
of information will be able to grab it really quickly. That's the possibility of if the
link |
02:27:38.640
bottleneck is literally the information that... The bottleneck of breakthrough ideas is just
link |
02:27:47.600
being able to quickly access huge amounts of information, then the possibility of connecting
link |
02:27:51.840
your brain to the computer could lead to totally new breakthroughs. You can think of mathematicians
link |
02:27:59.760
being able to just up the orders of magnitude of power in their reasoning about
link |
02:28:08.240
mathematical proofs. What if humanity has already discovered the optimal form of
link |
02:28:12.400
government through an evolutionary process? There is an evolution going on. So what we
link |
02:28:17.840
discover is that maybe the problem of government doesn't have stable solutions for us as a species,
link |
02:28:23.280
because we are not designed in such a way that we can make everybody conform to them.
link |
02:28:28.720
But there could be solutions that work under given circumstances or that are the best for
link |
02:28:33.360
certain environment and depends on, for instance, the primary forms of ownership and the means
link |
02:28:38.400
of production. So if the main means of production is land, then the forms of government will be
link |
02:28:45.760
regulated by the landowners and you get a monarchy. If you also want to have a form of
link |
02:28:50.320
government in which you depend on some form of slavery, for instance, where the peasants have
link |
02:28:56.240
to work very long hours for very little gain, so very few people can have plumbing, then maybe
link |
02:29:01.680
you need to promise them to get paid in the afterlife, the overtime. So you need a theocracy.
link |
02:29:08.560
And so for much of human history in the West, we had a combination of monarchy and theocracy
link |
02:29:14.880
that was our form of governance. At the same time, the Catholic Church implemented game theoretic
link |
02:29:21.040
principles. I recently reread Thomas Aquinas. It's very interesting to see this because he was not
link |
02:29:27.040
dualist. He was translating Aristotle in a particular way for designing an operating
link |
02:29:32.560
system for the Catholic society. And he says that basically people are animals in very much the same
link |
02:29:39.440
way as Aristotle envisions, which is basically organisms with cybernetic control. And then he
link |
02:29:44.320
says that there are additional rational principles that humans can discover and everybody can
link |
02:29:48.880
discover them so they are universal. If you are sane, you should understand, you should submit to
link |
02:29:53.520
them because you can rationally deduce them. And these principles are roughly you should be willing
link |
02:30:00.240
to self regulate correctly. You should be willing to do correct social regulation. It's
link |
02:30:06.800
intraorganismic. You should be willing to act on your models so you have skin in the game.
link |
02:30:17.040
And you should have goal rationality. You should be choosing the right
link |
02:30:20.400
goals to work on. So basically these three rational principles, goal rationality he calls
link |
02:30:26.320
prudence or wisdom, social regulation is justice, the correct social one, and the internal regulation
link |
02:30:33.280
is temperance. And this willingness to act on your models is courage. And then he says that
link |
02:30:40.400
there are additionally to these four cardinal virtues, three divine virtues. And these three
link |
02:30:45.200
divine virtues cannot be rationally deduced, but they reveal themselves by the harmony, which means
link |
02:30:49.920
if you assume them and you extrapolate what's going to happen, you will see that they make sense.
link |
02:30:55.360
And it's often been misunderstood as God has to tell you that these are the things. So basically
link |
02:31:00.080
there's something nefarious going on. The Christian conspiracy forces you to believe
link |
02:31:05.360
some guy with a long beard that they discovered this. So these principles are relatively simple.
link |
02:31:11.840
Again, it's for high level organization for the resulting civilization that you form.
link |
02:31:16.480
A commitment to unity. So basically you serve this higher, larger thing,
link |
02:31:21.520
this structural principle on the next level. And he calls that faith. Then there needs to be a
link |
02:31:28.480
commitment to shared purpose. This is basically this global reward that you try to figure out
link |
02:31:32.160
what that should be and how you can facilitate this. And this is love. The commitment to shared
link |
02:31:36.000
purpose is the core of love, right? You see the sacred thing that is more important than your own
link |
02:31:40.960
organismic interests in the other, and you serve this together. And this is how you see the sacred
link |
02:31:45.840
in the other. And the last one is hope, which means you need to be willing to act on that
link |
02:31:51.520
principle without getting rewards in the here and now because it doesn't exist yet.
link |
02:31:55.520
Then you start out building the civilization, right? So you need to be able to do this in the
link |
02:31:59.520
absence of its actual existence yet. So it can come into being. So the way it comes into being
link |
02:32:06.640
is by you accepting those notions and then you see these three divine concepts and you see them
link |
02:32:12.960
realized. Divine is a loaded concept in our world because we are outside of this cult and we are
link |
02:32:18.800
still scarred from breaking free of it. But the idea is basically we need to have a civilization
link |
02:32:23.520
that acts as an intentional agent, like an insect state. And we are not actually a tribal species,
link |
02:32:28.960
we are a state building species. And what enables state building is basically the formation of
link |
02:32:35.520
religious states and other forms of rule based administration in which the individual doesn't
link |
02:32:40.240
matter as much as the rule or the higher goal. We got there by the question, what's the optimal
link |
02:32:45.600
form of governance? So I don't think that Catholicism is the optimal form of governance
link |
02:32:50.000
because it's obviously on the way out, right? So it is for the present type of society that we are
link |
02:32:54.400
in. Religious institutions don't seem to be optimal to organize that. So what we discovered right now
link |
02:33:01.280
that we live in in the West is democracy. And democracy is the rule of oligarchs that are the
link |
02:33:06.640
people that currently own the means of production that is administered not by the oligarchs
link |
02:33:11.440
themselves because there's too much disruption. We have so much innovation that we have in every
link |
02:33:17.360
generation new means of production that we invent. And corporations die usually after 30 years or so
link |
02:33:23.520
and something other takes a leading role in our societies. So it's administered by institutions
link |
02:33:29.280
and these institutions themselves are not elected but they provide continuity and they are led by
link |
02:33:35.680
electable politicians. And this makes it possible that you can adapt to change without having to
link |
02:33:40.640
kill people, right? So you can, for instance, have a change in governments if people think that the
link |
02:33:44.960
current government is too corrupt or is not up to date, you can just elect new people. Or if a
link |
02:33:50.160
journalist finds out something inconvenient about the institution and the institution has no plan B
link |
02:33:55.920
like in Russia, the journalist has to die. This is when you run society by the deep state. So ideally
link |
02:34:02.400
you have an administration layer that you can change if something bad happens, right? So you
link |
02:34:09.360
will have a continuity in the whole thing. And this is the system that we came up in the West.
link |
02:34:13.600
And the way it's set up in the US is largely a result of low level models. So it's mostly just
link |
02:34:17.920
second, third order consequences that people are modeling in the design of these institutions. So
link |
02:34:22.880
it's a relatively young society that doesn't really take care of the downstream effects of
link |
02:34:27.120
many of the decisions that are being made. And I suspect that AI can help us this in a way if you
link |
02:34:33.120
can fix the incentives. The society of the US is a society of cheaters. It's basically cheating is
link |
02:34:39.520
so indistinguishable from innovation and we want to encourage innovation. Can you elaborate on what
link |
02:34:44.000
you mean by cheating? It's basically people do things that they know are wrong. It's acceptable
link |
02:34:48.400
to do things that you know are wrong in this society to a certain degree. You can, for instance,
link |
02:34:52.720
suggest some non sustainable business models and implement them. Right. But you're always pushing
link |
02:34:57.920
the boundaries. I mean, yes, this is seen as a good thing largely. Yes. And this is different
link |
02:35:05.280
from other societies. So for instance, social mobility is an aspect of this. Social mobility
link |
02:35:09.520
is the result of individual innovation that would not be sustainable at scale for everybody else.
link |
02:35:14.720
Right. Normally you should not go up, you should go deep, right? We need bakers and if we are very
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02:35:18.960
very good bakers, but in a society that innovates, maybe you can replace all the bakers with a really
link |
02:35:23.760
good machine. Right. And that's not a bad thing. And it's a thing that made the US so successful,
link |
02:35:29.280
right? But it also means that the US is not optimizing for sustainability, but for innovation.
link |
02:35:34.880
And so it's not obvious as the evolutionary process is unrolling, it's not obvious that that
link |
02:35:39.600
long term would be better. It has side effects. So you basically, if you cheat, you will have a
link |
02:35:45.920
certain layer of toxic sludge that covers everything that is a result of cheating.
link |
02:35:50.400
And we have to unroll this evolutionary process to figure out if these side effects are so damaging
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02:35:55.600
that the system is horrible, or if the benefits actually outweigh the negative effects.
link |
02:36:03.600
How do we get to which system of government is best? That was from,
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02:36:07.920
I'm trying to trace back the last like five minutes.
link |
02:36:10.720
I suspect that we can find a way back to AI by thinking about the way in which our brain has to
link |
02:36:16.640
organize itself. In some sense, our brain is a society of neurons. And our mind is a society
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02:36:24.480
of behaviors. And they need to be organizing themselves into a structure that implements
link |
02:36:30.720
regulation and government is social regulation. We often see government as the manifestation of
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02:36:36.480
power or local interests, but it's actually a platform for negotiating the conditions of human
link |
02:36:40.960
survival. And this platform emerges over the current needs and possibilities and the trajectory
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02:36:46.960
that we have. So given the present state, there are only so many options on how we can move into
link |
02:36:52.560
the next state without completely disrupting everything. And we mostly agree that it's a
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02:36:56.400
bad idea to disrupt everything because it will endanger our food supply for a while and the entire
link |
02:37:01.200
infrastructure and fabric of society. So we do try to find natural transitions,
link |
02:37:06.960
and there are not that many natural transitions available at any given point.
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02:37:10.720
What do you mean by natural transitions?
link |
02:37:12.080
So we try not to have revolutions if we can have it.
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02:37:14.880
Right. So speaking of revolutions and the connection between government systems and the mind,
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02:37:21.760
you've also said that in some sense, becoming an adult means you take charge of your emotions.
link |
02:37:29.120
Maybe you never said that. Maybe I just made that up. But in the context of the mind,
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02:37:35.840
what's the role of emotion? And what is it? First of all, what is emotion? What's its role?
link |
02:37:42.240
It's several things. So psychologists often distinguish between emotion and feeling,
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02:37:46.880
and in common day parlance, we don't. I think that emotion is a configuration of the cognitive
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02:37:52.800
system. And that's especially true for the lowest level for the affective state. So when you have
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02:37:57.840
an affect, it's the configuration of certain modulation parameters like arousal, valence,
link |
02:38:03.920
your attentional focus, whether it's wide or narrow, inter reception or extra reception,
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02:38:08.080
and so on. And all these parameters together put you in a certain way. You relate to the
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02:38:13.040
environment and to yourself, and this is in some sense an emotional configuration.
link |
02:38:17.200
In the more narrow sense, an emotion is an affective state. It has an object,
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02:38:22.240
and the relevance of that object is given by motivation. And motivation is a bunch of needs
link |
02:38:26.640
that are associated with rewards, things that give you pleasure and pain. And you don't actually act
link |
02:38:31.440
on your needs, you act on models of your needs. Because when the pleasure and pain manifest,
link |
02:38:35.520
it's too late, you've done everything. So you act on expectations that will give you pleasure and
link |
02:38:40.480
pain. And these are your purposes. The needs don't form a hierarchy, they just coexist and compete.
link |
02:38:45.680
And your brain has to find a dynamic homeostasis between them. But the purposes need to be
link |
02:38:51.840
consistent. So you basically can create a story for your life and make plans. And so we organize
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02:38:57.920
them all into hierarchies. And there is not a unique solution for this. Some people eat to make
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02:39:02.160
art and other people make art to eat. They might end up doing the same things, but they cooperate
link |
02:39:07.200
in very different ways. Because their ultimate goals are different. And we cooperate based on
link |
02:39:12.800
shared purpose. Everything else that is not cooperation on shared purpose is transactional.
link |
02:39:16.800
I don't think I understood that last piece of achieving the homeostasis.
link |
02:39:26.640
Are you distinguishing between the experience of emotion and the expression of emotion?
link |
02:39:30.960
Of course. So the experience of emotion is a feeling. And in this sense, what you feel is
link |
02:39:37.520
an appraisal that your perceptual system has made of the situation at hand. And it makes this based
link |
02:39:42.800
on your motivation and on your estimates, not your but of the subconscious geometric parts of your
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02:39:50.400
mind that assess the situation in the world with something like a neural network. And this neural
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02:39:56.480
network is making itself known to the symbolic parts of your mind, to your conscious attention
link |
02:40:02.000
by mapping them as features into a space. So what you will feel about your emotion is a projection
link |
02:40:08.640
usually into your body map. So you might feel anxiety in your solar plexus, and you might feel
link |
02:40:12.800
it as a contraction, which is all geometry. Your body map is the space that is always instantiated
link |
02:40:18.880
and always available. So it's a very obvious cheat if your non symbolic parts of your brain
link |
02:40:26.960
try to talk to your symbolic parts of your brain to map the feelings into the body map.
link |
02:40:31.120
And then you perceive them as pleasant and unpleasant, depending on whether the appraisal
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02:40:35.040
has a negative or positive valence. And then you have different features of them that give you
link |
02:40:40.720
more knowledge about the nature of what you're feeling. So for instance, when you feel
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02:40:44.160
connected to other people, you typically feel this in your chest region around the heart.
link |
02:40:48.240
And you feel this is an expansive feeling in which you're reaching out, right? And it's
link |
02:40:53.200
very intuitive to encode it like this. That's why it's encoded like this. It's a code in which the
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02:40:59.760
non symbolic parts of your mind talk to the symbolic ones. And then the expression of emotion
link |
02:41:04.080
is then the final step that could be sort of gestural or visual and so on. That's part of
link |
02:41:09.680
the communication. This probably evolved as part of an adversarial communication. So as soon as
link |
02:41:14.480
you started to observe the facial expression and posture of others to understand what emotional
link |
02:41:19.360
state they're in, others started to use this as signaling and also to subvert your model of their
link |
02:41:23.920
emotional state. So we now look at the inflections, at the difference between the standard face that
link |
02:41:29.280
they're going to make in this situation. When you are at a funeral, everybody expects you to make a
link |
02:41:33.600
solemn face, but the solemn face doesn't express whether you're sad or not. It just expresses that
link |
02:41:38.080
you understand what face you have to make at a funeral. Nobody should know that you are triumphant.
link |
02:41:44.080
So when you try to read the emotion of another person, you try to look at the delta
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02:41:48.000
between a truly sad expression and the things that are animating this face behind the curtain.
link |
02:41:56.320
So the interesting thing is, so having done this podcast and the video component, one of the things
link |
02:42:03.920
I've learned is that now I'm Russian and I just don't know how to express emotion on my face.
link |
02:42:10.720
One, I see that as weakness, but whatever. The people look to me after you say something,
link |
02:42:16.960
they look to my face to help them see how they should feel about what you said,
link |
02:42:22.960
which is fascinating because then they'll often comment on why did you look bored or why did you
link |
02:42:28.000
particularly enjoy that part or why did you whatever. It's a kind of interesting, it makes
link |
02:42:32.800
me cognizant of I'm part, like you're basically saying a bunch of brilliant things, but I'm
link |
02:42:38.800
part of the play that you're the key actor in by making my facial expressions and then
link |
02:42:45.920
therefore telling the narrative of what the big, like the big point is, which is fascinating.
link |
02:42:51.200
Makes me cognizant that I'm supposed to be making facial expressions. Even this conversation is hard
link |
02:42:56.240
because my preference would be to wear a mask with sunglasses to where I could just listen.
link |
02:43:01.920
Yes, I understand this because it's intrusive to interact with others this way. And basically
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02:43:07.680
Eastern European society have a taboo against that and especially Russia,
link |
02:43:11.840
the further you go to the East and in the US it's the opposite. You're expected to be
link |
02:43:17.360
hyperanimated in your face and you're also expected to show positive affect.
link |
02:43:22.160
Yes.
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02:43:22.560
And if you show positive affect without a good reason in Russia,
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02:43:27.600
people will think you are a stupid, unsophisticated person.
link |
02:43:33.280
Exactly. And here positive affect without reason goes either appreciated or goes unnoticed.
link |
02:43:40.800
No, it's the default. It's being expected. Everything is amazing. Have you seen these?
link |
02:43:45.840
Lego movie?
link |
02:43:47.600
No, there was a diagram where somebody gave the appraisals that exist in the US and Russia,
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02:43:52.800
so you have your bell curve. And the lower 10% in the US, it's a good start. Everything
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02:44:02.080
above the lowest 10%, it's amazing.
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02:44:04.400
It's amazing.
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02:44:06.000
And for Russians, everything below the top 10%, it's terrible. And then everything except the
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02:44:14.800
top percent is, I don't like it. And the top percent is even so.
link |
02:44:23.680
It's funny, but it's kind of true.
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02:44:27.200
There's a deeper aspect to this. It's also how we construct meaning in the US. Usually you focus on
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02:44:33.440
the positive aspects and you just suppress the negative aspects. And in our Eastern European
link |
02:44:40.400
traditions, we emphasize the fact that if you hold something above the waterline, you also need to
link |
02:44:46.880
put something below the waterline because existence by itself is as best neutral.
link |
02:44:51.360
Right. That's the basic intuition, at best neutral. Or it could be just suffering,
link |
02:44:56.240
the default is suffering.
link |
02:44:56.800
There are moments of beauty, but these moments of beauty are inextricably linked to the reality
link |
02:45:02.160
of suffering. And to not acknowledge the reality of suffering means that you are really stupid and
link |
02:45:07.280
unaware of the fact that basically every conscious being spends most of the time suffering.
link |
02:45:12.560
Yeah. You just summarized the ethos of the Eastern Europe. Yeah. Most of life is suffering
link |
02:45:19.680
with an occasional moments of beauty. And if your facial expressions don't acknowledge
link |
02:45:24.480
the abundance of suffering in the world and in existence itself, then you must be an idiot.
link |
02:45:30.640
It's an interesting thing when you raise children in the US and you, in some sense,
link |
02:45:36.000
preserve the identity of the intellectual and cultural traditions that are embedded in your
link |
02:45:40.960
own families. And your daughter asks you about Ariel the mermaid and asks you,
link |
02:45:46.800
why is Ariel not allowed to play with the humans? And you tell her the truth. She's a siren. Sirens
link |
02:45:53.840
eat people. You don't play with your food. It does not end well. And then you tell her the original
link |
02:45:58.080
story, which is not the one by Anderson, which is the romantic one. And there's a much darker one,
link |
02:46:02.640
which is Undine's story. What happened? So Undine is a mermaid or a water woman. She lives on the
link |
02:46:11.040
ground of a river and she meets this prince and they fall in love. And the prince really,
link |
02:46:15.440
really wants to be with her. And she says, okay, but the deal is you cannot have any other woman.
link |
02:46:20.800
If you marry somebody else, even though you cannot be with me, because obviously you cannot breathe
link |
02:46:24.240
underwater and have other things to do than managing your kingdom as you have here, you will
link |
02:46:29.520
die. And eventually after a few years, he falls in love with some princess and marries her. And
link |
02:46:35.760
she shows up and quietly goes into his chamber and nobody is able to stop her or willing to do
link |
02:46:41.520
so because she is fierce. And she comes quietly and sad out of his chamber. And they ask her,
link |
02:46:47.440
what has happened? What did you do? And she said, I kissed him to death.
link |
02:46:52.000
All done.
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02:46:53.760
And you know the Anderson story, right? In the Anderson story, the mermaid is playing with
link |
02:46:59.280
this prince that she saves and she falls in love with him and she cannot live out there. So she is
link |
02:47:04.240
giving up her voice and her tale for a human like appearance so she can walk among the humans. But
link |
02:47:11.360
this guy does not recognize that she is the one that you would marry. Instead, he marries somebody
link |
02:47:16.880
who has a kingdom and economical and political relationships to his own kingdom and so on,
link |
02:47:22.160
as he should. And she dies.
link |
02:47:25.200
Yeah. Instead, Disney, the Little Mermaid story has a little bit of a happy ending. That's the
link |
02:47:35.040
Western, that's the American way.
link |
02:47:37.040
My own problem is this, of course, that I read Oscar Wilde before I read the other things. So
link |
02:47:41.280
I'm indoctrinated, inoculated with this romanticism. And I think that the mermaid is right. You
link |
02:47:46.960
sacrifice your life for romantic love. That's what you do. Because if you are confronted with
link |
02:47:51.520
either serving the machine and doing the obviously right thing under the economic and social and
link |
02:47:57.680
other human incentives, that's wrong. You should follow your heart.
link |
02:48:04.000
So do you think suffering is fundamental to happiness along these lines?
link |
02:48:09.520
Suffering is the result of caring about things that you cannot change. And if you are able to
link |
02:48:14.640
change what you care about to those things that you can change, you will not suffer.
link |
02:48:17.840
But would you then be able to experience happiness?
link |
02:48:22.160
Yes. But happiness itself is not important. Happiness is like a cookie. When you are a child,
link |
02:48:27.680
you think cookies are very important and you want to have all the cookies in the world,
link |
02:48:30.720
you look forward to being an adult because then you have as many cookies as you want.
link |
02:48:35.200
But as an adult, you realize a cookie is a tool. It's a tool to make you eat vegetables.
link |
02:48:40.000
And once you eat your vegetables anyway, you stop eating cookies for the most part,
link |
02:48:43.280
because otherwise you will get diabetes and will not be around for your kids.
link |
02:48:46.560
Yes, but then the cookie, the scarcity of a cookie, if scarcity is enforced,
link |
02:48:51.760
nevertheless, so like the pleasure comes from the scarcity.
link |
02:48:54.560
Yes. But the happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself. It's not made by the
link |
02:48:59.760
environment. The environment cannot make you happy. It's your appraisal of the environment
link |
02:49:03.600
that makes you happy. And if you can change the appraisal of the environment, which you can learn
link |
02:49:07.840
to, then you can create arbitrary states of happiness. And some meditators fall into this
link |
02:49:11.920
trap. So they discover the womb, this basement womb in their brain where the cookies are made,
link |
02:49:16.560
and they indulge and stuff themselves. And after a few months, it gets really old and
link |
02:49:20.400
the big crisis of meaning comes. Because they thought before that their unhappiness was the
link |
02:49:25.360
result of not being happy enough. So they fixed this, right? They can release the newer
link |
02:49:29.600
transmitters at will if they train. And then the crisis of meaning pops up in a deeper layer.
link |
02:49:36.400
And the question is, why do I live? How can I make a sustainable civilization that is meaningful to
link |
02:49:40.480
me? How can I insert myself into this? And this was the problem that you couldn't solve in the
link |
02:49:44.240
first place. But at the end of all this, let me then ask that same question. What is the answer
link |
02:49:53.360
to that? What could the possible answer be of the meaning of life? What could an answer be? What is
link |
02:49:59.440
it to you? I think that if you look at the meaning of life, you look at what the cell is. Life is the
link |
02:50:06.000
cell. Or this principle, the cell. It's this self organizing thing that can participate in evolution.
link |
02:50:14.160
In order to make it work, it's a molecular machine. It needs a self replicator and an
link |
02:50:18.160
entropy extractor and a Turing machine. If any of these parts is missing, you don't have a cell
link |
02:50:22.560
and it is not living. And life is basically the emergent complexity over that principle.
link |
02:50:27.520
Once you have this intelligent super molecule, the cell, there is very little that you cannot
link |
02:50:32.560
make it do. It's probably the optimal computronium and especially in terms of resilience. It's very
link |
02:50:37.920
hard to sterilize the planet once it's infected with life. So it's active function of these three
link |
02:50:45.200
components or the supercell cell is present in the cell, it's present in us, and it's just...
link |
02:50:51.600
We are just an expression of the cell. It's a certain layer of complexity in the organization
link |
02:50:55.600
of cells. So in a way, it's tempting to think of the cell as a von Neumann probe. If you want to
link |
02:51:02.000
build intelligence on other planets, the best way to do this is to infect them with cells
link |
02:51:07.360
and wait for long enough and there's a reasonable chance the stuff is going to evolve into an
link |
02:51:11.600
information processing principle that is general enough to become sentient.
link |
02:51:16.400
That idea is very akin to the same dream and beautiful ideas that are expressed to
link |
02:51:21.360
cellular automata in their most simple mathematical form. If you just inject the system with some
link |
02:51:26.000
basic mechanisms of replication and so on, basic rules, amazing things would emerge.
link |
02:51:32.160
The cell is able to do something that James Trardy calls existential design. He points out
link |
02:51:38.000
that in technical design, we go from the outside in. We work in a highly controlled environment in
link |
02:51:42.880
which everything is deterministic, like our computers, our labs, or our engineering workshops.
link |
02:51:48.080
And then we use this determinism to implement a particular kind of function that we dream up and
link |
02:51:53.120
that seamlessly interfaces with all the other deterministic functions that we already have in
link |
02:51:57.600
our world. So it's basically from the outside in. Biological systems designed from the inside out
link |
02:52:04.080
as seed will become a seedling by taking some of the relatively unorganized matter around it and
link |
02:52:11.200
turning it into its own structure and thereby subdue the environment. Cells can cooperate if
link |
02:52:16.560
they can rely on other cells having a similar organization that is already compatible. But
link |
02:52:21.040
unless that's there, the cell needs to divide to create that structure by itself. So it's a
link |
02:52:27.280
self organizing principle that works on a somewhat chaotic environment. And the purpose of life in
link |
02:52:32.640
this sense is to produce complexity. And the complexity allows you to harvest entropy gradients
link |
02:52:38.960
that you couldn't harvest without the complexity. And in this sense, intelligence and life are very
link |
02:52:43.920
strongly connected because the purpose of intelligence is to allow control under conditions
link |
02:52:48.800
and the conditions of complexity. So basically, you shift the boundary between the ordered systems
link |
02:52:53.760
into the realm of chaos. You build bridge heads into chaos with complexity. And this is what we
link |
02:53:00.960
are doing. This is not necessarily a deeper meaning. I think the meaning that we have priors
link |
02:53:05.200
for that we are all for outside of the priors, there is no meaning. Meaning only exists if the
link |
02:53:09.280
mind projects it. That is probably civilization. I think that what feels most meaningful to me is
link |
02:53:16.720
to try to build and maintain a sustainable civilization. And taking a slight step outside
link |
02:53:22.880
of that, we talked about a man with a beard and God, but something, some mechanism, perhaps must
link |
02:53:34.400
have planted the seed, the initial seed of the cell. Do you think there is a God? What is a God?
link |
02:53:42.480
And what would that look like? If there was no spontaneous biogenesis, in the sense that the
link |
02:53:48.000
first cell formed by some happy random accidents where the molecules just happened to be in the
link |
02:53:54.160
right constellation to each other. But there could also be the mechanism that allows for the random.
link |
02:53:59.600
I mean, there's like turtles all the way down. There seems to be, there has to be a head turtle
link |
02:54:04.720
at the bottom. Let's consider something really wild. Imagine, is it possible that a gas giant
link |
02:54:10.480
could become intelligent? What would that involve? So imagine you have vortices that spontaneously
link |
02:54:16.240
emerge on the gas giants, like big storm systems that endure for thousands of years.
link |
02:54:21.360
And some of these storm systems produce electromagnetic fields because some of the
link |
02:54:24.880
clouds are ferromagnetic or something. And as a result, they can change how certain clouds react
link |
02:54:30.240
rather than other clouds and thereby produce some self stabilizing patterns that eventually
link |
02:54:34.960
lead to regulation feedback loops, nested feedback loops and control. So imagine you have such this
link |
02:54:40.560
thing that basically has emergent self sustaining, self organizing complexity. And at some point,
link |
02:54:44.960
this breaks up and realizes and basically lam solaris, I am a thinking planet, but I will not
link |
02:54:50.320
replicate because I can recreate the conditions of my own existence somewhere else. I'm just
link |
02:54:55.680
basically an intelligence that has spontaneously formed because it could. And now it builds a
link |
02:55:01.840
von Neumann probe and the best von Neumann probe for such a thing might be the cell.
link |
02:55:05.680
So maybe it, because it's very, very clever and very enduring, creates cells and sends them out.
link |
02:55:10.560
And one of them has infected our planet. And I'm not suggesting that this is the case,
link |
02:55:14.400
but it would be compatible with the Prince Birmingham hypothesis. And it was my intuition
link |
02:55:19.120
that our biogenesis is very unlikely. It's possible, but you probably need to roll the
link |
02:55:24.160
cosmic dice very often, maybe more often than there are planetary surfaces. I don't know.
link |
02:55:28.240
So God is just a large enough, a system that's large enough that allows randomness.
link |
02:55:37.360
No, I don't think that God has anything to do with creation. I think it's a mistranslation
link |
02:55:41.440
of the Talmud into the Catholic mythology. I think that Genesis is actually the childhood
link |
02:55:46.800
memories of a God. So the, when. Sorry, Genesis is the.
link |
02:55:51.600
The childhood memories of a God. It's basically a mind that is remembering how it came into being.
link |
02:55:57.280
Wow.
link |
02:55:57.840
And we typically interpret Genesis as the creation of a physical universe by a supernatural being.
link |
02:56:03.680
Yes.
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02:56:04.240
And I think when you read it, there is light and darkness that is being created. And then you
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discover sky and ground, create them. You construct the plants and the animals and you
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02:56:18.880
give everything their names and so on. That's basically cognitive development. It's a sequence
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02:56:24.320
of steps that every mind has to go through when it makes sense of the world. And when you have
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children, you can see how initially they distinguish light and darkness and then they
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02:56:33.040
make out directions in it and they discover sky and ground and they discover the plants and the
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02:56:37.120
animals and they give everything their name. And it's a creative process that happens in every mind
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02:56:41.520
because it's not given. Your mind has to invent these structures to make sense of the patterns
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02:56:46.160
on your retina. Also, if there was some big nerd who set up a server and runs this world on it,
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02:56:52.560
this would not create a special relationship between us and the nerd. This nerd would not
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02:56:57.120
have the magical power to give meaning to our existence. So this equation of a creator god
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02:57:03.280
with the god of meaning is a sleight of hand. You shouldn't do it.
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02:57:07.840
The other one that is done in Catholicism is the equation of the first mover,
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02:57:12.080
the prime mover of Aristotle, which is basically the automaton that runs the universe. Aristotle
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02:57:17.440
says if things are moving and things seem to be moving here, something must move them. If something
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02:57:23.600
moves them, something must move the thing that is moving it. So there must be a prime mover.
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02:57:28.080
This idea to say that this prime mover is a supernatural being is complete nonsense.
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02:57:33.280
It's an automaton in the simplest case. So we have to explain the enormity that this automaton
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02:57:39.120
exists at all. But again, we don't have any possibility to infer anything about its properties
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02:57:45.520
except that it's able to produce change in information. So there needs to be some kind
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02:57:51.440
of computational principle. This is all there is. But to say this automaton is identical again with
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02:57:56.400
the creator of the first cause or with the thing that gives meaning to our life is confusion.
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02:58:02.000
No, I think that what we perceive is the higher being that we are part of. The higher being that
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we are part of is the civilization. It's the thing in which we have a similar relationship as the cell
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02:58:13.200
has to our body. And we have this prior because we have evolved to organize in these structures.
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02:58:20.560
So basically, the Christian God in its natural form without the mythology,
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02:58:24.720
if you undress it, is basically the platonic form of the civilization.
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02:58:30.480
Is the ideal?
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02:58:32.480
Yes, it's this ideal that you try to approximate when you interact with others,
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02:58:36.240
not based on your incentives, but on what you think is right.
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02:58:38.880
Wow, we covered a lot of ground. And we're left with one of my favorite lines, and there's many,
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02:58:45.520
which is happiness is a cookie that the brain bakes itself. It's been a huge honor and a
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02:58:54.880
pleasure to talk to you. I'm sure our paths will cross many times again.
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02:58:59.680
Joshua, thank you so much for talking today. I really appreciate it.
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02:59:02.480
Thank you, Lex. It was so much fun. I enjoyed it.
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02:59:05.760
Awesome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Joshua Bach. And thank you to our sponsors,
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02:59:12.080
ExpressVPN and Cash App. Please consider supporting this podcast by getting ExpressVPN at
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02:59:18.000
expressvpn.com slash lexpod and downloading Cash App and using code lexpodcast. If you enjoy this
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02:59:27.360
thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars in Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon,
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02:59:33.440
or simply connect with me on Twitter at lexfreedman. And yes, try to figure out how to
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02:59:39.440
spell it without the E. And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Joshua Bach.
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02:59:46.400
If you take this as a computer game metaphor, this is the best level for humanity to play.
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02:59:52.720
And this best level happens to be the last level, as it happens against the backdrop of a dying
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02:59:59.760
world. But it's still the best level. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.