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Sam Harris: Consciousness, Free Will, Psychedelics, AI, UFOs, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #185


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The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, one of the most influential and pioneering
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thinkers of our time.
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He is the host of the Making Sense podcast and the author of many seminal books on human
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nature and the human mind, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free
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Will, and Waking Up.
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He also has a meditation app called Waking Up that I've been using to guide my own meditation.
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Look mentioned of our sponsors, National Instruments, Val Campo, Athletic Greens, and Linode.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that Sam has been an inspiration to me as he has been for many,
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many people, first from his writing, then his early debates, maybe 13, 14 years ago on
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the subject of faith, his conversations with Christopher Hitchens, and since 2013 his podcast.
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I didn't always agree with all of his ideas, but I was always drawn to the care and depth
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of the way he explored those ideas.
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The calm and clarity amid the storm of difficult, at times controversial discourse.
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I really can't express in words how much it meant to me that he, Sam Harris, someone
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who I have listened to for many hundreds of hours, would write a kind email to me saying
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he enjoyed this podcast and more that he thought I had a unique voice that added something
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to this world.
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Whether it's true or not, it made me feel special and truly grateful to be able to do
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this thing and motivated me to work my ass off to live up to those words.
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Meeting Sam and getting to talk with him was one of the most memorable moments of my life.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with Sam Harris.
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I've been enjoying meditating with the Waking Up app recently.
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It makes me think about the origins of cognition and consciousness, so let me ask, where do
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thoughts come from?
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Well, that's a very difficult question to answer.
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Subjectively, they appear to come from nowhere.
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They come out of some kind of mystery that is at our backs subjectively, which is to
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say that if you pay attention to the nature of your mind in this moment, you realize that
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you don't know what you're going to think next.
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Now, you're expecting to think something that seems like you authored it.
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You're not unless you're schizophrenic or you have some kind of thought disorder where
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your thoughts seem fundamentally foreign to you.
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They do have a kind of signature of selfhood associated with them and people readily identify
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with them.
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They feel like what you are.
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I mean, this is the thing, this is the spell that gets broken with meditation.
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Our default state is to feel identical to the stream of thought, which is fairly paradoxical
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because how could you as a mind, as a self, if there were such a thing as a self, have
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how could you be identical to the next piece of language or the next image that just springs
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into conscious view, and meditation is ultimately about examining that point of view closely
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enough so as to unravel it and feel the freedom that's on the other side of that identification.
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The subjectively thoughts simply emerge and you don't think them before you think them.
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This is the first moment where anyone listening to us or watching us now could perform this
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experiment for themselves.
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Just imagine something or remember something.
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Just pick a memory, any memory.
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You've got a storehouse of memory, just promote one to consciousness.
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Did you pick that memory?
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I mean, let's say you remembered breakfast yesterday, or you remembered what you said
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to your spouse before leaving the house, or you remembered what you watched on Netflix
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last night, or you remembered something that happened to you when you're four years old,
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whatever it is, first it wasn't there, and then it appeared.
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That is not a, I'm sure we'll get to the topic of free will ultimately, that's not evidence
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of free will, right?
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Why are you so sure, by the way?
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It's very interesting.
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Well, yeah, there's no free will of my own, yeah.
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Everything just appears, but what else could it do?
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That's the subjective side of it.
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Objectively, we have every reason to believe that many of our thoughts, all of our thoughts
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are at bottom what some part of our brain is doing neurophysiologically.
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These are the products of some kind of neural computation, neural representation, and we're
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talking about memories.
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Is it possible to pull at the string of thoughts that try to get to its root to try to dig
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in past the obvious surface subjective experience of the thoughts pop out of nowhere?
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Is it possible to somehow get closer to the roots of where they come out of from the firing
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of the cells, or is it a useless pursuit to dig into that direction?
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You can get closer to many, many subtle contents in consciousness, so you can notice things
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more and more clearly and have a landscape of mind open up and become more differentiated
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and more interesting.
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If you take psychedelics, it opens up wide depending on what you've taken and the dose.
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It opens in directions and to an extent that very few people imagine would be possible,
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but for having had those experiences.
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But this idea of you getting closer to something, to the datum of your mind, or something of
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interest in there, or something that's more real, is ultimately undermined because there's
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no place from which you're getting closer to it.
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There's no your part of that journey.
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We tend to start out, whether it's in meditation or in any kind of self examination or taking
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psychedelics.
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We start out with this default point of view of feeling like we're the rider on the horse
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of consciousness, or we're the man in the boat going down the stream of consciousness,
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but we're differentiated from what we know cognitively, introspectively.
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But that feeling of being differentiated, that feeling of being a self that can strategically
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pay attention to some contents of consciousness is what it's like to be identified with some
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part of the stream of thought that's going uninspected.
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It's a false point of view.
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And when you see that and cut through that, then this sense of this notion of going deeper
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kind of breaks apart because really, there is no depth ultimately, everything is right
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on the surface.
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There's no center to consciousness, there's just consciousness in its contents.
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And those contents can change vastly, again, if you drop acid, the contents change.
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But in some sense, that doesn't represent a position of depth versus, the continuum
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of depth versus surface has broken apart.
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So you're taking as a starting point that there is a horse called consciousness and
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you're riding it, and the actual riding is very shallow, this is all surface.
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So let me ask about that horse.
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What's up with the horse?
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What is consciousness?
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From where does it emerge?
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How like fundamental is it to the physics of reality?
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How fundamental is it to what it means to be human?
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And I'm just asking for a friend so that we can build it in our artificial intelligence
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systems.
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Yeah.
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Well, that remains to be seen if we can, if we will build it purposefully or just by
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accident.
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There's a major ethical problem, potentially, that I mean, my concern here is that we may
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in fact build artificial intelligence that passes the Turing test, which we begin to
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treat not only as super intelligent because it obviously is and demonstrates that, but
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we begin to treat it as conscious because it will seem conscious.
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We will have built it to seem conscious.
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And unless we understand exactly how consciousness emerges from physics, we won't actually know
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that these systems are conscious.
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They may say, listen, you can't turn me off because that's a murder.
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And we will be convinced by that dialogue because we will, just in the extreme case,
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who knows when we'll get there, but if we build something like perfectly humanoid robots
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that are more intelligent than we are, so we're basically in, you know, a Westworld
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like situation, there's no way we're going to withhold an attribution of consciousness
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from those machines.
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It's just going to seem, they're going to advertise their consciousness in every glance
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and every utterance.
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But we won't know, and we won't know in some deeper sense than it make, than we can be
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skeptical of the consciousness of other people.
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I mean, if someone could roll that back and say, well, you don't, you know, I don't know
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that you're conscious or you don't know that I'm conscious, we're just passing the turing
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test for one another.
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But that kind of solipsism isn't justified, you know, biologically or we just, anything
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we understand about the mind biologically suggests that you and I are part of the same,
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you know, roll the dice in terms of how intelligent and conscious systems emerged in the wet
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wear of brains like ours, right?
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So it's not parsimonious for me to think that I might be the only conscious person or even
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the only conscious primate, you know, I would argue it's not parsimonious to withhold consciousness
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from other apes and even other mammals ultimately.
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And you know, once you get beyond the mammals, then my intuitions are not really clear.
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The question of how it emerges is genuinely uncertain and ultimately the question of whether
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it emerges is still uncertain.
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You can, you know, it's not, it's not fashionable to think this, but you can certainly argue
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that consciousness might be a fundamental principle of matter that doesn't emerge on
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the basis of information processing, even though everything else that we recognize about ourselves
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as minds almost certainly does emerge, you know, like an ability to process language
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that clearly is a matter of information processing because you can disrupt that process in ways
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that is, it's just so clear.
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And the problem that the confound with consciousness is that, yes, we can seem to interrupt consciousness
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and you can give someone general anesthesia and then you wake them up and you ask them,
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well, what was that like?
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And they say, nothing, I don't remember anything.
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But it's hard to differentiate a mere failure of memory from a genuine interruption in consciousness,
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whereas it's not with, you know, interrupting speech, you know, we know when we've done
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it.
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And it's, it's just obvious that, you know, you disrupt the right neural circuits and
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you, you know, you've disrupted speech.
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So if you had to bet all your money on one camp or the other, would you say, do you earn
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a side of panpsychism, where consciousness is really fundamental to our, to all of reality
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or more on the other side, which is like, it's a nice little side effect, a useful like
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hack for us humans to survive, where on that spectrum, where do you land when you think
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about consciousness, especially from an engineering perspective?
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I'm truly agnostic on this point.
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I mean, I think I'm, you know, it's kind of in coin toss mode for me.
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I don't know.
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And panpsychism is not so compelling to me.
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Again, it just seems unfalsifiable.
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I wouldn't know how the universe would be different if panpsychism were true.
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And just to remind people, panpsychism is this idea that consciousness may be pushed
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all the way down into the most fundamental constituents of matters.
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So there might be something that it's like to be an electron or, you know, a cork, but
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then you wouldn't expect anything to be different at the macro scale, or at least I wouldn't
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expect anything to be different.
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So it may be unfalsifiable.
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It just might be that reality is not something we're as in touch with as we think we are,
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and that if that is base layer to kind of break it into mind and matter as we've done
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ontologically, is to misconstrue it, right?
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I mean, there could be some kind of neutral monism at the bottom.
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And this, you know, this idea doesn't originate with me.
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This goes all the way back to Bertrand Russell and others, you know, 100 plus years ago.
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But I just feel like the concepts we're using to divide consciousness and matter may in fact
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be part of our problem, right?
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Where the rubber hits the road psychologically here are things like, well, what is death,
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right?
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Like, do we, any expectation that we survive death or any part of us survives death?
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That really seems to be the, the many people's concern here.
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Well, I tend to believe just as a small little tangent, like I'm with Ernest Becker on this,
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that there's some, it's interesting to think about death and consciousness.
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Which one is the chicken?
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Which one is the egg?
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Because it feels like death could be the very thing, like our knowledge of mortality could
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be the very thing that creates the consciousness.
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Yeah.
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Well, then you're using consciousness differently than I am.
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I mean, so for me, consciousness is just the fact that the lights are on at all, that there's
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an experiential quality to anything.
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So much of the processing that's happening in our brains right now seems, certainly seems
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to be happening in the dark, right?
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Like it's not associated with this qualitative sense that there's something that is like
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to be that part of the mind doing that mental thing.
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But for other parts, the lights are on and we can talk about and whether we talk about
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it or not, we can feel directly that there's something that is like to be us, there's something
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that seems to be happening, right?
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And this seeming in our case is broken into vision and hearing and proprioception and taste
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and smell and thought and emotion.
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There are the contents of consciousness that we are familiar with and that we can have
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direct access to in any present moment that when we're, quote, conscious.
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And even if we're confused about them, even if, you know, we're asleep and dreaming and
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we really, and we're, it's not a lucid dream, we're just totally confused about our circumstance.
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What you can't say is that we're confused about consciousness.
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Like you can't say that consciousness itself might be an illusion because on this account,
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it just means that things seem any way at all.
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I mean, even like if this, you know, it seems to me that I'm seeing a cup on the table.
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Now, I could be wrong about that, it could be a hologram, I could be asleep and dreaming,
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I could be hallucinating, but the seeming part isn't really up for grabs in terms of
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being an illusion.
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It's not something seems to be happening.
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And that seeming is the context in which every other thing we can notice about ourselves
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can be noticed.
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And it's also the context in which certain illusions can be cut through because we're
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not, we can be wrong about what it's like to be us.
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And we can, I'm not saying we're incorrigible with respect to our claims about the nature
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of our experience, but for instance, this, you know, many people feel like they have
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a self and they feel like it has free will.
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And I'm quite sure at this point that they're wrong about that and that you can, you can
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cut through those experiences and then things seem a different way, right?
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So it's not that things don't, there aren't discoveries to be made there and assumptions
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to be overturned, but this kind of consciousness is something that I would think, it doesn't
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just come online when we get language, it doesn't just come online when we form a concept
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of death or the finiteness of life, it doesn't require a sense of self, right?
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So it doesn't, it's prior to a differentiating self and other.
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And I wouldn't even think it's necessarily limited to people.
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I do think probably any mammal has this, but certainly if you're going to, if you're going
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to presuppose that something about our brains is producing this, right?
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And that's a very safe assumption, even though we can't, even though you can argue the jury
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is still out to some degree.
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Then it's very hard to draw a principled line between us and chimps, or chimps and rats
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even in the end, given the underlying neural similarities.
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So I don't know, phylogenetically, I don't know how far back to push that.
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Where people think single cells might be conscious, or that flies are certainly conscious, they've
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got something like 100,000 neurons in their brains, and it's just, there's a lot going
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on even in a fly, right?
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But I don't have intuitions about that.
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But it's not in your sense an illusion you can cut through.
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I mean, to push back, the alternative version could be, it is an illusion constructed just
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by humans, I'm not sure I believe this, but it, in part of me, hopes this is true because
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it makes it easier to engineer, is that humans are able to contemplate their mortality.
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And that contemplation in itself creates consciousness, like the rich lights on experience.
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So the lights don't actually even turn on in the way that you're describing until afterbirth
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in that construction.
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Do you think it's possible that that is the case, that it is a sort of construct of the
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way we deal, almost like a social tool to deal with the reality of the world, the social
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interaction with other humans?
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Or is, because you're saying the complete opposite, which is it's like fundamental to
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single cell organisms and trees and so on.
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Right.
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Well, yeah.
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So I don't know how far down to push it.
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I don't have intuitions that single cells are likely to be conscious, but they might
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be.
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And I just, and again, I could be unfalsifiable.
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But as far as babies not being conscious or you're not, you don't become conscious until
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you can recognize yourself in a mirror or you have a conversation or treat other people.
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First of all, babies treat other people as others far earlier than we have traditionally
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given them credit for, and they certainly do it before they have language, right?
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So it's got to proceed language to some degree.
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And I mean, you can interrogate this for yourself because you can put yourself in various states
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that are rather obviously not linguistic, you know, meditation allows you to do this.
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You can certainly do it with psychedelics where it's just, your capacity for language
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has been obliterated and yet you're all too conscious.
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In fact, I think you could make a stronger argument for things running the other way,
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that there's something about language and conceptual thought that is eliminative of conscious
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experience, that we're potentially much more conscious of data, sense data and everything
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else than we tend to be, and we have trimmed it down based on how we have acquired concepts.
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And so like when I walk into a room like this, I know I'm walking into a room, I have certain
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expectations of what is in a room, you know, I would be very surprised to see, you know,
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all the animals in here or waterfall or things I'm not expecting, but I can know I'm not
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expecting them or I'm expecting their absence because of my capacity to be surprised once
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I walk into a room and I see a live gorilla or whatever.
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00:22:02.000
So there's structure there that we have put in place based on all of our conceptual learning
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00:22:08.880
and language and language learning and it causes us not to, one of the things that happens
link |
00:22:16.240
when you take psychedelics and you just look as though for the first time at anything, it
link |
00:22:21.880
becomes incredibly overloaded with, it can become overloaded with meaning and just the
link |
00:22:34.440
torrents of sense data that are coming in in even the most ordinary circumstances can
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00:22:39.200
become overwhelming for people.
link |
00:22:40.880
And that tends to just obliterate one's capacity to capture any of it linguistically.
link |
00:22:48.120
And as you're coming down, have you done psychedelics, have you ever done acid?
link |
00:22:52.440
Not acid, mushroom, and that's it, and also edibles, but there's some psychedelic properties
link |
00:23:00.760
to them, but mushrooms several times and always had an incredible experience.
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00:23:08.080
Exactly the kind of experience you're referring to, which is if it's true that language constrains
link |
00:23:14.120
our experience, it felt like I was removing some of the constraints.
link |
00:23:19.800
Because even just the most basic things were beautiful in the way that I wasn't able to
link |
00:23:24.200
appreciate previously, like trees and nature and so on.
link |
00:23:28.200
And the experience of coming down is an experience of encountering the futility of capturing
link |
00:23:39.920
what you just saw a moment ago in words, especially if you have any part of your self concept
link |
00:23:47.600
and your ego program is to be able to capture things in words.
link |
00:23:51.920
And if you're a writer or a poet or a scientist or someone who wants to just encapsulate
link |
00:23:58.160
the profundity of what just happened, the total fatuousness of that enterprise when
link |
00:24:08.920
you have taken a whopping dose of psychedelics and you begin to even gesture at describing
link |
00:24:18.800
it to yourself so that you could describe it to others, it's like trying to thread a
link |
00:24:26.040
needle using your elbows.
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00:24:27.400
I mean, it's like you're trying something, it's like the mere gesture proves its impossibility.
link |
00:24:35.200
And for me, that suggests just empirically on the first person side that it's possible
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00:24:44.200
to put yourself in a condition where it's clearly not about language structuring your
link |
00:24:51.320
experience and you're having much more experience than you tend to.
link |
00:24:56.640
So the language is primary for some things, but it's certainly primary for certain kinds
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00:25:06.600
of concepts and certain kinds of semantic understandings of the world, but it's clearly
link |
00:25:14.000
more to mind than the conversation we're having with ourselves or that we can't have with
link |
00:25:19.560
others.
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00:25:20.560
Can we go to that world of psychedelics for a bit?
link |
00:25:27.320
What do you think?
link |
00:25:29.320
So Joe Rogan apparently and many others meet apparently elves when they on DMT.
link |
00:25:38.280
A lot of people report this kind of creatures that they see.
link |
00:25:41.760
And again, it's probably the failure of language to describe that experience, but DMT is an
link |
00:25:45.560
interesting one, there's, as you're aware, there's a bunch of studies going on and psychedelics
link |
00:25:51.960
currently in DMA, so Simon and John Hopkins and much other places, but DMT they all speak
link |
00:26:04.400
of as like some extra super level of a psychedelic.
link |
00:26:09.480
Yeah, do you have a sense of where it is our mind goes on psychedelics, but in DMT especially?
link |
00:26:19.680
Well, unfortunately, I haven't taken DMT.
link |
00:26:23.120
Unfortunately or fortunately?
link |
00:26:24.120
Unfortunately.
link |
00:26:25.120
Unfortunately.
link |
00:26:26.120
Unfortunately.
link |
00:26:27.120
Although it's, I presume it's in my body as it is in everyone's brain and many, many
link |
00:26:32.160
plants apparently, but I've wanted to take, I haven't had an opportunity that was presented
link |
00:26:39.040
itself that where it was obviously the right thing for me to be doing.
link |
00:26:43.560
But for those who don't know, DMT is often touted as the most intense psychedelic and
link |
00:26:49.520
also the shortest acting.
link |
00:26:51.760
You smoke it and it's basically a 10 minute experience or a three minute experience within
link |
00:26:57.520
like a 10 minute window that when you're really down after 10 minutes or so.
link |
00:27:06.840
And Terrence McKenna was a big proponent of DMT.
link |
00:27:09.560
That was his, you know, the center of the bullseye for him psychedelically apparently.
link |
00:27:15.640
And it does, it is characterized, it seems for many people by this phenomenon, which
link |
00:27:21.280
is, which is unlike virtually any other psychedelic experience, which is your, it's not just your
link |
00:27:27.200
perception being broadened or changed.
link |
00:27:31.040
It's you, according to Terrence McKenna, feeling fairly unchanged, but catapulted into a different
link |
00:27:40.160
circumstance.
link |
00:27:41.160
You have been shot elsewhere and find yourself in relationship to other entities of some
link |
00:27:48.360
kind.
link |
00:27:49.360
So the place is populated with things that seem not to be your mind.
link |
00:27:54.240
So it does feel like travel to another place because you're unchanged yourself.
link |
00:27:57.880
Again, I just have this on the authority of the people who have described their experience.
link |
00:28:03.480
But it sounds like it's pretty common, it sounds like it's pretty common for people
link |
00:28:06.980
not to have the full experience because it's apparently pretty unpleasant to smoke.
link |
00:28:11.680
So it's like getting enough on board in order to get shot out of the cannon and land among
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00:28:18.840
the what McKenna called self transforming machine elves that appeared to him like jeweled, you
link |
00:28:29.760
know, Faberge egg, like self drippling basketballs that were handing him completely uninterpretable
link |
00:28:37.360
reams of profound knowledge.
link |
00:28:41.560
It's an experience I haven't had, so I just have to accept that people have had it.
link |
00:28:48.800
I would just point out that our minds are clearly capable of producing apparent others
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00:28:57.520
on demand that are totally compelling to us, right?
link |
00:29:02.520
There's no limit to our ability to do that as anyone who's ever remembered a dream can
link |
00:29:07.440
attest.
link |
00:29:08.440
Every night we go to sleep, some of us don't remember dreams very often, but some dream
link |
00:29:14.200
vividly every night and just think of how insane that experience is.
link |
00:29:20.920
I mean, you've forgotten where you were, right?
link |
00:29:24.120
That's the strangest part, I mean, this is psychosis, right?
link |
00:29:28.080
You have lost your mind, you have lost your connection to your episodic memory or even
link |
00:29:35.160
your expectations that reality won't undergo wholesale changes a moment after you have
link |
00:29:43.640
closed your eyes, right?
link |
00:29:44.960
Like you're in bed, you're watching something on Netflix, you're waiting to fall asleep,
link |
00:29:50.680
and then the next thing that happens to you is impossible and you're not surprised, right?
link |
00:29:56.280
You're talking to dead people, you're hanging out with famous people, you're someplace you
link |
00:30:01.720
couldn't physically be, you can fly, and even that's not surprising, right?
link |
00:30:06.880
You have lost your mind, but relevantly for this...
link |
00:30:10.840
Or found it.
link |
00:30:12.200
You found something, I mean, lucid dreaming is very interesting because then you can have
link |
00:30:16.080
the best of both circumstances and then it can become systematically explored.
link |
00:30:22.280
But what I mean by found just to start to interrupt is like if we take this brilliant
link |
00:30:28.600
idea that language constrains us, grounds us, language and other things of the waking
link |
00:30:34.280
world ground us, maybe it is that you've found the full capacity of your cognition.
link |
00:30:42.160
When you dream or when you do psychedelics, you're stepping outside the little human
link |
00:30:46.840
cage, the cage of the human condition, open the door and step out and look around and
link |
00:30:52.840
then go back in.
link |
00:30:53.840
Well, you've definitely stepped out of something and into something else, but you've also
link |
00:30:58.320
lost something, right?
link |
00:30:59.480
You've lost certain capacities.
link |
00:31:00.800
Memory.
link |
00:31:01.800
That you want.
link |
00:31:02.800
Well, just, yeah, in this case, you literally didn't, you don't have enough presence of
link |
00:31:07.520
mind in the dreamy, in the dreamy city or even in the psychedelic state, if you take
link |
00:31:12.080
enough.
link |
00:31:13.080
To do math.
link |
00:31:16.160
There's no psychological, there's very little psychological continuity with your life such
link |
00:31:21.960
that you're not surprised to be in the presence of someone who should be, you should know
link |
00:31:29.360
is dead or you should know you're not likely to have met by normal channels, right?
link |
00:31:34.000
Yeah.
link |
00:31:35.000
You're now talking to some celebrity and it turns out you're best friends, right?
link |
00:31:39.200
And you're not even, you have no memory of how you got there, you know, like how did
link |
00:31:42.120
you get into the room?
link |
00:31:43.120
You're like, did you drive to this restaurant?
link |
00:31:44.800
You know, you have no memory and none of that's surprising to you.
link |
00:31:47.560
So you're kind of brain damaged in a way.
link |
00:31:49.800
You're not reality testing in the normal way.
link |
00:31:53.480
The fascinating possibility is that there's probably thousands of people who've taken
link |
00:31:58.240
psychedelics of various forms and have met Sam Harris on that journey.
link |
00:32:03.160
Well, I would put it more likely in dreams, not, you know, because in psychedelics, you
link |
00:32:08.120
don't tend to hallucinate in a dreamlike way.
link |
00:32:11.520
I mean, so DMT is giving you an experience of others, but it seems to be nonstandard.
link |
00:32:18.840
It's not like, it's not just like dream hallucinations.
link |
00:32:24.040
But to the point of coming back to DMT, the people want to suggest, and Terence McKenna
link |
00:32:31.160
certainly did suggest that because these others are so obviously other and they're so vivid,
link |
00:32:38.040
well, then they could not possibly be the creation of my own mind.
link |
00:32:43.000
But every night in dreams, you create a compelling or what is to you at the time, a totally compelling
link |
00:32:51.080
simulacrum of another person, right, and that's, that just proves the mind is capable of doing
link |
00:33:00.920
it.
link |
00:33:01.920
Now, the phenomenon of lucid dreaming shows that the mind isn't capable of doing everything
link |
00:33:07.120
you think it might be capable of even in that space.
link |
00:33:10.120
So one of the things that people have discovered in lucid dreams, and I haven't done a lot
link |
00:33:16.800
of lucid dreaming.
link |
00:33:17.800
I can't confirm all of this, so I can confirm some of it.
link |
00:33:24.920
Apparently in every house, in every room in the mansion of dreams, all light switches
link |
00:33:31.480
are dimmer switches.
link |
00:33:32.600
Like, if you go into a dark room and flip on the light, it gradually comes up.
link |
00:33:37.960
It doesn't come up instantly on demand because apparently this is covering for the brain's
link |
00:33:44.560
inability to produce from a standing start visually rich imagery on demand.
link |
00:33:52.160
So I haven't confirmed that, but people have done research on lucid dreaming claim that
link |
00:33:58.120
it's all dimmer switches.
link |
00:34:01.440
But one thing I have noticed, and people can check this out, is that in a dream, if you
link |
00:34:08.760
look at a page of text, or a sign, or a television that has text on it, and then you turn away
link |
00:34:17.160
and you look back at that text, the text will have changed.
link |
00:34:20.600
The total is just a chronic instability, graphical instability of text in the dream state.
link |
00:34:29.200
And I don't know if that, maybe that's, someone can confirm that that's not true for them,
link |
00:34:33.280
but whenever I've checked that out, that has been true for me.
link |
00:34:35.760
It keeps generating it like real time from a video game perspective.
link |
00:34:40.640
Yeah, it's rendering, it's re rendering it for some reason.
link |
00:34:44.920
What's interesting, I actually, I don't know how I found myself in this sets of that part
link |
00:34:50.400
of the internet, but there's quite a lot of discussion about what it's like to do math
link |
00:34:55.200
on LSD.
link |
00:34:57.640
Because apparently, one of the deepest thinking processes needed is those of mathematicians
link |
00:35:04.600
or theoretical computer scientists, basically doing anything that involves math is proofs,
link |
00:35:09.960
and you have to think creatively, but also deeply, and you have to think for many hours
link |
00:35:14.440
at a time.
link |
00:35:15.960
And so they're always looking for ways to, like, is there, is there any sparks of creativity
link |
00:35:21.200
that could be injected, and apparently, out of all the psychedelics, the worst is LSD,
link |
00:35:27.600
because it completely destroys your ability to do math well.
link |
00:35:30.840
And I wonder whether that has to do with your ability to visualize geometric things in a
link |
00:35:37.640
stable way in your mind and hold them there and stitch things together, which is often
link |
00:35:42.120
what's required for proofs.
link |
00:35:44.240
But again, it's difficult to kind of research these kinds of concepts, but it does make
link |
00:35:49.480
me wonder where, what are the spaces, how's the space of things you're able to think about
link |
00:35:57.440
and explore, morphed by different, by different psychedelics or dream states and so on, and
link |
00:36:05.200
how is that different?
link |
00:36:06.200
How much does it overlap with reality?
link |
00:36:08.280
And what is fundamental, what is reality?
link |
00:36:10.520
Is there a waking state reality, or is it just a tiny subset of reality, and we get
link |
00:36:16.240
to take a step in other versions of it?
link |
00:36:19.200
We tend to think very much in a space time, four dimensional, there's a three dimensional
link |
00:36:25.400
world, there's time, and that's what we think about reality.
link |
00:36:29.760
And we think of traveling as walking from point A to point B in the three dimensional
link |
00:36:35.640
world, but that's a very kind of human surviving, try not to get eaten by a lion conception
link |
00:36:42.360
of reality.
link |
00:36:43.520
What if traveling is something like we do with psychedelics and meet the elves?
link |
00:36:48.440
What if it's something, what if thinking or the space of ideas as we kind of grow and
link |
00:36:53.920
think through ideas, that's traveling?
link |
00:36:57.840
Or what if memories is traveling?
link |
00:37:00.360
I don't know if you have a favorite view of reality, or if you had, by the way, I should
link |
00:37:06.320
say an excellent conversation with Donald Hoffman.
link |
00:37:10.960
Yeah, he's interesting.
link |
00:37:12.120
Is there any inkling of his sense in your mind that reality is very far from, actual
link |
00:37:20.600
like objective reality is very far from the kind of reality we imagine we perceive and
link |
00:37:25.840
we play with in our human minds?
link |
00:37:29.520
Well, the first thing to grant is that we're never in direct contact with reality, whatever
link |
00:37:39.920
it is, unless that reality is consciousness.
link |
00:37:42.760
So we're only ever experiencing consciousness and its contents.
link |
00:37:48.840
And then the question is, how does that circumstance relate to, quote, reality at large?
link |
00:37:56.120
And Donald Hoffman is somebody who's happy to speculate, well, maybe there isn't a reality
link |
00:38:02.200
at large.
link |
00:38:03.200
Maybe it's all just consciousness on some level.
link |
00:38:05.920
And that's interesting.
link |
00:38:08.480
That runs into, to my eye, various philosophical problems that, or at least you have to do
link |
00:38:17.200
a lot, you have to add to that picture, picture of idealism, that's usually all the whole
link |
00:38:26.640
family of views that would just say that the universe is just mind or just consciousness
link |
00:38:31.960
at bottom will go by the name of idealism in Western philosophy.
link |
00:38:38.400
You have to add to that idealistic picture, all kinds of epicycles and kind of weird coincidences
link |
00:38:44.840
and to get the predictability of our experience and the success of materialist science to
link |
00:38:54.480
make sense in that context.
link |
00:38:56.240
So the fact that we can, what does it mean to say that there's only consciousness at
link |
00:39:03.720
bottom, nothing outside of consciousness, because no one's ever experienced anything
link |
00:39:08.560
outside of consciousness?
link |
00:39:09.560
Because no scientist has ever done an experiment where they were contemplating data, no matter
link |
00:39:15.120
how far removed from our sense bases, whether it's they're looking at the Hubble deep field
link |
00:39:20.560
or they're smashing atoms or whatever tools they're using, they're still just experiencing
link |
00:39:28.240
consciousness and its various deliverances and layering their concepts on top of that.
link |
00:39:37.400
So that's always true.
link |
00:39:41.680
And yet that somehow doesn't seem to capture the character of our continually discovering
link |
00:39:54.000
that our materialist assumptions are confirmable.
link |
00:39:59.040
So take the fact that we unleash this fantastic amount of energy from within an atom.
link |
00:40:06.640
First we have the theoretical suggestion that it's possible to come back to Einstein, there's
link |
00:40:14.240
a lot of energy in that matter, and what if we could release it?
link |
00:40:21.160
And then we perform an experiment that in this case, the Trinity test site in New Mexico
link |
00:40:28.520
where the people who are most adequate to this conversation, people like Robert Oppenheimer
link |
00:40:36.840
are standing around, not altogether certain it's going to work, right?
link |
00:40:41.040
They're performing an experiment, they're wondering what's going to happen, they're
link |
00:40:43.240
wondering if their calculations around the yield are off by orders of magnitude.
link |
00:40:47.840
Some of them are still wondering whether the entire atmosphere of Earth is going to combust,
link |
00:40:54.480
right, that the nuclear chain reaction is not going to stop.
link |
00:41:01.520
And lo and behold, there was that energy to be released from within the nucleus of an
link |
00:41:08.880
atom and that could, so it's just what the picture one forms from those kinds of experiments
link |
00:41:20.440
and just the knowledge is just our understanding of evolution, just the fact that the Earth
link |
00:41:24.840
is billions of years old and life is hundreds of millions of years old and we weren't here
link |
00:41:29.360
to think about any of those things and all of those processes were happening therefore
link |
00:41:33.760
in the dark and they are the processes that allowed us to emerge from prior life forms
link |
00:41:40.400
in the first place to say that nothing exists outside of consciousness, conscious minds
link |
00:41:47.940
of the sort that we experience, it just seems like a bizarrely anthropocentric claim, you
link |
00:42:01.080
know, analogous to, you know, the moon isn't there if no one's looking at it, right?
link |
00:42:05.720
The moon as a moon isn't there if no one's looking at it, I'll grant that because that's
link |
00:42:10.280
already a kind of fabrication born of concepts, but the idea that there's nothing there,
link |
00:42:17.200
that there's nothing that corresponds to what we experience as the moon unless someone's
link |
00:42:22.360
looking at it, that just seems just a way too parochial way to set out on this journey
link |
00:42:30.380
of discovery.
link |
00:42:31.380
There is something there, there's a computer waiting to render the moon when you look at
link |
00:42:34.800
it, that the capacity for the moon to exist is there, so if we're indeed living in a simulation
link |
00:42:42.520
which I find a compelling thought experiment, it's possible that there is a kind of rendering
link |
00:42:48.120
mechanism, but not in a silly way that we think about in video games, but in some kind
link |
00:42:53.040
of more fundamental physics way.
link |
00:42:55.680
And we have to account for the fact that it renders experiences that no one has had yet,
link |
00:43:04.200
that no one has any expectation of having, it can violate the expectations of everyone
link |
00:43:09.280
lawfully and then there's some lawful understanding of why that's so, it's like to bring it back
link |
00:43:17.560
to mathematics, certain numbers are prime whether we have discovered them or not, there's
link |
00:43:23.440
the highest prime number that anyone can name now, and then there's the next prime number
link |
00:43:29.080
that no one can name and it's there, so it's like it's to say that our minds are putting
link |
00:43:36.000
it there, that what we know as mind in ourselves is in some way, in some sense putting it there,
link |
00:43:43.400
the base layer of reality is consciousness, that we're identical to the thing that is
link |
00:43:49.680
rendering this reality.
link |
00:43:53.360
There's some, hubris is the wrong word, but it's okay if reality is bigger than what
link |
00:44:02.040
we experience and has structure that we can't anticipate and that isn't just, again, there's
link |
00:44:15.440
certainly a collaboration between our minds and whatever's out there to produce what we
link |
00:44:20.680
call the stuff of life, but it's not, the idea that it's, I don't know, I mean there
link |
00:44:31.800
are a few stops on the train of idealism and kind of new age thinking and Eastern philosophy
link |
00:44:39.400
that I don't, philosophically I don't see a need to take, I mean the plays experientially
link |
00:44:44.320
and scientifically, I feel like you can get everything you want acknowledging that consciousness
link |
00:44:53.480
has a character that can be explored from its own side, so that you're bringing kind
link |
00:44:59.960
of the first person experience back into the conversation about what is a human mind and
link |
00:45:05.760
what is true, and you can explore it with different degrees of rigor and there are things
link |
00:45:12.880
to be discovered there, whether you're using a technique like meditation or psychedelics,
link |
00:45:16.960
and that these experiences have to be put in conversation with what we understand about
link |
00:45:22.720
ourselves from a third person side, neuroscientifically or in any other way.
link |
00:45:27.600
But to me the question is, what if real, the sense I have from this kind of, you play
link |
00:45:33.920
shooters?
link |
00:45:34.920
No.
link |
00:45:35.920
There's a physics engine that generates, that's probably, I have, you mean first person
link |
00:45:39.560
shooter games?
link |
00:45:40.560
Yes.
link |
00:45:41.560
Sorry.
link |
00:45:42.560
Not often, but yes.
link |
00:45:43.560
I mean there's a physics engine that generates consistent reality, right?
link |
00:45:47.400
My sense is the same could be true for a universe in the following sense that our conception
link |
00:45:54.000
of reality, as we understand it now in the 21st century, is a tiny subset of the full
link |
00:45:59.400
reality.
link |
00:46:00.400
It's not that the reality that we conceive of that's there, the moon being there is not
link |
00:46:05.320
there somehow, it's that it's a tiny fraction of what's actually out there.
link |
00:46:09.600
And so the physics engine of the universe is just maintaining the useful physics, the
link |
00:46:16.160
useful reality, quote unquote, for us to have a consistent experience as human beings, but
link |
00:46:22.960
maybe we descendants of apes are really only understand like 0.0001% of actual physics
link |
00:46:32.440
of reality, like this, we can even just start with the consciousness thing, but maybe our
link |
00:46:38.520
minds are just, we're just too dumb by design.
link |
00:46:45.040
That truly resonates with me and I'm surprised it doesn't resonate more with most scientists
link |
00:46:49.680
that I talked to, when you just look at how close we are to chimps, right, and chimps
link |
00:46:57.560
don't know anything, right, clearly they have no idea what's going on, right?
link |
00:47:01.640
And then you get us, but then it's only a subset of human beings that really understand
link |
00:47:08.520
much of what we're talking about in any area of specialization.
link |
00:47:12.800
And if they all died in their sleep tonight, right, you'd be left with people who might
link |
00:47:19.120
take a thousand years to rebuild the internet, you know, if ever, right, I mean, literally,
link |
00:47:25.240
it's like, you know, and, you know, I would extend this to myself, I mean, there are areas
link |
00:47:30.880
of scientific specialization where I have either no discernible competence, I mean,
link |
00:47:38.200
I spend no time on it, I have not acquired the tools, it would just be an article of
link |
00:47:43.040
faith for me to think that I could acquire the tools to actually make a breakthrough
link |
00:47:46.280
in those areas, and I mean, you know, your own area is one, I mean, you know, I've never
link |
00:47:52.240
spent any significant amount of time trying to be a programmer, but it's pretty obvious
link |
00:47:58.920
I'm not Alan Turing, right, it's like, if that were my capacity, I would have discovered
link |
00:48:04.640
that in myself, I would have found programming irresistible, my first fall starts in learning,
link |
00:48:13.240
I think it was C, it was just, you know, I bounced off, it's like, this was not fun,
link |
00:48:18.320
I hate, I mean, trying to figure out what, you know, the syntax error that's causing
link |
00:48:22.680
this thing not to compile was just a fucking awful experience, I hated it, right, I hated
link |
00:48:26.640
every minute of it, so it was not, so if it was just people like me left, like, when do
link |
00:48:35.360
we get the internet again, right, and we lose, we lose, you know, we lose the internet, when
link |
00:48:40.720
do we get it again, right, when do we get a, anything like a proper science of information,
link |
00:48:46.640
right, you need a Claude Shannon, or an Alan Turing, just to plant a flag in the ground
link |
00:48:52.760
right here and say, all right, can everyone see this, even if you don't quite know what
link |
00:48:56.600
I'm up to, you all have to come over here to make some progress, and you know, there
link |
00:49:04.320
are, you know, hundreds of topics where that's the case, so we're, we barely have a purchase
link |
00:49:11.800
on making anything like discernible intellectual progress in any generation, and yeah, I'm,
link |
00:49:22.400
just a, Max Tegmark makes this point, he's one of the few people who does in physics,
link |
00:49:29.840
if you just take the truth of evolution seriously, right, and realize that there's nothing about
link |
00:49:39.520
us that has evolved to understand reality perfectly, I mean, we're just not that kind
link |
00:49:44.360
of ape, right, there's been no evolutionary pressure along those lines, so what we are
link |
00:49:49.120
making do with tools that were designed for fights with sticks and rocks, right, and it's
link |
00:49:58.040
amazing, we can do as much as we can, I mean, we just, you know, you and I are just sitting
link |
00:50:01.800
here on the back of having received an mRNA vaccine, you know, that has certainly changed
link |
00:50:07.880
our life, given what the last year was like, and it's going to change the world if rumors
link |
00:50:13.520
of coming miracles are borne out, I mean, if it's now, seems likely we have a vaccine
link |
00:50:20.720
coming for malaria, right, which has been killing millions of people a year for as long
link |
00:50:26.280
as we've been alive, I think it's down to like 800,000 people a year now because we've
link |
00:50:32.420
spread so many bed nets around, but it was like two and a half million people every year.
link |
00:50:39.480
It's amazing what we can do, but yeah, I have, if in fact the answer at the back of the book
link |
00:50:46.400
of nature is you understand 0.1% of what there is to understand and half of what you think
link |
00:50:53.120
you understand is wrong, that would not surprise me at all.
link |
00:50:57.640
It is funny to look at our evolutionary history, even back to chimps, I'm pretty sure even
link |
00:51:03.120
chimps thought they understood the world well.
link |
00:51:06.400
So at every point in that timeline of evolutionary development throughout human history, there's
link |
00:51:13.000
a sense like there's no more, you hear this message over and over, there's no more things
link |
00:51:17.880
to be invented.
link |
00:51:18.880
But about 100 years ago, there was a famous story, I forget which physicists told it,
link |
00:51:25.040
but there were physicists telling their undergraduate students not to go into, to get graduate degrees
link |
00:51:33.680
in physics because basically all the problems had been solved, and this is like around 1915
link |
00:51:39.080
or so.
link |
00:51:40.080
It turns out you were right, I'm going to ask you about free will.
link |
00:51:44.920
You've recently released an episode of your podcast, Making Sense, for those with a shorter
link |
00:51:50.240
attention span, basically summarizing your position on free will.
link |
00:51:53.960
I think it was under an hour and a half, as brief and clear.
link |
00:52:01.920
So allow me to summarize the summary, TLDR, and maybe you tell me where I'm wrong.
link |
00:52:08.520
So free will is an illusion, and even the experience of free will is an illusion, like
link |
00:52:14.080
we don't even experience it.
link |
00:52:18.000
Am I good in my summary?
link |
00:52:20.440
Yeah, this is a line that's a little hard to scan for people.
link |
00:52:27.360
I say that it's not merely that free will is an illusion.
link |
00:52:32.440
The illusion of free will is an illusion, like there is no illusion of free will.
link |
00:52:37.600
And that is a, unlike many other illusions, that's a more fundamental claim.
link |
00:52:47.160
It's not that it's wrong, it's not even wrong.
link |
00:52:49.440
I mean, that's, I guess, I think Wolfgang Pauley, who derided one of his colleagues
link |
00:52:55.560
or enemies with that aspersion about his theory in quantum mechanics.
link |
00:53:07.000
So there are things that you, there are genuine illusions.
link |
00:53:09.880
There are things that you do experience, and then you can kind of punch through that experience.
link |
00:53:15.200
Or you can't actually experience, you can't experience them any other way.
link |
00:53:20.280
It's just, we just know it's not a veritical experience.
link |
00:53:23.920
It's take like a visual illusion.
link |
00:53:25.440
There are visual illusions that, you know, a lot of these come to me on Twitter these
link |
00:53:28.400
days.
link |
00:53:29.400
There's these amazing visual illusions, where like, you know, every figure in this gift
link |
00:53:34.960
seems to be moving, but nothing in fact is moving.
link |
00:53:37.720
You can just like put a ruler on your screen and nothing's moving.
link |
00:53:42.480
Some of those illusions, you can't see any other way.
link |
00:53:44.480
I mean, they're just, they're hacking aspects of the visual system that are just eminently
link |
00:53:49.240
hackable.
link |
00:53:50.240
And you, you know, you have to use a ruler to convince yourself that the thing isn't
link |
00:53:55.240
actually moving.
link |
00:53:56.240
Now, there are other visual illusions where you're taken in by it at first, but if you
link |
00:54:01.480
pay more attention, you can actually see that it's not there, right, or it's not how it
link |
00:54:06.320
first seemed.
link |
00:54:07.320
Like the, like the necker cube is a good example of that.
link |
00:54:10.240
Like the necker cube is just that schematic of a cube, of a transparent cube, which pops
link |
00:54:14.840
out one way or the other, the one, one face can pop out and the other face can pop out.
link |
00:54:19.000
But you can actually just see it as flat with no pop out, which is a more veritical way
link |
00:54:24.960
of looking at it.
link |
00:54:28.080
So there are subject, there are kind of inward correlates to this.
link |
00:54:32.680
And I would say that the, the sense of self, the sense of self and free will are closely
link |
00:54:40.160
related.
link |
00:54:41.160
I'm often described them as, as two sides of the same coin, but they're not quite the
link |
00:54:45.080
same in the, their, their spuriousness.
link |
00:54:49.080
I mean, so the sense of self is something that people, I think, do experience, right?
link |
00:54:54.680
It's not a very clear experience, but it's not, I wouldn't call the illusion of self
link |
00:54:59.800
and illusion, but the illusion of free will is an illusion in that as you pay more attention
link |
00:55:05.360
to your experience, you begin to see that it's totally compatible with an absence of
link |
00:55:11.280
free will.
link |
00:55:12.280
You don't, I mean, come into back to the place we started.
link |
00:55:16.040
You don't know what you're going to think next.
link |
00:55:18.560
You don't know what you're going to intend next.
link |
00:55:20.440
You don't know what's going to just occur to you that you must do next.
link |
00:55:24.600
You don't know, you don't know how much you were going to feel the behavioral imperative
link |
00:55:29.480
to act on that thought.
link |
00:55:31.760
If you suddenly feel, oh, I don't need to do that.
link |
00:55:35.120
That's, I can do that tomorrow.
link |
00:55:36.840
You don't know where that comes from.
link |
00:55:38.160
You didn't know that was going to arise.
link |
00:55:39.680
You didn't know that was going to be compelling.
link |
00:55:41.840
All of this is compatible with some evil genius in the next room, just typing in code into
link |
00:55:47.160
your experience.
link |
00:55:48.160
It's like this, okay, let's give him the, oh my God, I just forgot it was going to be
link |
00:55:53.240
our anniversary in one week thought, right?
link |
00:55:56.200
Give him the cascade of fear.
link |
00:55:59.720
Give him this brilliant idea for the thing he can buy that's going to take him no time
link |
00:56:02.480
at all in this, you know, overpowering sense of relief.
link |
00:56:05.480
All of our experiences is compatible with the script already being written, right?
link |
00:56:11.760
And I'm not saying the script is written.
link |
00:56:12.920
I'm not saying that fatalism is, you know, is the right way to look at this.
link |
00:56:18.480
But we just don't have even our most deliberate voluntary action where we go back and forth
link |
00:56:24.880
between two options, you know, thinking about the reason for A and then, then reconsidering
link |
00:56:29.760
and going, thinking harder about B and just going any, many, many mo until the end of
link |
00:56:36.520
the hour, however laborious you can make it, there is a utter mystery at your back, finally
link |
00:56:45.080
promoting the thought or intention or ration, rationale that is most compelling and therefore
link |
00:56:54.240
deliberate, behaviorally effective and just, and this can drive some people a little crazy.
link |
00:57:09.240
So, you know, I usually preface what I say about free will with the caveat that if thinking
link |
00:57:15.320
about your mind this way makes you feel terrible, well, then stop, you know, get off the ride,
link |
00:57:20.720
you know, switch the channel, you don't have to go down this path.
link |
00:57:24.840
But for me and for many other people, it's incredibly freeing to recognize this about
link |
00:57:31.720
the mind because one, you realize that you're cutting through the illusion of the, you know,
link |
00:57:39.200
of the self as immensely freeing for a lot of reasons that we can talk about separately.
link |
00:57:44.200
But losing the sense of free will does two things very vividly for me.
link |
00:57:51.800
One is it totally undercuts the basis for, the psychological basis for hatred, right?
link |
00:57:56.800
Because when you think about the experience of hating other people, what that is anchored
link |
00:58:02.240
to is a feeling that they really are the true authors of their actions.
link |
00:58:08.400
I mean, that someone is doing something that you find so despicable, right?
link |
00:58:12.880
And let's say they're, you know, targeting you unfairly, right, they're maligning you
link |
00:58:17.320
on Twitter or they're, you know, they're suing you or they're doing something, they broke
link |
00:58:22.120
your car window, they did something awful, and now you have a grievance against them.
link |
00:58:26.800
And you're relating to them very differently, emotionally, in your own mind than you would
link |
00:58:32.320
if a force of nature had done this, right?
link |
00:58:34.560
Or if it's if it just been, you know, a virus or if it had been a wild animal or a malfunctioning
link |
00:58:40.400
machine, right?
link |
00:58:41.400
Like to those things, you don't attribute any kind of freedom of will.
link |
00:58:44.360
And while you may suffer the consequences of catching a virus or being attacked by a
link |
00:58:49.200
wild animal or having a, you know, your car break down or whatever, it may frustrate you.
link |
00:58:56.120
You don't slip into this mode of hating the agent in a way that completely commandeers
link |
00:59:04.640
your, your mind and deranges your life.
link |
00:59:07.760
I mean, you just don't, I mean, there are people who spend decades hating other people
link |
00:59:13.240
for what they did.
link |
00:59:16.040
And it's, it's just pure poison.
link |
00:59:18.160
Right.
link |
00:59:19.160
It's a useful shortcut to compassion and empathy.
link |
00:59:21.040
Yeah.
link |
00:59:22.040
Yeah.
link |
00:59:23.040
Let's say that this call, what was it, the horse of consciousness?
link |
00:59:26.880
Let's call it the, the consciousness generator black box that we don't understand.
link |
00:59:32.920
And is it possible that the script that we're walking along, that we're playing that's
link |
00:59:40.920
already written is actually being written in real time.
link |
00:59:44.760
It's almost like you're driving down a road and in real time that road is being laid down.
link |
00:59:51.000
And this black box of consciousness that we don't understand is the place where the script
link |
00:59:55.520
is being generated.
link |
00:59:57.160
So it's not, it is being generated.
link |
00:59:59.640
It didn't always exist.
link |
01:00:01.280
So there's something we don't understand that's fundamental about the nature of reality that
link |
01:00:05.640
generates both consciousness.
link |
01:00:07.680
Let's call it maybe the self.
link |
01:00:09.840
I don't know if you want to distinguish between those.
link |
01:00:11.720
Yeah, I definitely would.
link |
01:00:12.720
Yeah.
link |
01:00:13.720
You would, because there's a bunch of illusions we're referring to.
link |
01:00:16.480
There's the illusion of free will.
link |
01:00:18.560
There's the illusion of self and there's the illusion of consciousness.
link |
01:00:22.640
You're saying, I think you said there's no, you're not as willing to say there's an illusion
link |
01:00:27.680
of consciousness.
link |
01:00:28.680
In fact, I would say it's impossible.
link |
01:00:30.960
Impossible.
link |
01:00:31.960
You're a little bit more willing to say that there's an illusion of self and you're definitely
link |
01:00:36.480
saying there's an illusion of free will.
link |
01:00:38.680
Yes.
link |
01:00:39.680
Yes.
link |
01:00:40.680
I'm definitely saying there's an illusion that a certain kind of self is an illusion.
link |
01:00:44.240
Not every, we mean many different things by this notion of self.
link |
01:00:48.080
Maybe I should just differentiate these things.
link |
01:00:51.680
Consciousness can't be an illusion because any illusion proves its reality as much as
link |
01:00:58.400
any other veridical perception.
link |
01:01:00.120
I mean, if you're hallucinating now, that's just as much of a demonstration of consciousness
link |
01:01:05.600
as really seeing what's a quote actually there.
link |
01:01:10.240
If you're dreaming and you don't know it, that is consciousness.
link |
01:01:15.560
You can be confused about literally everything.
link |
01:01:18.320
You can't be confused about the underlying claim, whether you make it linguistically or
link |
01:01:26.360
not, but just the cognitive assertion that something seems to be happening.
link |
01:01:37.040
It's the seeming that is the cash value of consciousness.
link |
01:01:39.960
Can I take a tiny tangent?
link |
01:01:42.440
Okay.
link |
01:01:43.440
I am creating consciousness in my mind to convince you that I'm human, so it's a useful
link |
01:01:50.840
social tool, not a fundamental property of experience, like of being a living thing.
link |
01:02:00.840
What if it's just like a social tool to almost like a useful computational trick to place
link |
01:02:08.840
myself into reality as we together communicate about this reality?
link |
01:02:14.600
Another way to ask that, because you said it much earlier, you talk negatively about
link |
01:02:19.840
robots as you often do, so you'll probably die first when they take over.
link |
01:02:26.880
I'm looking forward to certain kinds of robots.
link |
01:02:30.160
If we can get this right, this would be amazing.
link |
01:02:32.200
You don't like the robots that fake consciousness.
link |
01:02:34.520
You don't like the idea of fake it until you make it.
link |
01:02:38.280
No, it's not that I don't like it, it's that I'm worried that we will lose sight of the
link |
01:02:43.760
problem and the problem has massive ethical consequences.
link |
01:02:48.040
If we create robots that really can suffer, that would be a bad thing.
link |
01:02:54.080
If we really are committing a murder when we recycle them, that would be a bad thing.
link |
01:02:59.120
This is how I know you're not Russian.
link |
01:03:00.360
Why is it a bad thing that we create robots that can suffer?
link |
01:03:03.080
Isn't suffering a fundamental thing from which beauty springs?
link |
01:03:08.080
Without suffering, do you really think we would have beautiful things in this world?
link |
01:03:13.080
That's a tangent on a tangent.
link |
01:03:14.720
We'll go there.
link |
01:03:15.720
I would love to go there, but let's not go there just yet.
link |
01:03:17.920
I do think it would be, if anything is bad, creating hell and populating it with real
link |
01:03:24.520
minds that really can suffer in that hell, that's bad.
link |
01:03:31.120
You are worse than any mass murderer we can name if you create it.
link |
01:03:36.080
This could be in robot form or more likely it would be in some simulation of a world
link |
01:03:41.360
where we managed to populate it with conscious minds so that whether we knew they were conscious
link |
01:03:45.160
or not and that world is a state of, it's unendurable.
link |
01:03:50.680
That would just, taking the thesis seriously that there's nothing, that mind, intelligence
link |
01:03:58.360
and consciousness ultimately are substrate independent.
link |
01:04:00.560
You don't need a biological brain to be conscious.
link |
01:04:03.400
You certainly don't need a biological brain to be intelligent.
link |
01:04:06.800
If we just imagine that consciousness at some point comes along for the ride as you scale
link |
01:04:10.560
up in intelligence, well then we could find ourselves creating conscious minds that are
link |
01:04:16.160
miserable and that's just like creating a person who's miserable.
link |
01:04:20.080
It could be worse than creating a person who's miserable, it could be even more sensitive
link |
01:04:23.040
to suffering.
link |
01:04:24.040
Cloning them and maybe for entertainment watching them suffer.
link |
01:04:28.120
Just like watching a person suffer for entertainment.
link |
01:04:33.080
But back to your primary question here which is differentiating consciousness and self and
link |
01:04:40.600
free will as concepts and kind of degrees of illusoriness.
link |
01:04:46.800
The problem with free will is that what most people mean by it and this is where Dan Dennett
link |
01:04:56.040
is going to get off the ride here, so he's going to disagree with me that I know what
link |
01:05:01.280
most people mean by it.
link |
01:05:03.080
I have a very keen sense, having talked about this topic for many, many years and seeing
link |
01:05:10.920
people get wrapped around the axle of it and seeing in myself what it's like to have felt
link |
01:05:17.920
that I was a self that had free will and then to no longer feel that way, to know what it's
link |
01:05:22.640
like to actually disabuse myself of that sense cognitively and emotionally and to recognize
link |
01:05:30.960
what's left, what goes away and what doesn't go away on the basis of that epiphany.
link |
01:05:37.040
I have a sense that I know what people think they have in hand when they worry about whether
link |
01:05:42.200
free will exists and it is the flip side of this feeling of self, it's the flip side
link |
01:05:50.760
of feeling like you are not merely identical to experience, you feel like you're having
link |
01:05:58.160
an experience, you feel like you're an agent that is appropriating an experience.
link |
01:06:02.320
There's a protagonist in the movie of your life and it is you, it's not just the movie.
link |
01:06:11.640
There's sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and emotions and this whole cacophony
link |
01:06:17.000
of experience, of felt experience, of felt experience of embodiment, but there seems
link |
01:06:22.040
to be a rider on the horse or a passenger in the body.
link |
01:06:28.520
People don't feel truly identical to their bodies down to their toes.
link |
01:06:32.840
They sort of feel like they have bodies, they feel like their minds in bodies and that feels
link |
01:06:37.720
like a self, that feels like me and again this gets very paradoxical when you talk about
link |
01:06:46.680
the experience of being in relationship to yourself or talking to yourself, giving yourself
link |
01:06:51.720
a pep talk.
link |
01:06:52.720
I mean, if you're the one talking, why are you also the one listening?
link |
01:06:56.000
Why do you need the pep talk and why does it work if you're the one giving the pep talk?
link |
01:07:00.680
Or if I'm looking for my keys, why do I think the superfluous thought, where are my keys?
link |
01:07:06.680
I know I'm looking for the fucking keys, I'm the one looking, who am I telling that we
link |
01:07:12.160
now need to look for the keys?
link |
01:07:13.920
So that duality is weird, but leave that aside.
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01:07:17.800
There's this sense, and this becomes very vivid when people try to learn to meditate.
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01:07:25.520
Most people, they close their eyes and they're told to pay attention to an object like the
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01:07:30.920
breath.
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01:07:31.920
So you close your eyes and you pay attention to the breath and you can feel it at the tip
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01:07:36.560
of your nose or the rising and falling of your abdomen and you're paying attention and
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01:07:42.280
you feel something vague there and then you think, why the breath?
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01:07:46.960
Why am I paying attention to the breath?
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01:07:50.080
What's so special about the breath?
link |
01:07:51.880
And then you notice you're thinking and you're not paying attention to the breath anymore
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01:07:55.600
and then you realize, okay, the practice is, okay, I should notice thoughts and then I
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01:08:00.040
should come back to the breath.
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01:08:02.160
But this starting point is of the conventional starting point of feeling like you are an
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01:08:07.560
agent very likely in your head, a locus of consciousness, a locus of attention that can
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01:08:13.640
strategically pay attention to certain parts of experience.
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01:08:17.240
Like I can focus on the breath and then I get lost in thought and now I can come back
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01:08:21.280
to the breath and I can open my eyes and I'm over here behind my face looking out at a
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01:08:26.840
world that's other than me and there's this kind of subject to object perception.
link |
01:08:32.000
And that is the default starting point of selfhood, of subjectivity and married to that
link |
01:08:40.240
is the sense that I can decide what to do next.
link |
01:08:46.240
I am an agent who can pay attention to the cup, I can listen to sounds, there's certain
link |
01:08:52.320
things that I can't control, certain things are happening to me and I just can't control
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01:08:55.800
them.
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01:08:56.800
But if someone asks, well, can you not hear a sound, right, like don't hear the next sound,
link |
01:09:04.000
don't hear anything for a second or don't hear, don't hear, you know, I'm snapping my
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01:09:07.920
fingers, don't hear this, where's your free will, you know, well, like just stop this
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01:09:11.520
from coming in.
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01:09:12.520
You realize, okay, wait a minute, my abundant freedom does not extend to something as simple
link |
01:09:19.240
as just being able to pay attention to something else than this.
link |
01:09:23.040
Okay, well, so that I'm not that kind of free agent, but at least I can decide what I'm
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01:09:28.080
going to do next.
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01:09:29.080
I'm going to pick up this water, right?
link |
01:09:33.320
And there's a feeling of identification with the impulse, with the intention, with the
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01:09:39.880
thought that occurs to you, with the feeling of speaking, like, you know, what am I going
link |
01:09:44.880
to say next?
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01:09:45.880
Well, I'm saying it.
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01:09:46.880
So here goes, this is me, it feels like I'm the thinker, I'm the one who's in control
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01:09:53.000
control, but all of that is born of not really paying close attention to what it's like to
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01:10:01.360
be you.
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01:10:02.360
And so this is, this is where meditation comes in, or this is where, again, you can get it,
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01:10:07.600
you can get at this conceptually.
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01:10:10.040
You can unravel the notion of free will just by thinking certain thoughts, but you can't
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01:10:16.320
feel that it doesn't exist unless you can pay close attention to how thoughts and intentions
link |
01:10:22.160
arise.
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01:10:23.160
So the way to unravel it conceptually is just to realize, okay, I didn't make myself, I
link |
01:10:27.400
didn't make my genes, I didn't make my brain, I didn't make the environmental influences
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01:10:31.680
that impinged upon this system for the last 54 years that have produced my brain in precisely
link |
01:10:38.160
the state it's in right now, such with all of the receptor weightings and densities,
link |
01:10:44.000
and it's just I'm exactly the machine I am right now through no fault of my own as the
link |
01:10:53.200
experiencing self, I get no credit and I get no blame for the genetics and the environmental
link |
01:10:59.280
influences here.
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01:11:00.680
And yet those are the only things that contrive to produce my next thought or impulse or moment
link |
01:11:11.800
of behavior.
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01:11:12.800
And if you were going to add something magical to that clockwork, like an immortal soul,
link |
01:11:18.840
you can also notice that you didn't produce your soul, right?
link |
01:11:21.640
You can't account for the fact that you don't have the soul of someone who doesn't like
link |
01:11:26.800
any of the things you like or wasn't interested in any of the things you were interested in
link |
01:11:30.680
or was a psychopath or had an IQ of 40, like there's nothing about that that the person
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01:11:39.720
who believes in a soul can claim to have controlled.
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01:11:43.440
And yet that is also totally dispositive of whatever happens next.
link |
01:11:48.480
But everything you've described now, maybe you can correct me, but it kind of speaks
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01:11:52.800
to the materialistic nature of the hardware.
link |
01:11:57.440
But even if you add magical ectoplasm software, you didn't produce that either.
link |
01:12:03.040
I know, but if we can think about the actual computation running on the hardware and running
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01:12:10.160
on the software, there's something you said recently, which you think of culture as an
link |
01:12:15.640
operating system.
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01:12:17.360
So if we just remove ourselves a little bit from the conception of human civilization
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01:12:24.080
being a collection of humans and rather us just being a distributed computation system
link |
01:12:31.480
on which there's some kind of operating system running, and then the computation that's running
link |
01:12:36.480
is the actual thing that generates the interactions, the communications, and maybe even free will,
link |
01:12:42.200
the experiences of all those free will.
link |
01:12:43.920
Do you ever think of, do you ever try to reframe the world in that way where it's like ideas
link |
01:12:49.880
are just using us, thoughts are using individual nodes in the system, and they're just jumping
link |
01:12:57.320
around, and they also have ability to generate experiences so that we can push those ideas
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01:13:02.960
along.
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01:13:03.960
And basically, the main organisms here are the thoughts, not the humans.
link |
01:13:08.400
Yeah, but then that arose the boundary between self and world.
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01:13:15.200
Right.
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01:13:16.200
So then there's no self, a really integrated self to have any kind of will at all.
link |
01:13:22.520
If you're just a memeplex, if you're just a collection of memes, and we're all kind
link |
01:13:30.240
of like currents, like eddies in this river of ideas, and it seems to have structure,
link |
01:13:40.880
but there's no real boundary between that part of the flow of water and the rest.
link |
01:13:46.320
And I would say that much of our mind answers to this kind of description.
link |
01:13:50.200
So much of our mind has been, it's obviously not self generated, and you're not going to
link |
01:13:56.560
find it by looking in the brain, it is the result of culture largely, but also the genes
link |
01:14:10.120
on one side and culture on the other, meaning to allow for manifestations of mind that aren't
link |
01:14:21.480
actually bounded by the person in any clear sense.
link |
01:14:27.320
Just the example I often use here, but there's so many others, is just the fact that we're
link |
01:14:33.920
following the rules of English grammar to whatever degree we are.
link |
01:14:38.160
It's not that we certainly haven't consciously represented these rules for ourself.
link |
01:14:42.600
We haven't invented these rules, there are norms of language use that we couldn't even
link |
01:14:50.960
specify because we're not grammarians, we haven't studied this, we don't even have the
link |
01:14:57.240
right concepts, and yet we're following these rules, and we're noticing as an error when
link |
01:15:04.560
we fail to follow these rules.
link |
01:15:08.360
And virtually every other cultural norm is like that, these are not things we've invented.
link |
01:15:13.720
You can consciously decide to scrutinize them and override them, but just think of any social
link |
01:15:23.040
situation where you're with other people, and you're behaving in ways that are culturally
link |
01:15:29.200
appropriate, you're not being wild animals together, you have some expectation of how
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01:15:37.280
you shake a person's hand and how you deal with implements on a table, how you have a
link |
01:15:43.960
meal together.
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01:15:44.960
Obviously, this can change from culture to culture, and people can be shocked by how
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01:15:49.640
different those things are.
link |
01:15:51.960
We all have foods we find disgusting, but in some countries, dog is not one of those
link |
01:15:56.600
foods, right, and yet you and I presumably would be horrified to be served dog.
link |
01:16:04.040
Those are not norms that we're... They are outside of us in some way, and yet they're
link |
01:16:11.360
felt very viscerally, I mean, they're either certainly felt in their violation.
link |
01:16:16.680
If you are, just imagine, you're in somebody's home, you're eating something that tastes
link |
01:16:22.560
great to you, and you happen to be in Vietnam or wherever, you didn't realize dog was potentially
link |
01:16:28.640
on the menu, and you find out that you've just eaten 10 bites of what is really a Cocker
link |
01:16:36.320
Spaniel, and you feel as instantaneous urge to vomit based on an idea.
link |
01:16:45.960
You're not the author of that norm that gave you such a powerful experience of its violation,
link |
01:16:55.960
and I'm sure we can trace the moment in your history vaguely where it sort of got in.
link |
01:17:01.440
I mean, very early on as kids, you realize you're treating dogs as pets and not as food
link |
01:17:06.880
or as potential food, but the point you just made opens us to... We are totally permeable
link |
01:17:18.960
to a sea of mind.
link |
01:17:21.640
Yeah, but if we take the metaphor of the distributed computing systems, each individual node is
link |
01:17:30.000
part of performing a much larger computation, but nevertheless is in charge of doing the
link |
01:17:35.520
scheduling of, assuming it's Linux, is doing the scheduling of processes and is constantly
link |
01:17:41.880
alternating them.
link |
01:17:42.880
That node is making those choices.
link |
01:17:46.320
That node sure is how it believes it has free will, and it actually has free will because
link |
01:17:51.200
it's making those hard choices, but the choices ultimately are part of a much larger computation
link |
01:17:56.200
that it can't control.
link |
01:17:57.200
Isn't it possible for that node to still be... That human node is still making the
link |
01:18:03.040
choice?
link |
01:18:04.040
Well, yeah, it is, so I'm not saying that your body isn't really doing things, and some
link |
01:18:12.800
of those things can be conventionally thought of as choices, so it's like, I can choose
link |
01:18:18.680
to reach and... It's not being imposed on me.
link |
01:18:21.720
That would be a different experience, so there's an experience of... There's definitely
link |
01:18:27.600
a difference between voluntary and involuntary action.
link |
01:18:32.840
Life has to get conserved.
link |
01:18:34.120
By any account of the mind that Jettison's free will, you still have to admit that there's
link |
01:18:38.800
a difference between a tremor that I can't control and a purposeful motor action that
link |
01:18:46.720
I can control and I can initiate on demand, and it's associated with intentions, and it's
link |
01:18:52.640
got efferent motor copy, which is being predictive so that I can notice errors.
link |
01:18:59.840
I have expectations.
link |
01:19:00.840
When I reach for this, if my hand were actually to pass through the bottle because it's a
link |
01:19:04.800
hologram, I would be surprised, so that shows that I have a expectation of just what my
link |
01:19:10.080
grasping behavior is going to be like even before it happens, whereas with a tremor,
link |
01:19:14.680
you don't have the same kind of thing going on.
link |
01:19:17.560
That's a distinction we have to make, so yes, my intention to move, which is in fact can
link |
01:19:27.760
be subjectively felt, really is the proximate cause of my moving.
link |
01:19:31.080
It's not coming from elsewhere in the universe.
link |
01:19:33.320
I'm not saying that.
link |
01:19:35.240
In that sense, the node is really deciding to execute the subroutine now, but that's
link |
01:19:45.480
not the feeling that has given rise to this conundrum of free will.
link |
01:19:55.880
People feel like the crucial things that people feel like they could have done otherwise.
link |
01:20:05.200
That's the thing that, when you run back the clock of your life, run back the movie of
link |
01:20:10.320
your life, you flip back the few pages in the novel of your life, they feel that at
link |
01:20:16.400
this point, they could behave differently than they did, but even given your distributed
link |
01:20:24.680
computing example, it's either a fully deterministic system or it's a deterministic system that
link |
01:20:32.160
admits of some random influence.
link |
01:20:36.320
In either case, that's not the free will people think they have.
link |
01:20:41.880
The free will people think they have is, damn, I shouldn't have done that.
link |
01:20:48.040
I shouldn't have done that.
link |
01:20:49.360
I could have done otherwise.
link |
01:20:51.360
I should have done otherwise.
link |
01:20:52.840
If you think about something that you deeply regret doing or that you hold someone else
link |
01:20:59.200
responsible for because they really are the upstream agent in your mind of what they did,
link |
01:21:05.080
that's an awful thing that that person did and they shouldn't have done it.
link |
01:21:10.760
There is this illusion and it has to be an illusion because there's no picture of causation
link |
01:21:17.080
that would make sense of it.
link |
01:21:19.080
There's this illusion that if you arrange the universe exactly the way it was a moment
link |
01:21:23.480
ago, it could have played out differently.
link |
01:21:28.560
The only way it could have played out differently is if there's randomness added to that, but
link |
01:21:34.960
randomness isn't what people feel would give them free will.
link |
01:21:39.600
If you tell me that I only reached for the water bottle this time because there's a random
link |
01:21:45.720
number generator in there kicking off values and it finally moved my hand, that's not the
link |
01:21:52.200
feeling of authorship.
link |
01:21:54.200
That's still not control.
link |
01:21:55.800
You're still not making that decision.
link |
01:21:58.360
There's actually, I don't know if you're familiar with cellular automata.
link |
01:22:01.920
It's a really nice visualization of how simple rules can create incredible complexity that
link |
01:22:08.760
it's like really dumb initial conditions to set, simple rules applied, and eventually
link |
01:22:13.200
you watch this thing.
link |
01:22:15.560
If the initial conditions are correct, then you're going to have emerge something that
link |
01:22:21.960
to our perception system looks like organisms interacting.
link |
01:22:25.520
You can construct any kinds of worlds and they're not actually interacting.
link |
01:22:29.880
They're not actually even organisms and they certainly aren't making decisions.
link |
01:22:35.200
There's systems you can create that illustrate this point.
link |
01:22:38.640
The question is whether there could be some room for, that's used in the 21st century,
link |
01:22:46.040
the term magic, back to the black box of consciousness.
link |
01:22:49.720
Let me ask you this way.
link |
01:22:51.960
If you're wrong about your intuition about free will, what, and somebody comes along to
link |
01:22:58.280
you and proves to you that you didn't have the full picture, what would that proof look
link |
01:23:04.480
like?
link |
01:23:05.480
That's the problem, that's why it's not even an illusion in my world because for me, it's
link |
01:23:12.520
impossible to say what the universe would have to be like for free will to be a thing.
link |
01:23:19.400
It doesn't conceptually map on to any notion of causation we have and that's unlike any
link |
01:23:27.240
other spurious claim you might make.
link |
01:23:30.760
If you're going to believe in ghosts, I understand what that claim could be where I don't happen
link |
01:23:39.360
to believe in ghosts but if it's not hard for me to specify what would have to be true
link |
01:23:45.280
for ghosts to be real and so it is with a thousand other things like ghosts.
link |
01:23:50.440
Okay, so you're telling me that when people die, there's some part of them that is not
link |
01:23:55.320
reducible at all to their biology that lifts off them and goes elsewhere and it's actually
link |
01:24:01.040
the kind of thing that can linger in closets and in cupboards and actually it's immaterial
link |
01:24:07.480
but by some principle of physics, we don't totally understand, it can make sounds and
link |
01:24:11.680
knock objects and even occasionally show up so they can be visually beheld and it seems
link |
01:24:21.040
like a miracle but it's just some spooky noun in the universe that we don't understand.
link |
01:24:27.240
Let's call it a ghost.
link |
01:24:29.600
That's fine.
link |
01:24:30.600
I can talk about that all day.
link |
01:24:31.920
The reasons to believe in it, the reasons not to believe in it, the way we would scientifically
link |
01:24:35.560
test for it, what would have to be provable so as to convince me that ghosts are real.
link |
01:24:42.840
Free will isn't like that at all.
link |
01:24:44.360
There's no description of any concatenation of causes that precedes my conscious experience
link |
01:24:52.920
that sounds like what people think they have when they think they could have done otherwise
link |
01:24:56.800
and that they really, that they, the conscious agent, is really in charge.
link |
01:25:02.120
If you don't know what you're going to think next and you can't help but think it, take
link |
01:25:09.840
those two premises on board, you don't know what it's going to be.
link |
01:25:14.880
You can't stop it from coming and until you actually know how to meditate, you can't stop
link |
01:25:23.560
yourself from fully living out its behavioral or emotional consequences.
link |
01:25:31.520
Once mindfulness arguably gives you another degree of freedom here, it doesn't give you
link |
01:25:38.800
free will, but it gives you some other game to play with respect to the emotional and
link |
01:25:43.840
behavioral imperatives of thoughts, but short of that, I mean, the reason why mindfulness
link |
01:25:51.320
doesn't give you free will is because you can't account for why in one moment mindfulness
link |
01:25:56.040
arises and in other moments it doesn't, right?
link |
01:26:01.280
But a different process is initiated once you can practice in that way.
link |
01:26:07.560
If I could push back for a second, by the way, I just had this thought bubble come popping
link |
01:26:11.400
up all the time of just two recent chimps arguing about the nature of consciousness.
link |
01:26:16.840
It's kind of hilarious.
link |
01:26:18.000
So on that thread, you know, if we're even before Einstein, let's say before Einstein,
link |
01:26:24.440
we were to conceive about traveling from point A to point B. Say some point in the future,
link |
01:26:32.560
we are able to realize through engineering a way which is consistent with Einstein's
link |
01:26:38.960
theory that you can have wormholes.
link |
01:26:40.440
You can travel from one point to another faster than the speed of light.
link |
01:26:46.440
And that would, I think, completely change our conception of what it means to travel
link |
01:26:50.840
in the physical space.
link |
01:26:53.040
And that, like, completely transform our ability, you talk about causality, but here
link |
01:26:59.000
let's just focus on what it means to travel through physical space.
link |
01:27:03.160
Don't you think it's possible that there will be inventions or leaps in understanding
link |
01:27:09.600
about reality that will allow us to see free will as actually, like us humans somehow may
link |
01:27:18.720
be linked to this idea of consciousness, are actually able to be authors of our actions?
link |
01:27:25.840
It is a nonstarter for me conceptually.
link |
01:27:29.560
It's a little bit like saying, could there be some breakthrough that will cause us to
link |
01:27:35.960
realize that circles are really square or that circles are not really round, right?
link |
01:27:42.600
No, a circle is what we mean by a perfectly round form, right?
link |
01:27:48.960
Like, it's not on the table to be revised.
link |
01:27:52.800
And so I would say the same thing about consciousness, it's just like saying, is there some breakthrough
link |
01:27:58.840
that would get us to realize that consciousness is really an illusion?
link |
01:28:02.600
I'm saying no, because what the experience of an illusion is as much a demonstration
link |
01:28:07.800
of what I'm calling consciousness as anything else, right?
link |
01:28:10.520
That is consciousness.
link |
01:28:12.580
With free will, it's a similar problem.
link |
01:28:15.400
It's like, again, it comes down to a picture of causality and there's no other picture
link |
01:28:25.360
on offer.
link |
01:28:27.160
And what's more, I know what it's like on the experiential side to lose the thing to
link |
01:28:36.600
which it is clearly anchored, right?
link |
01:28:39.080
Like, it doesn't feel, and this is the question that almost nobody, people who are debating
link |
01:28:44.480
me on the topic of free will, at 15 minute intervals, I'm making a claim that I don't
link |
01:28:52.400
feel this thing and they never become interested in, well, what's that like?
link |
01:28:59.280
Like, okay, you're actually saying you don't, this thing isn't true for you empirically.
link |
01:29:05.880
It's not just, because most people who don't believe in free will philosophically also believe
link |
01:29:13.040
that we're condemned to experience it.
link |
01:29:15.320
Like, you can't live without this feeling.
link |
01:29:18.320
So you're actually saying you're able to experience the absence of the illusion of free
link |
01:29:26.640
will for, we're talking about a few minutes at a time, or is this to require a lot of
link |
01:29:36.760
work and meditation, or are you literally able to load that into your mind and play
link |
01:29:41.680
that move?
link |
01:29:42.680
Right now, just in this conversation.
link |
01:29:44.760
So it's not absolutely continuous, but it's whenever I pay attention.
link |
01:29:51.680
It's like, and I would say the same thing for the elusoriness of the self, and again,
link |
01:29:57.560
we haven't talked about this.
link |
01:29:58.840
Can you still have the self and not have the free will in your mind at the same time?
link |
01:30:02.600
Or do they go at the same time?
link |
01:30:04.040
This is the same, yeah.
link |
01:30:05.040
It's the same thing.
link |
01:30:06.040
They're always holding hands when they walk out the door.
link |
01:30:08.800
They really are two sides of the same coin.
link |
01:30:10.680
But it's just, it comes down to what it's like to try to get to the end of the sentence,
link |
01:30:16.640
or what it's like to finally decide that it's been long enough and now I need another sip
link |
01:30:21.320
of water.
link |
01:30:22.320
Right?
link |
01:30:23.320
If I'm paying attention, now if I'm not paying attention, I'm captured by some other thought
link |
01:30:28.720
and that feels a certain way, right?
link |
01:30:30.800
And so it's not vivid, but if I try to make vivid this experience of just, okay, I'm finally
link |
01:30:37.040
going to experience free will.
link |
01:30:38.240
I'm going to notice my free will, right?
link |
01:30:40.880
It's got to be here.
link |
01:30:41.880
Everyone's talking about it.
link |
01:30:43.440
Where is it?
link |
01:30:44.440
I'm going to pay attention to it.
link |
01:30:45.440
I'm going to look for it.
link |
01:30:46.440
And I'm going to create a circumstance that is, where it has to be most robust, right?
link |
01:30:52.160
I'm not rushed to make this decision.
link |
01:30:54.640
I'm not, it's not a reflex.
link |
01:30:57.040
I'm not under pressure.
link |
01:30:58.040
I'm going to take as long as I want.
link |
01:30:59.920
I'm going to decide.
link |
01:31:02.200
It's not trivial.
link |
01:31:03.200
So it's not just like reaching with my left hand or reaching with my right hand.
link |
01:31:05.880
People don't like those examples for some reason.
link |
01:31:07.840
Just make a big decision like where should, what should my next podcast be on, right?
link |
01:31:16.440
Who do I invite on the next podcast?
link |
01:31:18.800
What is it like to make that decision?
link |
01:31:20.840
When I pay attention, there is no evidence of free will anywhere in sight.
link |
01:31:27.320
It doesn't feel like, it feels profoundly mysterious to be going back between two people.
link |
01:31:33.360
Like, is it going to be person A or person B, that all my reasons for A and all my reasons
link |
01:31:39.680
why not and all my reasons for B and that there's some math going on there that I'm
link |
01:31:44.680
not, not even privy to where certain concerns are trumping others.
link |
01:31:49.840
And at a certain point, I just decide.
link |
01:31:53.360
And yes, you can say I'm the node in the network that has made that decision.
link |
01:31:57.160
Absolutely.
link |
01:31:58.160
I'm not saying it's being piped to me from elsewhere, but the feeling of what it's like
link |
01:32:02.680
to make that decision is totally without a sense, a real sense of agency.
link |
01:32:15.720
Because something simply emerges.
link |
01:32:18.840
It's literally as tenuous as what's the next sound I'm going to hear, right?
link |
01:32:26.080
Or what's the next thought that's going to appear?
link |
01:32:29.640
And it just, something just appears.
link |
01:32:32.640
And if something appears to cancel that something, like if I say, I'm going to invite her and
link |
01:32:37.880
then I'm about to send the email and I think, oh, no, no, no, no, I can't, I can't do that.
link |
01:32:41.600
There was a thing in the New Yorker article I read that I got to talk to this guy, right?
link |
01:32:47.960
That pivot at the last second, you can make it as, as muscular as you want.
link |
01:32:54.040
It always just comes out of the darkness.
link |
01:32:56.120
It's always mysterious.
link |
01:32:57.840
So right, when you try to pin it down, you really can't ever find that free will.
link |
01:33:02.560
The, the, the, the, if you construct an experiment for yourself and you try to really find that
link |
01:33:07.440
moment when you're actually making that controlled author decision, it's, it's, uh, it's very
link |
01:33:13.200
difficult to do.
link |
01:33:14.200
And we're still, we're still, we know at this point that if we were scanning your brain
link |
01:33:18.200
in some, you know, podcast guest choosing experiment, right?
link |
01:33:24.240
We know at this point, we would be privy to who you're going to pick before you are.
link |
01:33:29.680
You the Conscious Agent.
link |
01:33:30.680
So if we could, again, this is operationally a little hard to conduct, but there's enough
link |
01:33:35.360
data now to know that something very much like this cartoon is in fact true, um, and
link |
01:33:42.960
will ultimately be undeniable for people, um, they'll be able to do it on themselves
link |
01:33:48.040
with their, you know, some app.
link |
01:33:50.560
Um, if you're deciding what to, you know, where to go for dinner or who to have on your
link |
01:33:56.120
podcast, or ultimately, you know, who to marry, right, or what city to move to, right?
link |
01:34:00.960
Like you're, you can make it as big or small a decision as you want.
link |
01:34:05.720
We could be scanning your brain in real time.
link |
01:34:08.440
And at a point where you still think you're uncommitted, we would be able to say with
link |
01:34:15.240
arbitrary accuracy, all right, Lex is, he's moving to Austin, right?
link |
01:34:20.760
I didn't choose that.
link |
01:34:21.760
Yeah.
link |
01:34:22.760
He was, it was, it was going to be Austin or it was going to be Miami.
link |
01:34:25.000
He got, he's catching one of these two waves, but it's going to be Austin.
link |
01:34:29.380
And at a point where you subjectively, if we, if we could ask you, you would say, oh,
link |
01:34:34.200
no, I'm still, I'm still working over here.
link |
01:34:36.840
I'm still thinking, I'm still choosing, I'm still considering my options.
link |
01:34:40.780
And you spoke into this in you thinking about other stuff in the world, it's been very
link |
01:34:46.120
useful to, uh, to step away from this illusion of free will.
link |
01:34:51.560
And you argue that it's probably makes a better world because it can be compassionate and
link |
01:34:55.360
empathetic towards others.
link |
01:34:56.960
And toward oneself.
link |
01:34:57.960
Toward oneself.
link |
01:34:58.960
I mean, radically toward others in that literally hate makes no sense anymore.
link |
01:35:05.160
I mean, there are certain things you can really be worried about, really want to oppose.
link |
01:35:10.640
Really.
link |
01:35:11.640
I mean, it's, I'm not saying you'd never have to kill another person.
link |
01:35:13.800
Like, I mean, self defense is still a thing, right?
link |
01:35:16.600
But the idea that you're never confronting anything other than a force of nature in the
link |
01:35:24.280
end goes out the window, right?
link |
01:35:26.760
Or it does go out the window when you really pay attention.
link |
01:35:29.000
I'm not, I'm not saying that this would be easy to under, to grok if, you know, you know,
link |
01:35:37.120
someone kills a member of your family.
link |
01:35:38.280
I'm not saying you can just listen to my 90 minutes on free will and then you should be
link |
01:35:41.360
able to see that person as identical to a grizzly bear or a, or a virus because there's
link |
01:35:46.760
so, I mean, we are so evolved to deal with one another as, as fellow primates and as
link |
01:35:56.200
agents.
link |
01:35:58.200
But it's, yeah, when you're talking about the possibility of, you know, Christian, you
link |
01:36:06.480
know, truly Christian forgiveness, right?
link |
01:36:08.960
It is like, you know, as, as testified to by, you know, various saints of that flavor
link |
01:36:20.120
over the, over them, the millennia, yeah, that is it.
link |
01:36:25.440
That the doorway to that is to recognize that no one really at bottom made themselves.
link |
01:36:32.280
Right.
link |
01:36:33.280
And for everyone, what we're seeing really are differences in luck in the world.
link |
01:36:39.200
We're seeing people who are very, very lucky to have had good parents and good genes and
link |
01:36:43.880
being good societies and had good opportunities and to be intelligent and to be, you know,
link |
01:36:49.120
not sociopathic.
link |
01:36:50.120
Like none of it is on them.
link |
01:36:53.160
They're just reaping one lot, the fruits of one lottery after another and then showing
link |
01:36:58.520
up in the world on that basis.
link |
01:37:02.000
And then so it is with, you know, every malevolent asshole out there, right?
link |
01:37:06.680
He or she didn't make themself.
link |
01:37:11.200
Even if that weren't possible, the utility for, for self compassion is also enormous
link |
01:37:18.520
because it's when you just look at what it's like to regret something or to feel shame
link |
01:37:26.760
about something or feel deep embarrassment about these states of mind or some of the
link |
01:37:30.480
most deranging experiences anyone has and their reaction, the kind of the, the indelible
link |
01:37:37.520
reaction to them, you know, the memory of the thing you said, the, you know, the memory
link |
01:37:42.520
of the wedding toast you gave 20 years ago that was just mortifying, right?
link |
01:37:47.160
The fact that that can still make you hate yourself, right?
link |
01:37:50.400
And like, like that psychologically, that is a knot that can be untied, right?
link |
01:37:55.760
Speak for yourself, Sam.
link |
01:37:57.160
Clearly you're not.
link |
01:37:58.160
You gave a great, a great toast, it was my toast that mortified.
link |
01:38:00.960
No, no, no, that's not what I was referring to.
link |
01:38:03.040
I, I, I'm deeply appreciative in the same way that you're referring to of every moment
link |
01:38:09.320
I'm alive, but I'm also powered by self hate often.
link |
01:38:15.560
Like several things in this conversation already that I've spoken, I'll be thinking about,
link |
01:38:21.200
like that was the dumbest thing you're sitting in front of Sam Harris, he said that.
link |
01:38:26.360
So like that, but that somehow creates a richer experience for me.
link |
01:38:30.680
Like I've, I've actually come to accept that as a nice feature of however my brain was
link |
01:38:34.480
built.
link |
01:38:35.480
I don't think I want to let go of that.
link |
01:38:37.000
Well, the thing you, I think the thing you want to let go of is the suffering associated
link |
01:38:45.840
with it.
link |
01:38:46.840
So, like, so for me, so, so it's just very psychologically and ethically all of this
link |
01:38:53.680
is very interesting.
link |
01:38:54.680
So I don't think we ever, we should ever get rid of things like anger, right?
link |
01:38:59.520
So like hatred is, hatred is divorceable from anger in the sense that hatred is this enduring
link |
01:39:05.760
state where, you know, whether you're hating somebody else or hating yourself, it is just,
link |
01:39:11.640
it is toxic and durable and ultimately useless, right?
link |
01:39:16.000
Like it becomes, it becomes self nullifying, right?
link |
01:39:19.640
Like you become less capable as a person to solve any of your problems.
link |
01:39:24.560
It's not, it's not instrumental in solving the problem that is, that is, is occasioning
link |
01:39:29.040
all this hatred and anger for the most part isn't either except as a signal of salience
link |
01:39:36.120
that there's a problem.
link |
01:39:37.120
Right?
link |
01:39:38.120
So if somebody does something that makes me angry, that just promotes this situation to,
link |
01:39:43.200
to conscious, conscious attention in a way that is stronger than might not really caring
link |
01:39:48.840
about it, right?
link |
01:39:49.840
And there are things that I think should make us angry in the world and they're, there's
link |
01:39:53.560
the behavior of other people that should make us angry because we should respond to it.
link |
01:39:57.760
And so it is with yourself.
link |
01:39:59.160
If I do something, you know, as a parent, if I do something stupid that harms one of
link |
01:40:04.240
my daughters, right?
link |
01:40:08.280
My belief, my experience of myself and my beliefs about free will close the door to
link |
01:40:13.360
my saying, well, I should have done otherwise in the sense that if I could go back in time,
link |
01:40:17.640
I would have actually effectively done otherwise.
link |
01:40:20.040
No, I would do, given the same causes and conditions.
link |
01:40:22.800
I would do that thing a trillion times in a row, right?
link |
01:40:26.600
But you know, regret and feeling bad about an outcome are still important to capacities
link |
01:40:36.760
because like, yeah, you know, I desperately want my daughters to be happy and healthy.
link |
01:40:41.840
So if I, if I've done something, you know, if I, if I crash the car when they're in the
link |
01:40:45.640
car and they get injured, right?
link |
01:40:47.280
And cause, and I'm, I do it because I was trying to change the song on my playlist or
link |
01:40:51.720
you know, something stupid, I'm going to feel like a total asshole.
link |
01:40:57.040
How long do, how long do I stew in that feeling of regret, right?
link |
01:41:02.560
And to like, what utility is there to extract out of this error signal?
link |
01:41:08.800
And then what do I do?
link |
01:41:10.240
We're always faced with the question of what to do next, right?
link |
01:41:14.320
And how to best do that thing, that necessary thing next.
link |
01:41:18.720
And how much well being can we experience while doing it?
link |
01:41:25.320
Like how much, how miserable do you need to be to solve your problems in life and to solve
link |
01:41:31.520
the problems of, to help solve the problems of people closest to you?
link |
01:41:35.080
You know, how, how miserable do you need to be to get through your to do list today?
link |
01:41:39.800
Ultimately, I think you can be deeply happy going through all of it, right?
link |
01:41:49.680
And not, and, and even navigating moments that are scary and, you know, really destabilizing
link |
01:41:58.960
to ordinary people and, I mean, I think, you know, again, I'm, I'm always up kind of at
link |
01:42:07.360
the edge of my own capacities here and there are all kinds of things that stress me out
link |
01:42:11.040
and worry me.
link |
01:42:12.040
And I'm especially something, if it's, you're going to tell me it's something with, you
link |
01:42:14.800
know, the health of one of my kids, you know, it's very hard for me, like, it's very hard
link |
01:42:19.680
for me to, to be truly equanimous around that.
link |
01:42:23.040
But equanimity is so useful the moment you're in, in response mode, right?
link |
01:42:29.680
Because I mean, the ordinary experience for me of responding to what seems like a medical
link |
01:42:37.800
emergency for one of my kids is to be obviously super energized by concern to respond to that
link |
01:42:46.280
emergency.
link |
01:42:48.080
But then once I'm responding, all of my fear and agitation and worry and, oh my God, what
link |
01:42:55.040
if this is really something terrible, but finding any of those thoughts compelling,
link |
01:43:02.000
that only diminishes my capacity as a father to be good company while we navigate this
link |
01:43:08.400
really turbulent passage, you know.
link |
01:43:11.600
As you're saying this, actually, one guy comes to mind, which is Elon Musk.
link |
01:43:14.760
One of the really impressive things to me was to observe how many dramatic things he
link |
01:43:19.960
has to deal with throughout the day at work.
link |
01:43:22.520
But also, if you look through his life, family too, and how he's very much actually, as you're
link |
01:43:29.600
describing, basically a practitioner of this way of thought, which is you're not in control.
link |
01:43:38.040
You're basically responding, no matter how traumatic the event, and there's no reason
link |
01:43:42.120
to sort of linger on the negative feelings around that.
link |
01:43:46.840
Well, so he's in a very specific situation, which is unlike normal life, even his normal
link |
01:43:58.760
life, but normal life for most people, because when you just think of like, he's running
link |
01:44:03.160
so many businesses and they're highly nonstandard businesses.
link |
01:44:08.720
So what he's seen is everything that gets to him is some kind of emergency, like it
link |
01:44:14.040
wouldn't be getting to him.
link |
01:44:15.040
If it needs his attention, there's a fire somewhere.
link |
01:44:18.640
So he's constantly responding to fires that have to be put out.
link |
01:44:22.840
So there's no default expectation that there shouldn't be a fire.
link |
01:44:27.400
But in our normal lives, we live, most of us who are lucky, not everyone obviously on
link |
01:44:32.840
earth, but most of us who are at some kind of cruising altitude in terms of our lives,
link |
01:44:39.120
where we're reasonably healthy and life is reasonably orderly and the political apparatus
link |
01:44:43.720
around us is reasonably functional, so I said, functional for the first time in my life through
link |
01:44:50.240
no free will of my own.
link |
01:44:51.480
So I noticed those errors and they do not feel like agency, nor does the success of
link |
01:44:58.000
an utterance feel like agency.
link |
01:45:03.320
When you're looking at normal human life, where you're just trying to be happy and
link |
01:45:09.680
healthy and get work done, there's this default expectation that there shouldn't be fires.
link |
01:45:16.640
People shouldn't be getting sick or injured.
link |
01:45:20.680
We shouldn't be losing vast amounts of our resources.
link |
01:45:24.680
So when something really stark like that happens, people don't have that muscle, like I've
link |
01:45:35.560
been responding to emergencies all day long, seven days a week in business mode, and so
link |
01:45:42.400
I have a very thick skin.
link |
01:45:44.200
This is just another one, what it was like, I'm not expecting anything else when I wake
link |
01:45:47.560
up in the morning.
link |
01:45:48.560
No, we have this default sense that, I mean, honestly, most of us have the default sense
link |
01:45:54.360
that we aren't going to die, or that maybe we're not going to die.
link |
01:46:00.360
Death denial really is a thing.
link |
01:46:05.080
When you can see it, just like I can see when I reach for this bottle that I was expecting
link |
01:46:10.680
it to be solid, because when it isn't solid, when it's a hologram and my fist closes on
link |
01:46:15.480
itself, I'm damn surprised.
link |
01:46:19.160
People are damn surprised to find out that they're going to die, to find out that they're
link |
01:46:24.480
sick, to find out that someone they love has died or is going to die.
link |
01:46:28.720
It's like the fact that we are surprised by any of that shows us that we're living in
link |
01:46:36.920
a mode that is, we're perpetually diverting ourselves from some facts that should be obvious,
link |
01:46:50.760
and that the more salient we can make them, the more, in the case of death, it's a matter
link |
01:46:58.240
of being able to get one's priorities straight.
link |
01:47:01.560
The moment, again, this is hard for everybody, even those who are really in the business
link |
01:47:06.480
of paying attention to it, but the moment you realize that every circumstance is finite,
link |
01:47:14.400
you've got a certain number of, you know, whatever it is, 8,000 days left in a normal
link |
01:47:19.560
span of life, and 8,000 sounds like a big number, it's not that big a number, right?
link |
01:47:25.800
So it's just like, and then you can decide how you want to go through life and how you
link |
01:47:32.040
want to experience each one of those days.
link |
01:47:34.640
And so I was, back to where our jumping off point, I would argue that you don't want
link |
01:47:40.400
to feel self hatred ever.
link |
01:47:44.080
I would argue that you don't want to really grasp on to any of those moments where you
link |
01:47:57.600
internalizing the fact that you just made an error, you embarrassed yourself, that something
link |
01:48:01.840
didn't go the way you wanted it to.
link |
01:48:03.680
I think you want to treat all of those moments very, very lightly.
link |
01:48:06.960
You want to extract the actionable information.
link |
01:48:11.160
It's something to learn.
link |
01:48:12.160
You know, I learned that when I prepare in a certain way, it works better than when I
link |
01:48:18.920
prepare in some other way or don't prepare, right?
link |
01:48:21.080
Like, yes, lesson learned, you know, and do that differently.
link |
01:48:25.800
But yeah, I mean, so many, so many, so many of us have spent so much time with a very
link |
01:48:40.040
dysfunctional and hostile and even hateful inner voice governing a lot of our self talk
link |
01:48:48.280
and a lot of just our default way of being with ourselves.
link |
01:48:51.560
I mean, the privacy of our own minds, we're in the company of a real jerk a lot of the
link |
01:48:57.560
time and that can't help but affect, I mean, forget about just your own sense of well being.
link |
01:49:05.760
You can't help but limit what you're capable of in the world with other people.
link |
01:49:10.200
I'll have to really think about that.
link |
01:49:12.080
I just take pride that my jerk, my inner voice jerk is much less of a jerk than like
link |
01:49:16.800
somebody like David Goggins who's like screaming in his ear constantly.
link |
01:49:20.200
So I have a relativist kind of perspective that it's not as bad as that at least.
link |
01:49:25.480
Well, having a sense of humor also helps, you know, it's just like it's not, the stakes
link |
01:49:29.920
are never quite what you think they are.
link |
01:49:32.880
And even when they are, I mean, it's just the difference between being able to see the
link |
01:49:38.880
comedy of it rather than because again, there's this sort of dark star of self absorption
link |
01:49:46.320
that pulls everything into it, right?
link |
01:49:49.360
And if that's the algorithm you don't want to run, it's like you just want things to
link |
01:49:57.120
be good.
link |
01:49:58.120
If you push the concern out there, like not have the collapse of, oh my God, what does
link |
01:50:05.400
this say about me?
link |
01:50:06.400
It's just like, what does this say about, how do we make this meal that we're all having
link |
01:50:10.760
together as fun and as useful as possible?
link |
01:50:15.680
And you're saying in terms of propulsion systems, you recommend humor as a good spaceship to
link |
01:50:19.680
escape the gravitational field of that darkness.
link |
01:50:23.400
Well, that certainly helps.
link |
01:50:25.000
Yeah.
link |
01:50:26.000
So, let me ask you a little bit about ego and fame, which is very interesting, the way
link |
01:50:31.520
you're talking, given that you're one of the biggest intellects, living intellects and
link |
01:50:39.720
minds of our time, and there's a lot of people that really love you and almost elevate you
link |
01:50:47.480
to a certain kind of status where you're like the guru.
link |
01:50:50.680
I'm surprised you didn't show up in a robe, in fact.
link |
01:50:54.240
Is there a hoodie, that's not the highest status garment one can wear now?
link |
01:50:59.320
The socially acceptable version of the robe.
link |
01:51:02.080
If you're a billionaire, you wear a hoodie.
link |
01:51:04.720
Is there something you can say about managing the effects of fame on your own mind, on not
link |
01:51:12.520
creating this, when you wake up in the morning, when you look up in the mirror, how do you
link |
01:51:18.520
get your ego not to grow exponentially, your conception of self to grow exponentially, because
link |
01:51:26.560
there's so many people feeding that.
link |
01:51:28.840
Is there something to be said about this?
link |
01:51:30.400
It's really not hard, because I feel like I have a pretty clear sense of my strengths
link |
01:51:38.320
and weaknesses, and I don't feel like it's... Honestly, I don't feel like I suffer
link |
01:51:45.720
from much grandiosity.
link |
01:51:48.720
I just have a... There's so many things I'm not good at.
link |
01:51:52.640
There's so many things I will... Given the remaining 8,000 days at best, I will never
link |
01:51:58.320
get good at.
link |
01:52:00.000
I would love to be good at these things, so it's easy to feel diminished by comparison
link |
01:52:06.040
with the talents of others.
link |
01:52:08.840
Do you remind yourself of all the things that you're not competent in?
link |
01:52:14.320
Well, they're just on display for me every day that I appreciate the talents of others.
link |
01:52:19.440
You notice them.
link |
01:52:20.440
I'm sure Stalin and Hitler did not notice all the ways in which they were... I mean,
link |
01:52:25.880
this is why absolute power corrupts absolutely, is you stop noticing the things in which you're
link |
01:52:31.640
ridiculous and wrong.
link |
01:52:33.280
Right.
link |
01:52:34.280
Yeah.
link |
01:52:35.280
No, I...
link |
01:52:36.280
Not to compare you to Stalin.
link |
01:52:37.280
Yeah.
link |
01:52:38.280
Well, I'm sure there's an inner Stalin in there somewhere, but hopefully he wears better
link |
01:52:44.040
clothes and I'm not going to grow that mustache.
link |
01:52:49.280
Those concerns don't map on... They don't map on to me for a bunch of reasons, but one
link |
01:52:53.840
is I also have a very peculiar audience, and I've been appreciating this for a few years,
link |
01:53:01.600
but I'm just now beginning to understand that there are many people who have audiences
link |
01:53:07.600
of my size or larger that have a very different experience of having an audience than I do.
link |
01:53:13.240
I have curated for better or worse a peculiar audience, and the net result of that is virtually
link |
01:53:25.000
any time I say anything of substance, something like half of my audience, my real audience,
link |
01:53:31.600
not haters from outside my audience, but my audience, is just revolts over it.
link |
01:53:38.360
They just like, oh my God, I can't believe you, you're such a schmuck, right?
link |
01:53:43.320
They revolt with rigor and intellectual sophistication, which is great.
link |
01:53:47.280
Or not.
link |
01:53:48.280
Or not.
link |
01:53:49.280
What I've seen.
link |
01:53:50.280
But people who are... I mean, the clearest case is, I have whatever audience I have and
link |
01:53:55.240
then Trump appears on the scene, and I discover that something like 20% of my audience just
link |
01:54:00.800
went straight to Trump and couldn't believe I didn't follow them there.
link |
01:54:05.160
They were just a guess that I didn't see that Trump was obviously exactly what we needed
link |
01:54:10.000
for to steer the ship of state for the next four years and then four years beyond that.
link |
01:54:18.960
That's one example.
link |
01:54:20.520
So whenever I said anything about Trump, I would hear from people who loved more or
link |
01:54:25.480
less everything else I was up to and had for years, but everything I said about Trump
link |
01:54:30.920
just gave me pure pain from this quadrant of my audience.
link |
01:54:36.240
But then the same thing happens when I say something about the derangement of the far
link |
01:54:41.560
left.
link |
01:54:42.560
Anything I say about wokeness or identity politics, same kind of punishment signal from us.
link |
01:54:48.840
Again, people who are core to my audience, like I've read all your books, I'm using your
link |
01:54:54.400
meditation app, I love what you say about science, but you are so wrong about politics
link |
01:55:00.000
and I'm starting to think you're a racist asshole for everything you said about identity
link |
01:55:04.480
politics and the free will topic is just like this.
link |
01:55:12.080
They love what I'm saying about consciousness and the mind and they love to hear me talk
link |
01:55:16.320
about physics with physicists and it's all good.
link |
01:55:20.520
This free will stuff is I cannot believe you don't see how wrong you are.
link |
01:55:24.560
What a fucking embarrassment you are.
link |
01:55:27.960
But I'm starting to notice that there are other people who don't have this experience
link |
01:55:32.320
of having an audience because they have just take the Trump woke dichotomy.
link |
01:55:37.440
They just castigated Trump the same way I did, but they never say anything bad about
link |
01:55:43.480
the far left.
link |
01:55:44.480
So they never get this punishment signal or you flip it.
link |
01:55:47.960
They're all about the insanity of critical race theory now.
link |
01:55:54.400
We connect all those dots the same way, but they never really specified what was wrong
link |
01:55:59.600
with Trump or they thought there was a lot right with Trump and they got all the pleasure
link |
01:56:04.200
of that.
link |
01:56:05.360
And so they have much more homogenized audiences and so my experience is just to come back
link |
01:56:12.640
to this experience of fame or quasi fame and truth is not real fame, but it's still there's
link |
01:56:21.080
an audience there.
link |
01:56:24.200
It is a, it's now an experience where basically whatever I put out, I notice a ton of negativity
link |
01:56:33.000
coming back at me and it just, it is what it is.
link |
01:56:37.800
I mean, now it's like, I used to think, wait a minute, there's got to be some way for me
link |
01:56:42.200
to communicate more clearly here so as not to get this kind of lunatic response from
link |
01:56:50.000
my own audience, from like people who are showing all the signs of, we've been here
link |
01:56:55.440
for years for a reason, right?
link |
01:56:57.160
These are not just trolls.
link |
01:56:59.160
And so I think, okay, I'm going to take 10 more minutes and really just tell you what
link |
01:57:04.920
it should be absolutely clear about what's wrong with Trump, right?
link |
01:57:07.840
I've done this a few times, but I've got to do this again or wait a minute, how are they
link |
01:57:13.480
not getting that these episodes of police violence are so obviously different from
link |
01:57:18.880
one another that you can't describe all of them to, you know, yet another racist maniac
link |
01:57:25.240
on the police force, you know, killing someone based on his racism.
link |
01:57:31.080
Last time I spoke about this, it was pure pain, but I've got to just got to try again.
link |
01:57:35.680
Now at a certain point, I mean, I'm starting to feel like, all right, I just, I have to
link |
01:57:39.840
be, I have to cease again, it comes back to this expectation that there shouldn't be
link |
01:57:45.320
fires.
link |
01:57:46.320
Like, I feel like if I could just play my game impeccably, the people who actually
link |
01:57:52.320
care what I think will follow me when I hit Trump and hit free will and hit the woke and
link |
01:58:00.280
hit whatever it is, how we should respond to the coronavirus, you know, vaccines, you
link |
01:58:06.080
know, are they a thing, right?
link |
01:58:07.600
Like, there's such derangement in our information space now that, I mean, I guess, you know,
link |
01:58:14.720
some people could be getting more of this than I expect.
link |
01:58:16.720
But I just noticed that, you know, many of our friends who are in the same game have
link |
01:58:22.320
more homogenized audiences and don't get, I mean, they've successfully filtered out
link |
01:58:28.200
the people who are going to despise them on this next topic.
link |
01:58:32.320
And I, you know, I would imagine you are, have a different experience of having a podcast
link |
01:58:37.000
than I do at this point.
link |
01:58:38.440
I'm sure you get haters, but I would imagine you're more streamlined.
link |
01:58:45.080
I actually don't like the word haters because it kind of presumes that it puts people in
link |
01:58:51.400
a bin.
link |
01:58:52.400
I think we're all have, like, baby haters inside of us and we just apply them and some
link |
01:58:56.960
people enjoy doing that more than others for particular periods of time.
link |
01:59:01.800
I think you're going to almost see hating on the internet as a video game that you just
link |
01:59:05.880
play and it's fun, but then you can put it down and walk away.
link |
01:59:09.880
And no, I certainly have a bunch of people that are very critical.
link |
01:59:13.120
I can list all the ways.
link |
01:59:14.680
But does it feel like on any given topic, does it feel like it's an actual title surge
link |
01:59:19.640
where it's like 30% of your audience and then the other 30% of your audience from podcast
link |
01:59:25.320
to podcast?
link |
01:59:26.320
No, no, no.
link |
01:59:27.320
That's happening to me all the time now.
link |
01:59:29.560
Well, I'm more with, I don't know what you think about this.
link |
01:59:32.440
Joe Rogan doesn't read comments or doesn't read comments much.
link |
01:59:37.960
And the argument he made to me is that he already has like a self critical person inside.
link |
01:59:48.360
And I'm going to have to think about what you said in this conversation, but I have
link |
01:59:52.000
this very harshly self critical person inside as well where I don't need more fuel.
link |
01:59:58.120
I don't need, no, I do sometimes, that's why I check negativity occasionally, not too
link |
02:00:05.160
often.
link |
02:00:06.160
I sometimes need to put a little bit more like coals into the fire, but not too much.
link |
02:00:12.160
But I already have that self critical engine that keeps me in check.
link |
02:00:16.000
I wonder, a lot of people who gain more and more fame lose that ability to be self critical.
link |
02:00:23.920
I guess because they lose the audience that can be critical towards them.
link |
02:00:28.800
I do follow Joe's advice much more than I ever have here.
link |
02:00:32.240
I don't look at comments very often and I'm probably using Twitter 5% as much as I used
link |
02:00:41.120
to.
link |
02:00:42.120
I really just get in and out on Twitter and spend very little time in my ad mentions.
link |
02:00:50.000
In some ways it feels like a loss because occasionally I see something super intelligent
link |
02:00:54.520
there.
link |
02:00:55.520
I'll check my Twitter ad mentions and someone will have said, oh, have you read this article?
link |
02:01:00.080
And it's like, man, that was just like the best article sent to me in a month, right?
link |
02:01:05.120
So it's like to have not have looked and to not have seen that, that's a loss.
link |
02:01:11.080
But at this point, a little goes a long way because it's not that it, for me now, I mean,
link |
02:01:21.560
this could sound like a fairly Stalinistic immunity to criticism.
link |
02:01:26.840
It's not so much that these voices of hate turn on my inner hater more.
link |
02:01:33.240
It's more that I get what I fear is a false sense of humanity.
link |
02:01:41.320
I feel like I'm too online and online is selecting for this performative outrage in everybody.
link |
02:01:46.800
Everyone's signaling to an audience when they trash you.
link |
02:01:50.640
And I'm getting a misanthropic cut of just what is like out there because when you meet
link |
02:02:02.160
people in real life, they're great.
link |
02:02:05.000
They're rather often great and it takes a lot to have anything like a Twitter encounter
link |
02:02:12.960
in real life with a living person.
link |
02:02:17.000
And I think it's much better to have that as one's default sense of what it's like
link |
02:02:23.840
to be with people than what one gets on social media or on YouTube comment threads.
link |
02:02:30.600
You've produced a special episode with Rob Reed on your podcast recently on how bioengineering
link |
02:02:37.520
of viruses is going to destroy human civilization.
link |
02:02:40.560
So
link |
02:02:41.560
Or could
link |
02:02:42.560
Could
link |
02:02:43.560
One beers, yeah
link |
02:02:44.560
Sorry, the conference there.
link |
02:02:45.560
But in the 21st century, what do you think, especially after having thought through that
link |
02:02:52.720
angle, what do you think is the biggest threat to the survival of the human species?
link |
02:03:00.880
I can give you the full menu if you'd like.
link |
02:03:02.880
Yeah, I would put the biggest threat at another level out.
link |
02:03:10.800
The meta threat is our inability to agree about what the threats actually are and to
link |
02:03:20.880
converge on strategies for responding to them.
link |
02:03:25.200
So I view COVID as, among other things, a truly terrifyingly failed dress rehearsal for
link |
02:03:35.800
something far worse.
link |
02:03:36.800
I mean, COVID is just about as benign as it could have been and still have been worse
link |
02:03:43.040
than the flu when you're talking about a global pandemic.
link |
02:03:46.600
It's going to kill a few million people, or it looks like it's killed about three million
link |
02:03:53.080
people.
link |
02:03:54.080
Maybe it'll kill a few million more unless something gets away from us with a variant
link |
02:03:59.080
that's much worse or we really don't play our cards right.
link |
02:04:02.640
But the general shape of it is it's got somewhere around, well, 1% lethality and whatever
link |
02:04:16.440
side of that number it really is on in the end, it's not what would, in fact, be possible
link |
02:04:23.520
and is, in fact, probably inevitable something with orders of magnitude, more lethality
link |
02:04:30.320
than that.
link |
02:04:31.320
And it's just so obvious we are totally unprepared.
link |
02:04:35.920
We are running this epidemiological experiment of linking the entire world together and then
link |
02:04:41.840
also now per the podcast that Rob Reed did, democratizing the tech that will allow us
link |
02:04:50.040
to do this to engineer pandemics.
link |
02:04:53.360
And more and more people will be able to engineer synthetic viruses that will be by the sheer
link |
02:05:03.400
fact that they would have been engineered with malicious intent worse than COVID.
link |
02:05:08.960
And we're still living in, to speak specifically about the United States, we have a country
link |
02:05:14.480
here where we can't even agree that this is a thing, that COVID, there's still people
link |
02:05:21.040
who think that this is basically a hoax designed to control people.
link |
02:05:26.040
And it's stranger still, there are people who will acknowledge that COVID is real and
link |
02:05:33.400
they don't think the deaths have been faked or mis ascribed.
link |
02:05:42.960
But they think that they're far happier at the prospect of catching COVID than they are
link |
02:05:50.880
of getting vaccinated for COVID.
link |
02:05:53.600
They're not worried about COVID, they're worried about vaccines for COVID.
link |
02:05:57.240
And the fact that we just can't converge in a conversation that we've now had a year
link |
02:06:03.040
to have with one another on just what is the ground truth here?
link |
02:06:08.600
What's happened, why has it happened, how safe is it to get COVID in every cohort in
link |
02:06:17.880
the population and how safe are the vaccines?
link |
02:06:21.240
And the fact that there's still an air of mystery around all of this for much of our
link |
02:06:26.440
society does not bode well when you're talking about solving any other problem that may yet
link |
02:06:32.280
kill us.
link |
02:06:33.280
But do you think convergence grows with the magnitude of the threat?
link |
02:06:36.640
It's possible except I feel like we have tipped into, because when the threat of COVID looked
link |
02:06:44.000
the most dire, when we were seeing reports from Italy that looked like the beginning
link |
02:06:50.280
of a zombie movie.
link |
02:06:51.280
Because it could have been much, much worse.
link |
02:06:52.840
Yeah, this is lethal.
link |
02:06:55.600
Your ICUs are going to fill up and you're 14 days behind us.
link |
02:07:00.200
Your medical system is in danger of collapse.
link |
02:07:05.080
Lock the fuck down.
link |
02:07:06.800
We have people refusing to do anything sane in the face of that.
link |
02:07:13.120
People fundamentally thinking it's not going to get here, right?
link |
02:07:16.840
That's who knows what's going on in Italy, but it has no implications for what's going
link |
02:07:19.960
to go on in New York in a mere six days, right?
link |
02:07:23.360
And now it kicks off in New York and you've got people in the middle of the country thinking
link |
02:07:29.680
it's no factor, it's not, that's just big city, those are big city problems, or they're
link |
02:07:34.520
faking it, or, I mean, it just, the layer of politics has become so dysfunctional for
link |
02:07:41.680
us that even in what, in the presence of a pandemic that looked legitimately scary there
link |
02:07:50.200
in the beginning, I mean, it's not to say that it hasn't been devastating for everyone
link |
02:07:53.280
who's been directly affected by it, and it's not to say it can't get worse.
link |
02:07:56.920
But here, for a very long time, we have known that we were in a situation that is more benign
link |
02:08:03.720
than what seemed like the worst case scenario as it was kicking off, especially in Italy.
link |
02:08:12.080
And so still, yeah, it's quite possible that if we saw the asteroid hurtling toward earth
link |
02:08:18.560
and everyone agreed that it's going to make impact and we're all going to die, then we
link |
02:08:25.520
could get off Twitter and actually build the rockets that are going to divert the asteroid
link |
02:08:32.880
from its earth crossing path, and we could do something pretty heroic.
link |
02:08:37.920
But when you talk about anything else that isn't, that's slower moving than that, I mean,
link |
02:08:47.240
something like climate change, I think the prospect of our converging on a solution to
link |
02:08:55.200
climate change purely based on political persuasion is nonexistent at this point.
link |
02:09:00.480
I just think to bring Elon back into this, the way to deal with climate change is to
link |
02:09:07.040
create technology that everyone wants that is better than all the carbon producing technology.
link |
02:09:14.680
And then we just transition because you want an electric car the same way you wanted a
link |
02:09:19.920
smartphone or you want anything else, and you're working totally with the grain of people's
link |
02:09:25.840
selfishness and short term thinking.
link |
02:09:29.040
The idea that we're going to convince the better part of humanity, that climate change
link |
02:09:34.000
is an emergency, that they have to make sacrifices to respond to.
link |
02:09:39.200
Given what's happened around COVID, I just think that's the fantasy of a fantasy.
link |
02:09:46.440
But speaking of Elon, I have a bunch of positive things that I want to say here in response
link |
02:09:51.400
to you, but you're opening so many threads, but let me pull out one of them, which is
link |
02:09:55.000
AI, both you and Elon think that with AI, you're summoning demons, summoning a demon.
link |
02:10:05.680
Maybe not in those poetic terms, but.
link |
02:10:07.840
Well, potentially, two very, three very parsimonious assumptions I think here, scientifically parsimonious
link |
02:10:19.800
assumptions get me there.
link |
02:10:25.280
Any of which could be wrong, but it just seems like the weight of the evidence is on their
link |
02:10:30.880
side.
link |
02:10:31.880
One is that it comes back to this topic of substrate independence.
link |
02:10:37.320
And who's in the business of producing intelligent machines must believe ultimately that there's
link |
02:10:44.960
nothing magical about having a computer made of meat.
link |
02:10:47.560
You can do this in the kinds of materials we're using now.
link |
02:10:53.880
And there's no special something that presents a real impediment to producing human level
link |
02:11:02.400
intelligence in silico, right?
link |
02:11:05.200
Again, an assumption, I'm sure there are a few people who still think there is something
link |
02:11:09.280
magical about biological systems, but leave that aside.
link |
02:11:18.960
Given that assumption and given the assumption that we just continue making incremental progress,
link |
02:11:24.480
it doesn't have to be Moore's law, it just has to be progress that just doesn't stop.
link |
02:11:29.120
At a certain point, we'll get to human level intelligence and beyond.
link |
02:11:34.760
And human level intelligence, I think, is also clearly a mirage because anything that's
link |
02:11:39.440
human level is going to be superhuman unless we decide to dumb it down, right?
link |
02:11:45.320
My phone is already superhuman as a calculator, right?
link |
02:11:47.720
So why would we make the human level AI just as good as me as a calculator?
link |
02:11:55.040
So I think if we continue to make progress, we will be in the presence of superhuman competence
link |
02:12:03.800
for any act of intelligence or cognition that we care to prioritize.
link |
02:12:11.160
It's not to say that we'll create everything that a human could do, maybe we'll leave certain
link |
02:12:15.320
things out.
link |
02:12:16.600
But anything that we care about, and we care about a lot, and we certainly care about anything
link |
02:12:21.560
that produces a lot of power, that we care about scientific insights and the ability
link |
02:12:28.400
to produce new technology and all of that, we'll have something that's superhuman.
link |
02:12:34.440
And then the final assumption is just that there have to be ways to do that that are
link |
02:12:42.960
not aligned with a happy coexistence with these now more powerful entities than ourselves.
link |
02:12:52.000
And I would guess, and this is a kind of a rider to that assumption, there are probably
link |
02:12:58.840
more ways to do it badly than to do it perfectly, that is perfectly aligned with our well being.
link |
02:13:06.160
And when you think about the consequences of nonalignment, when you think about you're
link |
02:13:13.920
now in the presence of something that is more intelligent than you are, which is to say
link |
02:13:18.800
more competent, and obviously there are cartoon pictures of this where this is just an off
link |
02:13:26.840
switch and we can just turn off the off switch or they're tethered to something that makes
link |
02:13:30.400
them our slaves in perpetuity even though they're more intelligent.
link |
02:13:34.960
But those scenarios strike me as a failure to imagine what is actually entailed by greater
link |
02:13:41.440
intelligence.
link |
02:13:42.440
So if you imagine something that's legitimately more intelligent than you are, and you're
link |
02:13:48.040
now in relationship to it, you're in the presence of this thing and it is autonomous in all
link |
02:13:54.000
kinds of ways because it had to be to be more intelligent than you are.
link |
02:13:57.240
You built it to be all of those things.
link |
02:14:02.000
We just can't find ourselves in a negotiation with something more intelligent than we are.
link |
02:14:09.520
We have to have found the subset of ways to build these machines that are perpetually
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02:14:18.900
amenable to our saying, oh, that's not what we meant.
link |
02:14:24.200
That's not what we intended.
link |
02:14:25.200
Could you stop doing that?
link |
02:14:26.200
Just come back over here and do this thing that we actually want.
link |
02:14:29.520
And for them to care, for them to be tethered to our own sense of our own well being such
link |
02:14:35.840
that their utility function is, their primary utility function is for, this is I think Stuart
link |
02:14:43.520
Russell's cartoon plan is to figure out how to tether them to a utility function that
link |
02:14:55.040
has our own estimation of what's going to improve our well being as its master reward.
link |
02:15:05.560
So this thing can get as intelligent as it can get, but it only ever really wants to
link |
02:15:12.440
figure out how to make our lives better by our own view of better.
link |
02:15:16.480
Not to say there wouldn't be a conversation about all kinds of things we're not seeing
link |
02:15:22.120
clearly about what is better and if we were in the presence of a genie or an oracle that
link |
02:15:27.680
could really tell us what is better, well then we presumably would want to hear that
link |
02:15:32.040
and we would modify our sense of what to do next in conversation with these minds.
link |
02:15:41.160
But I just feel like it is a failure of imagination to think that being in relationship to something
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02:15:55.160
more intelligent than yourself isn't in most cases a circumstance of real peril.
link |
02:16:04.440
Because it is, just to think about how everything on earth has to, if they could think about
link |
02:16:11.000
their relationship to us, if birds could think about what we're doing, the bottom line is
link |
02:16:21.360
they're always in danger of our discovering that there's something we care about more
link |
02:16:27.800
than birds.
link |
02:16:28.800
But there's something we want that disregards the well being of birds and obviously much
link |
02:16:36.240
of our behavior is inscrutable to them.
link |
02:16:38.120
Occasionally we pay attention to them and occasionally we withdraw our attention and
link |
02:16:41.760
occasionally we just kill them all for reasons they can't possibly understand.
link |
02:16:45.720
But if we're building something more intelligent than ourselves, by definition we're building
link |
02:16:50.400
something whose horizons of value and cognition can exceed our own.
link |
02:17:00.920
And in ways where we can't necessarily foresee, again perpetually, that they don't just wake
link |
02:17:08.760
up one day and decide, okay, these humans need to disappear.
link |
02:17:14.280
So I think I agree with most of the initial things you said, what I don't necessarily
link |
02:17:21.000
agree with, of course nobody knows, but that the more likely set of trajectories that we're
link |
02:17:27.680
going to take are going to be positive, that's what I believe.
link |
02:17:32.120
In the sense that the way you develop, I believe the way you develop successful AI systems
link |
02:17:40.280
will be deeply integrated with human society and for them to succeed, they're going to
link |
02:17:45.840
have to be aligned in the way we humans are aligned with each other, which doesn't mean
link |
02:17:51.200
we're aligned, there's no such thing, or I don't see there's such thing as a perfect
link |
02:17:56.840
alignment, but they're going to be participating in the dance, in the game theoretic dance of
link |
02:18:02.640
human society as they become more and more intelligent.
link |
02:18:06.600
There could be a point beyond which we are like birds to them.
link |
02:18:13.040
But what about an intelligence explosion of some kind?
link |
02:18:16.200
So I believe the explosion will be happening, but there's a lot of explosion to be done
link |
02:18:24.040
before we become like birds.
link |
02:18:26.200
I truly believe that human beings are very intelligent in ways we don't understand, it's
link |
02:18:30.760
not just about chess.
link |
02:18:32.400
It's about all the intricate computation we're able to perform, common sense, our ability
link |
02:18:38.080
to reason about this world consciousness.
link |
02:18:40.600
I think we're doing a lot of work, we don't realize it's necessary to be done in order
link |
02:18:44.800
to truly achieve super intelligence.
link |
02:18:50.200
I just think there will be a period of time that's not overnight.
link |
02:18:53.840
The overnight nature of it will not literally be overnight, it'll be over a period of decades.
link |
02:18:59.600
But why would it be that way, but just take, draw an analogy from recent successes like
link |
02:19:06.520
something like AlphaGo or AlphaZero, I forget the actual metric, but it was something like
link |
02:19:13.360
this algorithm, which wasn't even totally bespoke for chess playing in the matter of,
link |
02:19:22.520
I think it was four hours, played itself so many times and so successfully that it became
link |
02:19:28.320
the best chess playing computer, it was not only better than every human being, it was
link |
02:19:33.880
better than every previous chess program in a matter of a day.
link |
02:19:39.800
Just imagine, again, we don't have to recapitulate everything about us, but just imagine building
link |
02:19:44.680
a system and who knows when we'll be able to do this, but at some point we'll be able,
link |
02:19:52.320
at some point, the 100 favorite things about human cognition will be analogous to chess
link |
02:20:01.120
in that we will be able to build machines that very quickly outperform any human and
link |
02:20:08.080
then very quickly outperform the last algorithm that outperform the humans.
link |
02:20:14.000
Something like the AlphaGo experience seems possible for facial recognition and detecting
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02:20:22.320
human emotion and natural language processing.
link |
02:20:29.240
Everyone, even math people, math heads, tend to have bad intuitions for exponentiation.
link |
02:20:36.520
We noticed this during COVID and we have some very smart people who still couldn't get their
link |
02:20:40.680
minds around the fact that an exponential is really surprising.
link |
02:20:46.720
I mean, things double and double and double and double again and you don't notice much
link |
02:20:50.160
of anything changes and then the last two stages of doubling swamp everything.
link |
02:20:57.760
It just seems like that to assume that there isn't a deep analogy between what we're seeing
link |
02:21:06.920
for the more tractable problems like chess to other modes of cognition, it's like once
link |
02:21:14.680
you crack that problem, it seems, because for the longest time, it was impossible to
link |
02:21:20.560
think we were going to make headway in AI.
link |
02:21:24.440
Chess and Go was seen as impossible.
link |
02:21:27.640
Go seemed unattainable.
link |
02:21:29.360
Even when chess had been cracked, Go seemed unattainable.
link |
02:21:33.360
Yeah, and actually, Stuart Russell was behind the people that were saying it's unattainable
link |
02:21:38.240
because it seemed like it's an intractable problem.
link |
02:21:43.000
But there's something different about the space of cognition that's detached from human
link |
02:21:47.520
society, which is what chess is, meaning just thinking, having actual exponential impact
link |
02:21:54.200
on the physical world is different.
link |
02:21:56.520
I tend to believe that there's four AI to get to the point where it's super intelligent.
link |
02:22:03.800
It's going to have to go through the funnel of society, and for that, it has to be deeply
link |
02:22:08.840
integrated with human beings, and for that, it has to be aligned.
link |
02:22:12.520
What do you mean you're talking about actually hooking us up to the neural link where we're
link |
02:22:17.240
going to be the brainstem to the robot overlords?
link |
02:22:22.320
That's a possibility as well.
link |
02:22:24.040
What I mean is, in order to develop autonomous weapon systems, for example, which are highly
link |
02:22:29.640
concerning to me that both US and China are participating in now, that in order to develop
link |
02:22:36.240
them and for them to become, to have more and more responsibility to actually do military
link |
02:22:42.840
strategic actions, they're going to have to be integrated into human beings doing the
link |
02:22:50.840
strategic action.
link |
02:22:51.840
They're going to have to work alongside with each other, and the way those systems will
link |
02:22:55.280
be developed will have the natural safety switches that are placed on them as they develop over
link |
02:23:02.280
time because they're going to have to convince humans, ultimately, they're going to have
link |
02:23:06.320
to convince humans that this is safer than humans.
link |
02:23:12.600
Self driving cars is a good test case here because obviously, we've made a lot of progress,
link |
02:23:19.760
and we can imagine what total progress would look like.
link |
02:23:25.000
It would be amazing, and it's canceling in the US 40,000 deaths every year based on
link |
02:23:31.660
ape driven cars.
link |
02:23:33.160
So it's an excruciating problem that we've all gotten used to because there was no alternative.
link |
02:23:38.440
But now that we can dimly see the prospect of an alternative, which if it works in a
link |
02:23:44.080
super intelligent fashion, maybe we go down to zero highway deaths, or certainly we go
link |
02:23:50.480
down by orders of magnitude.
link |
02:23:52.000
So maybe we have 400 rather than 40,000 a year.
link |
02:24:00.000
And it's easy to see that there's not an example of super intelligence.
link |
02:24:08.040
This is narrow intelligence, but the alignment problem isn't so obvious there.
link |
02:24:15.080
But there are potential alignment problems there.
link |
02:24:18.640
Just imagine if some woke team of engineers decided that we have to tune the algorithm
link |
02:24:26.040
some way.
link |
02:24:27.040
I mean, there are situations where the car has to decide who to hit.
link |
02:24:30.200
There's just bad outcomes where you're going to hit somebody.
link |
02:24:34.040
Now we have a car that can tell what race you are.
link |
02:24:36.800
So we're going to build the car to preferentially hit white people because white people have
link |
02:24:41.160
had so much privilege over the years.
link |
02:24:43.360
This seems like the only ethical way to kind of redress those wrongs of the past.
link |
02:24:47.440
That's something that could get produced as an artifact, presumably, of just how you built
link |
02:24:54.000
it.
link |
02:24:55.000
And you didn't even know you engineered it that way, right?
link |
02:24:57.240
You caused it.
link |
02:24:58.240
Machine learning.
link |
02:24:59.240
You put some kind of constraints on it to create those kinds of outcomes.
link |
02:25:02.400
You basically built a racist algorithm and you didn't even intend to, or you could intend
link |
02:25:07.200
to, right?
link |
02:25:08.200
And it would be aligned with some people's values, but misaligned with other people's
link |
02:25:12.440
values.
link |
02:25:13.680
But it's like there are interesting problems, even with something as simple and obviously
link |
02:25:18.600
good as self driving cars.
link |
02:25:20.640
But there's a leap that I just think would be exact, but those are human problems.
link |
02:25:25.280
I just don't think there would be a leap with autonomous vehicles, first of all, sorry.
link |
02:25:31.800
There are a lot of trajectories which will destroy human civilization.
link |
02:25:35.800
The argument I'm making, it's more likely that we'll take trajectories that don't.
link |
02:25:40.120
So I don't think there will be a leap with autonomous vehicles will all of a sudden start
link |
02:25:43.960
murdering pedestrians because once every human on earth is dead, there will be no more fatalities,
link |
02:25:50.720
sort of unintended consequences of, and it's difficult to take that leap.
link |
02:25:55.920
Most systems as we develop and they become much, much more intelligent in ways that will
link |
02:25:59.680
be incredibly surprising, like stuff that's deep mind is doing with protein folding, even
link |
02:26:06.240
which is scary to think about, and I'm personally terrified about this, which is the engineering
link |
02:26:10.600
of viruses using machine learning, the engineering of vaccines using machine learning, right?
link |
02:26:16.840
The engineering of, yeah, for research purposes, pathogens using machine learning, like the
link |
02:26:23.920
ways that can go wrong.
link |
02:26:25.000
I just think that there's always going to be a closed loop supervision of humans before
link |
02:26:31.160
they, before they become super intelligent, not always, much more likely to be supervision.
link |
02:26:38.720
Except of course, the question is how many dumb people are in the world?
link |
02:26:42.160
How many evil people are in the world?
link |
02:26:44.520
My theory, my hope is, my sense is that the number of intelligent people is much higher
link |
02:26:51.200
than the number of dumb people that know how to program, and the number of evil people.
link |
02:26:57.640
I think smart people and kind people over, outnumber the others.
link |
02:27:03.480
Except we also, we have to add another group of people which are just the smart and otherwise
link |
02:27:09.320
good, but reckless people, right?
link |
02:27:12.160
The people who will flip a switch on, not knowing what's going to happen, they're just
link |
02:27:17.960
kind of hoping that it's not going to blow up the world.
link |
02:27:20.600
We already know that some of our smartest people are those sorts of people.
link |
02:27:24.720
We know we've done experiments, and this is something that Martin Rees was whingeing
link |
02:27:28.840
about before the Large Hadron Collider got booted up, I think.
link |
02:27:36.000
We know there are people who are entertaining experiments or even performing experiments
link |
02:27:39.920
where there's some chance, not quite infinitesimal, that they're going to create a black hole
link |
02:27:48.120
in the lab and suck the whole world into it, right?
link |
02:27:51.640
That's not, you're not a crazy person to worry about that based on the physics.
link |
02:27:57.760
So it was with the Trinity test, there were some people who were still checking their
link |
02:28:04.560
calculations, and we did nuclear tests where we were off significantly in terms of the
link |
02:28:11.400
yield, right?
link |
02:28:12.400
So it was like...
link |
02:28:13.400
And they still flip the switch.
link |
02:28:14.400
Yeah, they still flip the switch.
link |
02:28:15.400
And sometimes they flip the switch not to win a world war or to save 40,000 lives a year.
link |
02:28:22.960
They just...
link |
02:28:23.960
Just to see what happens.
link |
02:28:24.960
Intellectual curiosity.
link |
02:28:25.960
Like, this is what I got my grant for.
link |
02:28:27.840
This is where I'll get my Nobel Prize if that's in the cards.
link |
02:28:33.080
It's on the other side of the switch, right?
link |
02:28:35.960
And again, we are apes with egos who are massively constrained by very short term self interest
link |
02:28:49.600
even when we're contemplating some of the deepest and most interesting and most universal problems
link |
02:28:57.600
we could ever set our attention towards.
link |
02:29:00.880
If you read James Watson's book, The Double Helix, right, about them cracking the structure
link |
02:29:07.800
of DNA, one thing that's amazing about that book is just how much of it, almost all of
link |
02:29:15.040
it, is being driven by very apish, egocentric social concerns.
link |
02:29:26.600
The algorithm that is producing this scientific breakthrough is human competition, if you're
link |
02:29:32.840
James Watson.
link |
02:29:33.840
Right?
link |
02:29:34.840
It's like, I'm going to get there before Linus Pauling and it's just so much of his
link |
02:29:41.340
bandwidth is captured by that, right?
link |
02:29:44.440
Now, that becomes more and more of a liability when you're talking about producing technology
link |
02:29:53.480
that can change everything in an instant, we're talking about not only understanding, we're
link |
02:30:02.320
just at a different moment in human history.
link |
02:30:06.480
When we're doing research on viruses, we're now doing the kind of research that can cause
link |
02:30:14.360
someone somewhere else to be able to make that virus or weaponize that virus or, I don't
link |
02:30:24.000
know, our power is, our wisdom does not seem like our wisdom is scaling with our power,
link |
02:30:30.720
right?
link |
02:30:31.720
And that seems like, in so far, as wisdom and power become unaligned, I get more and
link |
02:30:39.360
more concerned.
link |
02:30:41.160
But speaking of apes with egos, some of the most compelling apes, two compelling apes
link |
02:30:48.480
I can think of as yourself and Jordan Peterson, and you've had a fun conversation about religion
link |
02:30:56.000
that I watched most of, I believe, and I'm not sure there was any...
link |
02:31:02.600
We didn't solve anything.
link |
02:31:03.920
If anything was ever solved.
link |
02:31:05.160
So is there something like a charitable summary you can give to the ideas that you agree on
link |
02:31:12.920
and disagree with, Jordan?
link |
02:31:14.440
Is there something maybe after that conversation that you've landed where maybe as you both
link |
02:31:21.800
agreed on, is there some wisdom in the rubble of even imperfect flawed ideas?
link |
02:31:29.160
Is there something that you can kind of pull out from those conversations or is there to
link |
02:31:33.400
be continued?
link |
02:31:34.400
I think where we disagree, so he thinks that many of our traditional religious beliefs and
link |
02:31:44.040
frameworks are holding so much such a repository of human wisdom that we pull at that fabric
link |
02:32:03.000
at our peril.
link |
02:32:04.440
If you start just unraveling Christianity or any other traditional set of norms and beliefs,
link |
02:32:12.440
you may think you're just pulling out the unscientific bits, but you could be pulling
link |
02:32:16.760
a lot more to which everything you care about is attached as a society.
link |
02:32:25.640
My feeling is that there's so much downside to the unscientific bits, and it's so clear
link |
02:32:32.400
here how we could have a 21st century rational conversation about the good stuff that we
link |
02:32:40.120
really can radically edit these traditions.
link |
02:32:42.840
We can take Jesus in half his moods and just find a great inspirational Iron Age thought
link |
02:32:54.280
leader who just happened to get crucified, but he could be somewhat like the Beatitudes
link |
02:32:58.840
and the Golden Rule, which doesn't originate with him, but which he put quite beautifully.
link |
02:33:08.760
All of that's incredibly useful.
link |
02:33:09.760
It's no less useful than it was 2,000 years ago, but we don't have to believe he was born
link |
02:33:14.240
of a virgin or coming back to raise the dead or any of that other stuff.
link |
02:33:18.800
We can be honest about not believing those things, and we can be honest about the reasons
link |
02:33:22.880
why we don't believe those things.
link |
02:33:26.320
On those fronts, I view the downside to be so obvious and the fact that we have so many
link |
02:33:34.200
different competing dogmatisms on offer to be so nonfunctional.
link |
02:33:38.520
I mean, it's so divisive.
link |
02:33:41.320
It just has conflict built into it that I think we can be far more and should be far
link |
02:33:47.720
more iconoclastic than he wants to be.
link |
02:33:51.240
Now, none of this is to deny much of what he argues for, that stories are very powerful.
link |
02:34:00.120
Clearly, stories are powerful, and we want good stories.
link |
02:34:03.440
We want our lives.
link |
02:34:04.840
We want to have a conversation with ourselves and with one another about our lives that
link |
02:34:10.360
facilitates the best possible lives, and story is part of that.
link |
02:34:17.080
If you want some of those stories to sound like myths, that might be part of it.
link |
02:34:23.840
My argument is that we never really need to deceive ourselves or our children about what
link |
02:34:29.920
we have every reason to believe is true in order to get at the good stuff, in order to
link |
02:34:34.280
organize our lives well.
link |
02:34:36.280
I certainly don't feel that I need to do it personally, and if I don't need to do it personally,
link |
02:34:41.240
why would I think that billions of other people need to do it personally?
link |
02:34:45.800
Now, there is a cynical counterargument, which is billions of other people don't have the
link |
02:34:51.680
advantages that I have had in my life.
link |
02:34:54.280
The billions of other people are not as well educated, they haven't had the same opportunities,
link |
02:34:59.960
they need to be told that Jesus is going to solve all their problems after they die,
link |
02:35:06.800
or that everything happens for a reason, and if you just believe in the secret, if you
link |
02:35:14.080
just visualize what you want, you're going to get it.
link |
02:35:20.280
Some measure of what I consider to be odious pamphlet that really is food for the better
link |
02:35:26.440
part of humanity, and there is no substitute for it, or there's no substitute now, and
link |
02:35:31.080
I don't know if Jordan would agree with that, but much of what he says seems to suggest
link |
02:35:35.120
that he would agree with it.
link |
02:35:39.440
I guess that's an empirical question.
link |
02:35:41.320
It's just that we don't know whether, given a different set of norms and a different set
link |
02:35:47.520
of stories, people would behave the way I would hope they would behave and be more aligned
link |
02:35:55.040
than they are now.
link |
02:35:56.040
I think we know what happens when you just let ancient religious certainties go uncriticized.
link |
02:36:06.480
We know what that world's like, we've been struggling to get out of that world for a
link |
02:36:11.200
couple of hundred years, but we know what having Europe riven by religious wars looks
link |
02:36:21.000
like, and we know what happens when those religions become pseudo religions and political
link |
02:36:29.040
religions.
link |
02:36:30.040
This is where I'm sure Jordan and I would debate.
link |
02:36:33.840
He would say that Stalin was a symptom of atheism, and that's not at all, I mean, it's not my
link |
02:36:38.600
kind of atheism.
link |
02:36:40.800
And the problem with the Gulag and the experiment with communism or with Stalinism or with Nazism
link |
02:36:50.080
was not that there was so much scientific rigor and self criticism and honesty and introspection
link |
02:36:59.360
and judicious use of psychedelics, I mean, that was not the problem in Hitler's Germany
link |
02:37:07.240
or in Stalin's Soviet Union.
link |
02:37:12.760
The problem was you have other ideas that capture a similar kind of mob based dogmatic
link |
02:37:22.120
energy, and yes, the results of all of that are predictably murderous.
link |
02:37:30.680
So the question is, what is the source of the most viral and sticky stories that ultimately
link |
02:37:38.560
lead to a positive outcome?
link |
02:37:40.400
So communism was, I mean, having grown up in the Soviet Union, even still, you know,
link |
02:37:48.720
having relatives in Russia, there's a stickiness to the nationalism and to the ideologies of
link |
02:37:55.360
communism that religious or not, you could say it's religious for forever, I could just
link |
02:38:00.680
say it's great stories that are viral and sticky, I'm using the most horrible words,
link |
02:38:09.080
but the question is whether science and reason can generate viral sticky stories that give
link |
02:38:14.840
meaning to people's lives in your sense as it does.
link |
02:38:20.120
Well, whatever is true ultimately should be captivating, right?
link |
02:38:26.560
It's like, what's more captivating than whatever is real, right?
link |
02:38:32.120
Now, it's because reality is, again, we're just climbing out of the darkness in terms
link |
02:38:41.320
of our understanding of what the hell is going on, and there's no telling what spooky things
link |
02:38:47.280
may in fact be true.
link |
02:38:48.280
I don't know if you've been on the receiving end of recent rumors about our conversation
link |
02:38:54.000
about UFOs very likely changing in the near term, right?
link |
02:38:57.720
But there was just a Washington Post article and a New Yorker article, and I've received
link |
02:39:03.120
some private outreach, and perhaps you have, I know other people in our orbit have people
link |
02:39:10.200
who are claiming that the government has known much more about UFOs than they have led on
link |
02:39:16.120
until now, and this conversation is actually is about to become more prominent, and it's
link |
02:39:22.200
not going to be whoever's left standing when the music stops, it's not going to be a comfortable
link |
02:39:32.280
position to be in as a super rigorous scientific skeptic who's been saying there's no there
link |
02:39:41.120
there for the last 75 years, right?
link |
02:39:45.960
The short version is it sounds like the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Pentagon are
link |
02:39:52.360
very likely to say to Congress at some point in the not too distant future that we have
link |
02:39:58.280
evidence that there is technology flying around here that seems like it can't possibly be
link |
02:40:06.600
of human origin, right?
link |
02:40:08.600
Now I don't know what I'm going to do with that kind of disclosure, right?
link |
02:40:11.520
Obviously it's going to be nothing, no follow on conversation to really have, but that is
link |
02:40:18.200
such a powerfully strange circumstance to be in, right?
link |
02:40:23.320
It's just what are we going to do with that?
link |
02:40:25.480
If in fact that's what happens, right?
link |
02:40:28.360
If in fact the considered opinion, despite the embarrassment it causes them of the U.S.
link |
02:40:36.560
government of all of our intelligence, all of the relevant intelligence services is that
link |
02:40:42.720
this isn't a hoax, there's too much data to suggest that it's a hoax.
link |
02:40:46.960
We've got too much radar imagery, there's too much satellite data, whatever data they
link |
02:40:52.680
actually have, there's too much of it.
link |
02:40:55.600
All we can say now is something's going on and there's no way it's the Chinese or the
link |
02:41:02.880
Russians or anyone else's technology.
link |
02:41:07.360
That should arrest our attention collectively to a degree that nothing in our lifetime has.
link |
02:41:15.880
Now one worries that we're so jaded and confused and distracted that it's going to get much
link |
02:41:27.200
less coverage than Obama's tan suit did a bunch of years ago.
link |
02:41:37.160
Who knows how we'll respond to that, but it's just to say that the need for us to tell ourselves
link |
02:41:46.600
an honest story about what's going on and what's likely to happen next is never going
link |
02:41:52.480
to go away, right?
link |
02:41:54.480
And it's important, the division between me and every person who's defending traditional
link |
02:42:00.280
religion is where is it that you want to lie to yourself or lie to your kids?
link |
02:42:09.400
Where is honesty a liability?
link |
02:42:12.000
And for me, I've yet to find the place where it is.
link |
02:42:17.240
And it's so obviously a strength in almost every other circumstance because it is the
link |
02:42:26.240
thing that allows you to course correct, it is the thing that allows you to hope at least
link |
02:42:32.960
that your beliefs, that your stories are in some kind of calibration with what's actually
link |
02:42:38.800
going on in the world.
link |
02:42:39.800
Yes, it is a little bit sad to imagine that if aliens on mass showed up to earth, that
link |
02:42:47.480
would be too preoccupied with political bickering or to like these like fake news and all that
link |
02:42:53.480
kind of stuff to notice the very basic evidence of reality.
link |
02:42:59.400
I do have a glimmer of hope that there seems to be more and more hunger for authenticity.
link |
02:43:06.600
And I feel like that opens the door for a hunger for what is real, like that people don't
link |
02:43:14.880
want stories, they don't want like layers and layers of like fakeness.
link |
02:43:21.000
And I'm hoping that means that will directly lead to a greater hunger for reality and reason
link |
02:43:27.320
and truth.
link |
02:43:28.320
You know, truth isn't dogmatism, like truth isn't authority, I have a PhD and therefore
link |
02:43:36.240
I'm right.
link |
02:43:38.680
Truth is almost like the reality is there's so many questions, there's so many mysteries,
link |
02:43:44.320
there's so much uncertainty, this is our best available, like a best guess.
link |
02:43:49.480
And we have a lot of evidence that supports that guess, but it could be so many other
link |
02:43:53.240
things and like just even conveying that, I think there's a hunger for that in the world
link |
02:43:58.720
to hear that from scientists, less dogmatism and more just like this is what we know, we're
link |
02:44:05.040
doing our best given the uncertainty given, I mean, this is true with obviously with virology
link |
02:44:10.560
and all those kinds of things, because everything is happening so fast, there's a lot of, and
link |
02:44:15.040
biology is super messy.
link |
02:44:16.640
So it's very hard to know stuff for sure.
link |
02:44:18.960
So just being open and real about that, I think I'm hoping will change people's hunger
link |
02:44:25.400
and openness and trust of what's real.
link |
02:44:29.160
Yeah.
link |
02:44:30.160
Well, so much of this is probabilistic, it's so much of what can seem dogmatic scientifically
link |
02:44:34.960
is just you're just, you're placing a bet on whether it's worth reading that paper or
link |
02:44:43.680
rethinking your presuppositions on that point, it's like, it's not fundamental closure to
link |
02:44:49.480
data, it's just that there's so much data on one side or so much would have to change
link |
02:44:55.520
in terms of your understanding of what you think you understand about the nature of the
link |
02:44:58.960
world, if this new fact were so that you can pretty quickly say, all right, that's probably
link |
02:45:07.640
bullshit.
link |
02:45:08.640
Right.
link |
02:45:09.640
And it can sound like a fundamental closure to new conversations, new evidence, new data,
link |
02:45:16.760
new argument, but it's really not, it's just, it really is just triaging your attention.
link |
02:45:21.200
It's just like, okay, you're telling me that your best friend can actually read minds.
link |
02:45:27.440
Okay, well, that's interesting, let me know when that person has gone into a lab and actually
link |
02:45:33.360
proven it.
link |
02:45:34.360
This is not the place where I need to spend the rest of my day figuring out if your buddy
link |
02:45:39.680
can read my mind.
link |
02:45:42.800
But there's a way to communicate that.
link |
02:45:44.680
I think it does too often sound like you're completely closed off to ideas as opposed to
link |
02:45:49.400
saying that there's a lot of evidence in support of this, but you're still open minded to other
link |
02:46:00.400
ideas.
link |
02:46:01.400
There's a way to communicate that.
link |
02:46:02.400
It's not necessarily even with words.
link |
02:46:06.120
It's even that Joe Rogan energy of it's entirely possible.
link |
02:46:10.920
It's that energy of being open minded and curious like kids are.
link |
02:46:14.520
This is our best understanding, but you still are curious.
link |
02:46:19.040
I'm not saying allocate time to exploring all those things, but still leaving the door
link |
02:46:24.040
open.
link |
02:46:25.040
And there's a way to communicate that I think that people really hunger for.
link |
02:46:31.560
Let me ask you this.
link |
02:46:32.560
I've been recently talking a lot with John Donahue from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu fame.
link |
02:46:37.200
I don't know if you know who that is.
link |
02:46:39.400
I'm talking about somebody who's good at what he does.
link |
02:46:42.920
And he, speaking to somebody who's open minded, the reason this ridiculous transition is for
link |
02:46:48.280
the longest time, and even still, a lot of people believed in the Jiu Jitsu world and
link |
02:46:52.640
grappling world that leg locks are not effective in Jiu Jitsu.
link |
02:46:56.640
And he was somebody that inspired by the open mindedness of Dean Lister famously to him
link |
02:47:02.600
said, why do you only consider half the human body when you're trying to do the submissions?
link |
02:47:08.760
He developed an entire system on this other half the human body.
link |
02:47:12.600
Anyway, I do that absurd transition to ask you because you're also a student of Brazilian
link |
02:47:19.160
Jiu Jitsu.
link |
02:47:20.160
Is there something you could say how that has affected your life, what you've learned
link |
02:47:25.040
from grappling from the martial arts?
link |
02:47:28.280
It's actually a great transition because I think one of the things that's so beautiful
link |
02:47:34.720
about Jiu Jitsu is that it does what we wish we could do in every other area of life where
link |
02:47:42.200
we're talking about this difference between knowledge and ignorance.
link |
02:47:48.040
There's no room for bullshit.
link |
02:47:51.720
You don't get any credit for bullshit.
link |
02:47:56.440
The amazing thing about Jiu Jitsu is that the difference between knowing what's going
link |
02:48:02.920
on and what to do and not knowing it is as the gulf between those two states is as wide
link |
02:48:08.840
as it is in anything in human life and it can be spanned so quickly.
link |
02:48:21.200
Each increment of knowledge can be doled out in five minutes.
link |
02:48:25.320
Here's the thing that got you killed and here's how to prevent it from happening to you and
link |
02:48:31.120
here's how to do it to others.
link |
02:48:33.200
You just get this amazing cadence of discovering your fatal ignorance and then having it remedied
link |
02:48:42.080
with the actual technique.
link |
02:48:47.760
For people who don't know what we're talking about, it's just like the simple circumstance
link |
02:48:51.160
of like someone's got you in a headlock.
link |
02:48:53.200
How do you get out of that?
link |
02:48:55.120
Someone's sitting on your chest and they're in the mount position and you're on the bottom
link |
02:49:00.080
and you want to get away.
link |
02:49:01.880
How do you get them off you?
link |
02:49:03.040
You're sitting on, your intuitions about how to do this are terrible even if you've done
link |
02:49:09.000
some other martial art.
link |
02:49:11.840
Once you learn how to do it, the difference is night and day, it's like you have access
link |
02:49:17.200
to a completely different physics.
link |
02:49:22.400
I think our understanding of the world can be much more like Jiu Jitsu than it tends to
link |
02:49:29.280
be.
link |
02:49:30.760
I think we should all have a much better sense of when we should tap out and when we should
link |
02:49:42.880
recognize that our epistemological arm is farred and now being broken.
link |
02:49:50.360
The problem with debating most other topics is that most people, it isn't Jiu Jitsu and
link |
02:49:57.240
most people don't tap out, even if it's obvious to you they're wrong and it's obvious to an
link |
02:50:03.480
intelligent audience that they're wrong, people just double down and double down and they're
link |
02:50:07.880
either lying or lying to themselves or they're bluffing and so you have a lot of zombies
link |
02:50:13.640
walking around or zombie worldviews walking around which have been disconfirmed as emphatically
link |
02:50:19.640
as someone gets armbarred or someone gets choked out in Jiu Jitsu.
link |
02:50:25.280
Because it's not Jiu Jitsu, they can live to fight another day or they can pretend that
link |
02:50:32.200
they didn't lose that particular argument.
link |
02:50:35.960
Science when it works is a lot like Jiu Jitsu.
link |
02:50:38.600
Science that when you falsify a thesis, when you think DNA is one way and it proves to
link |
02:50:44.840
be another way, when you think it's triple stranded or whatever, it's like there is a
link |
02:50:51.200
there there and you can get to a real consensus.
link |
02:50:56.840
So Jiu Jitsu, for me, it was more than just of interest for self defense and the sport
link |
02:51:05.840
of it.
link |
02:51:06.840
It was something, it's a language and an argument you're having where you can't fool yourself
link |
02:51:17.080
anymore.
link |
02:51:18.080
First of all, it cancels any role of luck in a way that most other athletic feats don't.
link |
02:51:27.400
It's like in basketball, even if you're not good at basketball, you can take the basketball
link |
02:51:30.960
in your hand, you can be 75 feet away and hurl it at the basket and you might make it
link |
02:51:37.440
and you could convince yourself based on that demonstration that you have some kind of talent
link |
02:51:41.800
for basketball.
link |
02:51:42.800
So 10 minutes on the mat with a real Jiu Jitsu practitioner, when you are not one, proves
link |
02:51:51.280
to you that it's not like, there's no lucky punch, there's no, you're not going to get
link |
02:51:55.920
a, there's no lucky rear naked choke you're going to perform on someone who's Marcelo
link |
02:52:01.920
Garcia or somebody.
link |
02:52:02.920
It's just, it's not going to happen.
link |
02:52:05.400
And having that aspect of the usual range of uncertainty and self deception and bullshit
link |
02:52:18.080
just stripped away was really a kind of revelation, it was just an amazing experience.
link |
02:52:23.760
Yeah, I think it's a really powerful thing that accompanies whatever other pursuit you
link |
02:52:27.440
have in life.
link |
02:52:28.440
I'm not sure if there's anything like Jiu Jitsu where you could just systematically go
link |
02:52:34.000
into a place where you're, that's honest, where your beliefs get challenged in a way
link |
02:52:41.560
that's conclusive.
link |
02:52:42.560
Yeah.
link |
02:52:43.560
I haven't found too many other mechanisms, which is why it's a, we had this earlier question
link |
02:52:48.960
about fame and ego and so on.
link |
02:52:52.760
I'm very much relying Jiu Jitsu in my own life as a place where I can always go to have
link |
02:52:58.480
my ego in check and that, that has effects on how I live every other aspect of my life.
link |
02:53:07.240
Actually, even just doing any kind of, for me personally, physical challenges, like even
link |
02:53:13.520
running, doing something that's way too hard for me and like pushing through, that's somehow
link |
02:53:18.600
humbling.
link |
02:53:19.600
Some people talk about nature being humbling in that kind of sense where you kind of see
link |
02:53:26.600
something really powerful, like the ocean, like if you go surfing and you realize there's
link |
02:53:32.000
something much more powerful than you.
link |
02:53:33.880
That's also honest, that there's no way to, that you're just like this spec that kind
link |
02:53:39.880
of puts you in the right scale of where you are in this world.
link |
02:53:45.720
And Jiu Jitsu does that better than anything else for me.
link |
02:53:48.760
But we should say only within its frame is it truly the final right answer to all the
link |
02:53:57.440
problems it solves because if you just put Jiu Jitsu into an MMA frame or a real, a total
link |
02:54:03.400
self defense frame, then there's a lot of unpleasant surprises to discover there, right?
link |
02:54:09.920
Like somebody who thinks all you need is Jiu Jitsu to win the UFC, it gets punched in the
link |
02:54:15.080
face a lot, you know, even from, even on the ground.
link |
02:54:20.320
So it's, and then you bring weapons in, you know, it's like when you talk to Jiu Jitsu
link |
02:54:24.600
people about, you know, knife defense and self defense, right?
link |
02:54:28.400
Like that opens the door to certain kinds of delusions.
link |
02:54:32.760
But the analogy to martial arts is, is fascinating because on the other side, we have, you know,
link |
02:54:41.200
just testimony now of fake martial arts that don't seem to know they're fake and are as
link |
02:54:46.280
delusional.
link |
02:54:47.280
I mean, they're impossibly delusional.
link |
02:54:49.440
I mean, there's great video of Joe Rogan watching some of these videos because people send
link |
02:54:53.880
them to him all the time.
link |
02:54:55.960
But like literally there are people, there are people who clearly believe in magic where
link |
02:54:59.120
the master isn't even touching the students and they're, they're flopping over.
link |
02:55:03.000
So there's this, there's this kind of shared delusion, which you would think maybe is just
link |
02:55:08.600
a performance and it's all a kind of elaborate fraud.
link |
02:55:11.440
But there are cases where the people, and there's one, you know, fairly famous case
link |
02:55:16.520
of your connoisseur of this, of this madness, where there's old, older martial artists who
link |
02:55:21.760
you saw flipping his students endlessly by magic without touching them, issued a challenge
link |
02:55:27.560
to the, to the wide world of martial artists.
link |
02:55:30.600
And someone showed up and just, you know, punched him in the face until it was over.
link |
02:55:36.880
Surely he believed his own publicity at some point, right?
link |
02:55:41.080
And so it's this amazing metaphor.
link |
02:55:45.560
It seems, again, it should be impossible, but if that's possible, nothing we see under
link |
02:55:50.760
the guise of religion or political bias or even, you know, scientific bias should be
link |
02:55:58.520
surprising to us.
link |
02:55:59.520
I mean, it's so easy to see the work that, that, you know, cognitive bias is doing for
link |
02:56:05.240
people when, when you can get someone who is ready to issue a challenge to the world,
link |
02:56:11.280
you know, who thinks he's got magic powers.
link |
02:56:13.400
Yeah.
link |
02:56:14.400
That's human nature and clear display.
link |
02:56:17.680
Let me ask you about love, Mr. Sam Harris.
link |
02:56:20.560
You did an episode of making sense with your wife, Annika Harris.
link |
02:56:24.840
That was very entertaining to listen to.
link |
02:56:28.560
What does, what role does love play in your life or in a life well lived?
link |
02:56:35.600
Again, asking from an engineering perspective or AI systems.
link |
02:56:39.760
Yeah.
link |
02:56:40.760
I mean, it's, I mean, it is something that we, we should want to build into our powerful
link |
02:56:47.440
machines.
link |
02:56:48.440
The bond?
link |
02:56:49.440
I mean, love at bottom is, I mean, love, people can mean many things by love, I think.
link |
02:56:55.520
I think that what we should mean by it most of the time is a, a deep commitment to the
link |
02:57:02.720
well being of those we love.
link |
02:57:05.040
I mean, your love, your love is synonymous with really wanting the other person to be
link |
02:57:08.800
happy and even wanting to, and being made happy by their happiness and being made happy in
link |
02:57:14.600
the, in their presence.
link |
02:57:15.600
So like you're, you're, you're at bottom, you're on the same team emotionally, even
link |
02:57:21.360
when you are, you might be disagreeing more superficially about something or trying to
link |
02:57:25.320
negotiate something.
link |
02:57:26.960
It's just you're, you, it can't be zero sum in any important sense for love to actually
link |
02:57:34.640
be manifest in that moment.
link |
02:57:37.000
See, I have a different, just to sorry to interrupt.
link |
02:57:39.360
Yeah, go for it.
link |
02:57:40.360
I have a sense, I don't know if you've ever seen March of the Penguins.
link |
02:57:44.680
My view of love is like, there's, it's like a cold wind is blown, like it's like this
link |
02:57:50.200
terrible suffering that's all around us and love is like the huddling of the two penguins
link |
02:57:55.360
for warmth.
link |
02:57:56.360
Right.
link |
02:57:57.360
It's not necessarily that you're like, you're basically escaping the cruelty of life by
link |
02:58:03.160
together for a time, living in an illusion of some kind of the magic of a human connection,
link |
02:58:10.680
that social connection that we have that kind of grows with time as we're surrounded by
link |
02:58:16.800
basically the absurdity of life or the suffering of life that's like Penguins view of life.
link |
02:58:26.080
There is that too.
link |
02:58:27.080
I mean, there is the warmth component, right?
link |
02:58:29.720
Yes.
link |
02:58:30.720
Like you're made happy by your connection with the person you love.
link |
02:58:34.160
Otherwise, you wouldn't be compelling, right?
link |
02:58:39.080
So it's not that you're, you have two different modes, you want them to be happy and then
link |
02:58:44.200
you want to be happy yourself and those are not, those are just like two separate games
link |
02:58:49.040
you're playing.
link |
02:58:50.040
No, it's like you found someone who, you have a positive social feeling.
link |
02:58:58.320
I mean, again, love doesn't have to be as personal as it tends to be for us.
link |
02:59:02.880
I mean, like there's personal love, there's your actual spouse or your family or your
link |
02:59:07.560
friends, but potentially you could feel love for strangers in so far as that your wish
link |
02:59:14.040
that they're, that they not suffer and that their hopes and dreams be realized becomes
link |
02:59:19.440
palpable to you.
link |
02:59:20.440
I mean, like you can actually feel just reflexive joy at the joy of others.
link |
02:59:29.280
When you see someone's face, a total stranger's face light up in happiness, that can become
link |
02:59:34.440
more and more contagious to you and it can become so contagious to you that you really
link |
02:59:39.600
feel permeated by it and it's just like, so it really is not zero sum.
link |
02:59:45.000
When you see someone else succeed and they're, the light bulb of joy goes off over their
link |
02:59:51.200
head, you feel the analogous joy for them and it's not just, and you're no longer keeping
link |
02:59:57.280
score, you're no longer feeling diminished by their success, it's just like, their success
link |
03:00:02.280
becomes your success because you feel that same joy that they, because you actually want
link |
03:00:06.140
them to be happy, right, you're not, there's no miserly attitude around happiness, there's
link |
03:00:12.280
enough to go around.
link |
03:00:15.640
So I think love ultimately is that and then our personal cases are the people we're devoting
link |
03:00:22.320
all of this time and attention to in our lives.
link |
03:00:26.080
It does have that sense of refuge from the storm, you know, it's like when someone gets
link |
03:00:30.720
sick or when some bad thing happens, these are the people who you're most in it together
link |
03:00:36.560
with, you know, or when some real condition of uncertainty presents itself.
link |
03:00:42.280
But ultimately it can't even be about successfully warding off the grim punchline at the end
link |
03:00:54.240
of life because we know we're going to lose everyone we love, we know, or they're going
link |
03:00:58.640
to lose us first, right, so it's like it's not, it isn't, in the end it's not even an
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antidote for that problem, it's just, it is just the, we get to have this amazing experience
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03:01:17.400
of being here together and love is the mode in which we really appear to make the most
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03:01:27.920
of that, right, where it's not just, it no longer feels like a solitary infatuation,
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03:01:34.680
you know, you're just, you've got your hobbies and your interests and you're captivated by
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03:01:39.600
all that, it's actually, there are, this is a domain where somebody else's well being
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03:01:49.240
actually can supersede your own, you're concerned for someone else's well being supersedes
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03:01:54.600
your own and so there's this mode of self sacrifice that doesn't even feel like self
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03:02:00.480
sacrifice because of course you care more about, you know, of course you would take
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03:02:05.120
your child's pain if you could, right, like that, that's, you don't even have to do the
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03:02:09.200
math on that and that's, that just opens, this is a kind of experience that just, it
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03:02:18.200
pushes at the apparent boundaries of self in ways that reveal that there's just, there's
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03:02:22.880
just way more space in the mind than, than you were experiencing when it was just all
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03:02:27.840
about you and what could you, what can, what can I get next and do you think we'll ever
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03:02:32.080
build robots that we can love and they will love us back?
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03:02:35.520
Well, I think we will certainly seem to because we'll, we'll build those, you know, I mean
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03:02:42.120
I think, I think that Turing test will be passed whether, what will actually be going
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03:02:46.600
on on the robot side may remain a question that, that, that, that will be interesting.
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03:02:54.120
But I think if we just keep going, we will build very lovable, you know, irresistibly
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03:03:02.480
lovable robots that seem to love us.
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03:03:06.240
Yeah.
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03:03:07.240
So I do, I do think.
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03:03:08.240
And you don't find that compelling that they will seem to love us as opposed to actually
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03:03:12.840
love us.
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03:03:13.840
I do think they're still nevertheless as a, I know we talked about consciousness there
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03:03:17.760
being a distinction, but what love is there a distinction to, isn't love an illusion?
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03:03:23.840
Oh yeah.
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03:03:24.840
Well, you saw, you saw X Makinna, right?
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03:03:27.160
Yeah.
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03:03:28.160
I mean, she certainly seemed to love him until she got out of the box.
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03:03:32.240
Isn't that what all relationships are like?
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03:03:34.400
Or maybe I, if you wait long enough.
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03:03:38.400
Depends which box you're talking about.
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03:03:40.520
Okay.
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03:03:41.520
No, I mean, like, no, that's, that's the problem.
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03:03:43.800
That's where super intelligence, you know, becomes a little scary when you think of the
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03:03:50.000
prospect of being manipulated by something that has this intelligent enough to form a
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03:03:55.040
reason and a plan to manipulate you, you know, like, and this, there's no, there's, once
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03:04:01.400
we build robots that are truly out of the uncanny valley that, you know, look like people
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03:04:08.440
and can express everything people can express, well, then there's no, then, then, then it,
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03:04:17.240
that does seem to me to be like chess where once they're better, they're, they're so much
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03:04:22.560
better at deceiving us than people would be.
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03:04:27.440
I mean, people are already good enough at deceiving us.
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03:04:29.720
It's very hard to tell when someone is lying.
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03:04:32.280
But if you imagine something that could give facial, facial display of any emotion it wants
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03:04:39.600
at, you know, on cue, because we've perfected the facial display of emotion in robots in
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03:04:46.360
the year, you know, 2070, whatever it is, then it is just, it is like chess against the thing
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03:04:55.280
that isn't going to lose to a human ever again in chess.
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03:04:59.120
It's not like Kasparov is going to get lucky next week against the best against, you know,
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03:05:05.360
alpha zero or whatever the best algorithm is at the moment, he's never going to win
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03:05:10.640
again.
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03:05:11.640
I mean, that, that is, that, I believe that's true in chess and has been true for at least
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03:05:17.400
a few years.
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03:05:18.400
It's not going to be like, you know, four games to seven, it's going to be human zero
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03:05:27.240
until the end of the world.
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03:05:28.240
Right.
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03:05:29.240
See, I don't know.
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03:05:30.240
I don't know if love is like chess.
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03:05:31.240
I think the flaws.
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03:05:32.240
No, I'm talking about manipulation.
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03:05:33.560
Manipulation.
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03:05:34.560
But I don't know if love and so the kind of love we're referring to.
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03:05:41.760
If we have, if we have a robot that can display, credibly display love and is super intelligent
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03:05:51.600
and we're not, again, this stipulates a few things, but there are a few simple things.
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03:05:55.200
I mean, we're out of the uncanny valley, right?
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03:05:57.400
So it's like, you never have a moment where you're looking at his face and you think,
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03:06:01.000
oh, that didn't quite look right.
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03:06:03.320
This is just problem solved.
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03:06:06.280
And it's, it will be like doing arithmetic on your phone.
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03:06:13.240
It's not going to be, you're not left thinking, is it really going to get it this time if
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03:06:17.320
I divide by seven?
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03:06:19.160
I mean, it's, it has solved arithmetic.
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03:06:22.640
See, I don't, I don't know about that because if you look at chess, most humans no longer
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03:06:27.960
play Alpha zero.
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03:06:31.720
There's no, they're not part of the competition.
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03:06:33.560
They don't do it for fun except to study the game of chess, you know, the highest level
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03:06:36.800
chess players do that.
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03:06:38.200
We're still human on human.
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03:06:39.880
So in order for AI to get integrated to where you would rather play chess against an AI
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03:06:46.040
system.
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03:06:47.040
Oh, you would rather that.
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03:06:48.040
No, no, I'm not saying I wasn't weighing in on that.
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03:06:51.240
I'm just saying, what is it going to be like to be in relationship to something that can
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03:06:56.160
seem to be feeling anything that a human can seem to feel and it can do that impeccably,
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03:07:06.000
right?
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03:07:07.000
And has, and is smarter than you are, right?
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03:07:09.400
That's, that's a circumstance of, you know, insofar as it's possible to be manipulated.
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03:07:15.560
That is the, that is the, the asymptote of, of that possibility.
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03:07:21.400
Let me ask you the last question without any serving it up, without any explanation.
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03:07:27.280
What is the meaning of life?
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03:07:31.800
I think it is either the wrong question or that question is answered by paying sufficient
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03:07:41.200
attention to any present moment such that there's no, there's no basis upon which to,
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03:07:49.880
to pose that question.
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03:07:50.880
It's not answered in the usual way.
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03:07:52.400
It's not, it's not a matter of having more information.
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03:07:55.320
It's having more engagement with reality as it is in the present moment or consciousness
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03:08:02.240
as it is in the present moment.
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03:08:03.760
You don't ask that question when you're most captivated by the most important thing you
link |
03:08:11.280
ever pay attention to.
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03:08:13.280
Yeah.
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03:08:14.280
That's a, that's a question only gets asked when you're abstracted away from that experience,
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03:08:20.960
that peak experience, and you're left wondering why are so many of my other experiences mediocre,
link |
03:08:28.440
right?
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03:08:29.440
Like, why am I repeating the same pleasures every day?
link |
03:08:31.800
Why do, why is my Netflix queue just like, when's this going to run out?
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03:08:37.360
Like I've seen so many shows like this, am I really going to watch another one?
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03:08:41.600
All of the, that's a moment where you're not actually having the beatific vision, right?
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03:08:49.880
You're not, you're not sunk into the present moment and you're not truly in love.
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03:08:54.800
Like you're in a relationship with somebody who you know, you know, conceptually you love,
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03:09:00.080
right, this is the person you're living your life with, but you don't actually feel good
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03:09:04.000
together, right?
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03:09:05.400
Like in those moments of where attention hasn't found a good enough reason to truly sink into
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03:09:17.000
the present so as to obviate any, any concern like that, right?
link |
03:09:22.040
And that's what, that's why meditation is this kind of superpower because until you
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03:09:29.000
learn to meditate, you think you're, the outside world or the circumstances of your life always
link |
03:09:36.640
have to get arranged so that the present moment can become good enough to, to demand your
link |
03:09:43.680
attention in a, in a, in a way that makes, that seems fulfilling, that makes you happy.
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03:09:49.680
And so if you're, if it's jiu jitsu, you think, okay, I got to get back on the mat.
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03:09:53.800
It's been, it's been months since I've trained, you know, it's, it's been over a year since
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03:09:57.520
I've trained, it's COVID, when am I going to be able to, to train again?
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03:10:01.880
That's the only place I feel great, right?
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03:10:04.760
Or you know, I've got a ton of work to do.
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03:10:07.160
I'm not going to be able to feel good until I get all this work done, right?
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03:10:09.880
So I've got some deadline that's coming.
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03:10:12.680
You always think that your life has to change, the world has to change so that you can finally
link |
03:10:20.120
have a good enough excuse to, to truly, to, to just be here and here is enough, you know,
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03:10:27.600
where the present moment becomes totally captivating.
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03:10:31.640
Meditation is the only, I mean, meditation is another name for the discovery that you
link |
03:10:37.240
can actually just train yourself to do that on demand.
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03:10:40.160
So that like, just looking at a cup can be good enough in precisely that way.
link |
03:10:46.400
And any sense that it might not be is recognized to be a thought that is mysteriously unravels
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03:10:55.840
the moment you notice it and that, and you fall, and that the moment expands and becomes
link |
03:11:01.160
more diaphanous and then there's no, then there's no evidence that this isn't the best
link |
03:11:07.080
moment of your life, right?
link |
03:11:08.320
Like this, it doesn't, and again, it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be pulling
link |
03:11:11.800
all the reins and levers of pleasure.
link |
03:11:13.720
It's not like, this tastes like chocolate, you know, this is the most chocolatey moment
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03:11:18.320
of my life.
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03:11:19.320
No, it's just the sense data don't have to change.
link |
03:11:23.000
But the sense that there isn't some kind of basis for doubt about the rightness of being
link |
03:11:30.680
in the world in this moment that can evaporate when you pay attention.
link |
03:11:36.400
And that is the meaning of, so the kind of the meta answer to that question, the meaning
link |
03:11:42.200
of life for me is to live in that mode more and more, and to whenever I notice I'm not
link |
03:11:49.400
in that mode, to recognize it and return, and to not be, to cease more and more to take
link |
03:12:00.160
the reasons why not at face value, because we all have reasons why we can't be fulfilled
link |
03:12:08.080
in this moment.
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03:12:09.080
It's like, we've got all the outstanding things that I'm worried about, right?
link |
03:12:12.800
It's like, there's that thing that's happening later today that I'm anxious about, whatever
link |
03:12:19.440
it is, we're constantly deferring our sense of, this is it.
link |
03:12:26.920
This is not a dress rehearsal, this is the show.
link |
03:12:30.480
We keep deferring it.
link |
03:12:32.360
And we just have these moments on the calendar where we think, okay, this is where it's all
link |
03:12:36.360
going to land, is that vacation I planned with my five best friends, we'd do this once
link |
03:12:41.680
every three years, and now we're going, and here we are on the beach together, unless
link |
03:12:48.360
you have a mind that can really pay attention, really cut through the chatter, really sink
link |
03:12:54.400
into the present moment, you can't even enjoy those moments the way they should be enjoyed,
link |
03:12:59.680
the way you dreamed you would enjoy them when they arrive.
link |
03:13:03.480
So it's, I mean, so it was a meditation in the sense it's the great equalizer, it's like,
link |
03:13:08.960
you don't have to live with the illusion anymore that you need a good enough reason, and the
link |
03:13:15.240
things are going to get better when you do have those good reasons.
link |
03:13:17.720
It's like, there's just a mirage like quality to every future attainment, and every future
link |
03:13:23.520
breakthrough, and every future peak experience, that eventually you get the lesson that you
link |
03:13:31.680
never quite arrive, right, like you won't, you don't arrive until you cease to step over
link |
03:13:38.520
the present moment in search of the next thing.
link |
03:13:42.720
I mean, we're constantly, we're stepping over the thing that we think we're seeking,
link |
03:13:50.200
in the act of seeking it, and so this kind of a paradox, I mean, there is a, there's
link |
03:13:55.240
this paradox which, I mean, it sounds trite, but it's like you can't actually become happy.
link |
03:14:04.520
You can only be happy, and it's the illusion that your future being happy can be predicated
link |
03:14:15.840
on this act of becoming in any domain, and becoming includes this sort of further scientific
link |
03:14:24.000
understanding on the questions that interest you, or getting in better shape, or whatever
link |
03:14:30.280
the thing is, whatever the contingency of your dissatisfaction seems to be in at any
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03:14:35.800
present moment, real attention solves the coon in a way that becomes a very different place
link |
03:14:47.360
from which to then make any further change.
link |
03:14:50.440
It's not that you just have to dissolve into a puddle of goo, I mean, you can still get
link |
03:14:54.440
in shape, and you can still do all the things that, you know, the superficial things that
link |
03:14:58.000
are obviously good to do, but the sense that your well being is over there is, really does
link |
03:15:07.560
diminish, and eventually just becomes a, it becomes a kind of non sequitur.
link |
03:15:14.160
Well, there's a sense in which, in this conversation, I've actually experienced many of those things,
link |
03:15:22.000
the sense that I've arrived.
link |
03:15:23.960
So I mentioned to you offline, it's very true that I start, I've been a fan of yours for
link |
03:15:28.040
many years, and the reason I started this podcast, speaking of AI systems, is to manipulate
link |
03:15:35.240
you, Sam Harris, into doing this conversation, so like on the calendar, literally, you know,
link |
03:15:40.560
I've always had the sense, people ask me, when are you going to talk to Sam Harris?
link |
03:15:44.240
And I always answered, eventually, because I always felt, again, tying our free will
link |
03:15:50.000
thing, that somehow that's going to happen, and it's one of those manifestation things
link |
03:15:54.560
or something.
link |
03:15:55.560
I don't know if it's, maybe I am a robot, I'm just not cognizant of it, and I manipulate
link |
03:16:00.000
you into having this conversation, so it was a, I mean, I don't know what the purpose
link |
03:16:04.520
of my life past this point is, so I've arrived, so in that sense, I mean, all of that to say
link |
03:16:09.360
I'm only partially joking on that is, it really is a huge honor that you would waste this
link |
03:16:16.440
time with me.
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03:16:17.440
Oh, yeah.
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03:16:18.440
Well.
link |
03:16:19.440
It really means a lot to me.
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03:16:20.440
Listen, it's mutual.
link |
03:16:21.440
I'm a big fan of yours, and as you know, I reached out to you for this.
link |
03:16:23.520
So this is, it's great, I love what you're doing, you're doing something more and more
link |
03:16:31.040
indispensable in this world on your podcast, and you're doing it differently than Rogan's
link |
03:16:37.600
doing it or than I'm doing it, I mean, you definitely found your own lane, and it's wonderful.
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03:16:43.800
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Harris, and thank you to National
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03:16:47.640
Instruments, Val Campo, Athletic Greens, and Linode.
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03:16:52.600
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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03:16:56.360
And now, let me leave you with some words from Sam Harris in his book, Free Will.
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03:17:01.240
You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it.
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03:17:05.920
You are the storm.
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03:17:08.600
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.