The following is a conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger, a founding member of the

Consilience Project that is aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue.

He is interested in understanding how we humans can be the best version of ourselves as individuals

and as collectives at all scales.

Quick mention of our sponsors, Ground News, NetSuite, Four Sigmatic, Magic Spoon, and

BetterHelp.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that I got a chance to talk to Daniel on and off the mic for a

couple of days.

We took a long walk the day before our conversation.

I really enjoyed meeting him, just on a basic human level.

We talked about the world around us with words that carried hope for us individual ants actually

contributing something of value to the colony.

These conversations are the reasons I love human beings, our insatiable striving to lessen

the suffering in the world.

But more than that, there's a simple magic to two strangers meeting for the first time

and sharing ideas, becoming fast friends, and creating something that is far greater

than the sum of our parts.

I've gotten to experience some of that same magic here in Austin with a few new friends

and in random bars in my travels across this country.

Where a conversation leaves me with a big stupid smile on my face and a new appreciation

of this too short, too beautiful life.

This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger.

If aliens were observing Earth through the entire history, just watching us, and we're

tasked with summarizing what happened until now, what do you think they would say?

What do you think they would write up in that summary?

Like it has to be pretty short, less than a page.

Like in Hitchhiker's Guide, there's I think like a paragraph or a couple sentences.

How would you summarize, sorry, how would the aliens summarize, do you think, all of

human civilization?

My first thoughts take more than a page.

They'd probably distill it.

Because if they watched, well, I mean, first, I have no idea if their senses are even attuned

to similar stuff to what our senses are attuned to, or what the nature of their consciousness

is like relative to ours.

So let's assume that they're kind of like us, just technologically more advanced to

get here from wherever they are.

That's the first kind of constraint on the thought experiment.

And then if they've watched throughout all of history, they saw the burning of Alexandria.

They saw that 2,000 years ago in Greece, we were producing things like clocks, the antikytheria

mechanism, and then that technology got lost.

They saw that there wasn't just a steady dialectic of progress.

So every once in a while, there's a giant fire that destroys a lot of things.

There's a giant commotion that destroys a lot of things.

Yeah, and it's usually self induced.

They would have seen that.

And so as they're looking at us now, as we move past the nuclear weapons age into the

full globalization, anthropocene, exponential tech age, still making our decisions relatively

similarly to how we did in the stone age as far as rivalry game theory type stuff, I think

they would think that this is probably most likely one of the planets that is not going

to make it to being intergalactic because we blow ourselves up in the technological

adolescence.

And if we are going to, we're going to need some major progress rapidly in the social

technologies that can guide and bind and direct the physical technologies so that we are safe

vessels for the amount of power we're getting.

Actually, Hitchhiker's Guide has an estimation about how much of a risk this particular thing

poses to the rest of the galaxy.

And I think, I forget what it was, I think it was medium or low.

So their estimation was, would be that this species of ant like creatures is not going

to survive long.

There's ups and downs in terms of technological innovation.

The fundamental nature of their behavior from a game theory perspective hasn't really changed.

They have not learned in any fundamental way how to control and properly incentivize or

properly do the mechanism design of games to ensure long term survival.

And then they move on to another planet.

Do you think there is, in a slightly more serious question, do you think there's some

number or perhaps a very, very large number of intelligent alien civilizations out there?

Yes, would be hard to think otherwise.

I know, I think Bostrom had a new article not that long ago on why that might not be

the case, that the Drake equation might not be the kind of end story on it.

But when I look at the total number of Kepler planets just that we're aware of just galactically

and also like when those life forms were discovered in Mono Lake that didn't have the same six

primary atoms, I think it had arsenic replacing phosphorus as one of the primary aspects of

its energy metabolism, we get to think about that the building blocks might be more different.

So the physical constraints even that the planets have to have might be more different.

It seems really unlikely not to mention interesting things that we've observed that are still

unexplained.

As you had guests on your show discussing Tic Tac and all the ones that have visited.

Yeah.

Well, let's dive right into that.

What do you make sense of the rich human psychology of there being hundreds of thousands, probably

millions of witnesses of UFOs of different kinds on Earth, most of which I presume are

conjured up by the human mind through the perception system.

Some number might be true, some number might be reflective of actual physical objects,

whether it's you know, drones or testing military technology that secret or otherworldly technology.

What do you make sense of all of that, because it's gained quite a bit of popularity recently.

There's some sense in which that's us humans being hopeful and dreaming of otherworldly

creatures as a way to escape the dreariness of our of the human condition.

But in another sense, it could be it really could be something truly exciting that science

should turn its eye towards.

So what do you where do you place it?

Speaking of turning eye towards this is one of those super fascinating, actually super

consequential possibly topics that I wish I had more time to study and just haven't

allocated so I don't have firm beliefs on this because I haven't got to study it as

much as I want.

So what I'm going to say comes from a superficial assessment.

While we know there are plenty of things that people thought of as UFO sightings that we

can fully write off, we have other better explanations for them.

What we're interested in is the ones that we don't have better explanations for and

then not just immediately jumping to a theory of what it is, but holding it as unidentified

and being being curious and earnest.

I think the the tic tac one is quite interesting and made it in major media recently.

But I don't know if you ever saw the Disclosure Project, a guy named Steven Greer organized

a bunch of mostly US military and some commercial flight people who had direct observation and

classified information disclosing it at a CNN briefing.

And so you saw high ranking generals, admirals, fighter pilots all describing things that

they saw on radar with their own eyes or cameras, and also describing some phenomena that had

some consistency across different people.

And I find this interesting enough that I think it would be silly to just dismiss it.

And specifically, we can ask the question, how much of it is natural phenomena, ball

lightning or something like that?

And this is why I'm more interested in what fighter pilots and astronauts and people who

are trained in being able to identify flying objects and atmospheric phenomena have to

say about it.

I think the thing then you could say, well, are they more advanced military craft?

Is it some kind of, you know, human craft?

The interesting thing that a number of them describe is something that's kind of like

right angles at speed, or not right angles, acute angles at speed, but something that

looks like a different relationship to inertia than physics makes sense for us.

I don't think that there are any human technologies that are doing that even in really deep underground

black projects.

Now one could say, okay, well, could it be a hologram?

Or would it show up on radar if radar is also seeing it?

And so I don't know.

I think there's enough, I mean, and for that to be a massive coordinated psyop, is it as

interesting and ridiculous in a way as the idea that it's UFOs from some extra planetary

source?

So it's up there on the interesting topics.

To me there's, if it is at all alien technology, it is the dumbest version of alien technology.

It's so far away, it's like the old, old crappy VHS tapes of alien technology.

These are like crappy drones that just floated or even like space to the level of like space

junk because it is so close to our human technology.

We talk about it moves in ways that's unlike what we understand about physics, but it still

has very similar kind of geometric notions and something that we humans can perceive

with our eyes, all those kinds of things.

I feel like alien technology most likely would be something that we would not be able to

perceive.

Not because they're hiding, but because it's so far advanced that it would be beyond the

cognitive capabilities of us humans.

Just as you were saying, as per your answer for alien summarizing Earth, the starting

assumption is they have similar perception systems, they have similar cognitive capabilities,

and that very well may not be the case.

Let me ask you about staying in aliens for just a little longer because I think it's

a good transition in talking about governments and human societies.

Do you think if a US government or any government was in possession of an alien spacecraft or

of information related to alien spacecraft, they would have the capacity, structurally

would they have the processes, would they be able to communicate that to the public

effectively or would they keep it secret in a room and do nothing with it, both to try

to preserve military secrets, but also because of the incompetence that's inherent to bureaucracies

or either?

Well, we can certainly see when certain things become declassified 25 or 50 years later that

there were things that the public might have wanted to know that were kept secret for a

very long time for reasons of at least supposedly national security, which is also a nice source

of plausible deniability for people covering their ass for doing things that would be problematic

and other purposes.

There are, there's a scientist at Stanford who supposedly got some material that was

recovered from Area 51 type area, did analysis on it using, I believe, electron microscopy

and a couple other methods and came to the idea that it was a nanotech alloy that was

something we didn't currently have the ability to do, was not naturally occurring.

So there, I've heard some things and again, like I said, I'm not going to stand behind

any of these because I haven't done the level of study to have high confidence.

I think what you said also about would it be super low tech alien craft, like would

they necessarily move their atoms around in space or might they do something more interesting

than that, might they be able to have a different relationship to the concept of space or information

or consciousness or one of the things that the craft supposedly do is not only accelerate

and turn in a way that looks non inertial, but also disappear.

So there's a question as to like the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive and it

could be possible to, some people run a hypothesis that they create intentional amounts of exposure

as an invitation of a particular kind, who knows, interesting field.

We tend to assume like SETI that's listening out for aliens out there, I've just been

recently reading more and more about gravitational waves and you have orbiting black holes that

orbit each other, they generate ripples in space time on my, for fun at night when I

lay in bed, I think about what it would be like to ride those waves when they, not the

low magnitude they are when they reach earth, but get closer to the black holes because

it will basically be shrinking and expanding us in all dimensions, including time.

So it's actually ripples through space time that they generate.

Why is it that you couldn't use that, it travels the speed of light, travels at a speed which

is a very weird thing to say when you're morphing space time, you could argue it's faster than

the speed of light.

So if you're able to communicate by, to summon enough energy to generate black holes and

to orbit them, to force them to orbit each other, why not travel as the ripples in space

time, whatever the hell that means, somehow combined with wormholes.

So if you're able to communicate through, like we don't think of gravitational waves

as something you can communicate with because the radio will have to be a very large size

and very dense, but perhaps that's it, perhaps that's one way to communicate, it's a very

effective way.

And that would explain, like we wouldn't even be able to make sense of that, of the physics

that results in an alien species that's able to control gravity at that scale.

I think you just jumped up the Kardashev scale so far that you're not just harnessing the

power of a star, but harnessing the power of mutually rotating black holes.

That's way above my physics pay grade to think about including even non rotating black hole

versions of transwarp travel.

I think, you know, you can talk with Eric more about that, I think he has better ideas

on it than I do.

My hope for the future of humanity mostly does not rest in the near term on our ability

to get to other habitable planets in time.

And even more than that, in the list of possible solutions of how to improve human civilization,

orbiting black holes is not on the first page for you.

Not on the first page.

Okay.

I bet you did not expect us to start this conversation here, but I'm glad the places

it went.

I am excited on a much smaller scale of Mars, Europa, Titan, Venus, potentially having very

like bacteria like life forms, just on a small human level, it's a little bit scary, but

mostly really exciting that there might be life elsewhere in the volcanoes and the oceans

all around us, teaming, having little societies and whether there's properties about that

kind of life that's somehow different than ours.

I don't know what would be more exciting if those colonies of single cell type organisms,

what would be more exciting if they're different or they're the same?

If they're the same, that means through the rest of the universe, there's life forms like

us, something like us everywhere.

If they're different, that's also really exciting because there's life forms everywhere that

are not like us.

That's a little bit scary.

I don't know what's scarier actually.

I think both scary and exciting no matter what, right?

The idea that they could be very different is philosophically very interesting for us

to open our aperture on what life and consciousness and self replicating possibilities could look

like.

The question on are they different or the same, obviously there's lots of life here

that is the same in some ways and different in other ways.

When you take the thing that we call an invasive species is something that's still pretty the

same hydrocarbon based thing, but co evolved with co selective pressures in a certain environment,

we move it to another environment, it might be devastating to that whole ecosystem because

it's just different enough that it messes up the self stabilizing dynamics of that ecosystem.

So the question of are they, would they be different in ways where we could still figure

out a way to inhabit a biosphere together or fundamentally not fundamentally the nature

of how they operate and the nature of how we operate would be incommensurable is a deep

question.

Well, we offline talked about mimetic theory, right?

It seems like if there were sufficiently different where we would not even, we can coexist on

different planes, it seems like a good thing.

If we're close enough together to where we'd be competing, then it's, you're getting into

the world of viruses and pathogens and all those kinds of things to where we would, one

of us would die off quickly through basically mass murder without even accidentally.

If we just had a self replicating single celled kind of creature that happened to not work

well for the hydrocarbon life that was here that got introduced because he either output

something that was toxic or utilized up the same resource too quickly and it just replicated

faster and mutated faster, that it wouldn't be a mimetic theory, conflict theory kind

of harm.

It would just be a Von Neumann machine, a self replicating machine that was fundamentally

incompatible with these kinds of self replicating systems with faster OODA loops.

For one final time, putting your alien God hat on and you look at human civilization,

do you think about the 7.8 billion people on earth as individual little creatures, individual

little organisms, or do you think of us as one organism with a collective intelligence?

What's the proper framework through which to analyze it again as an alien?

So that I know where you're coming from, would you have asked the question the same way before

the industrial revolution, before the agricultural revolution when there were half a billion

people and no telecommunications connecting them?

I would indeed ask the question the same way, but I would be less confident about your conclusions.

It would be an actually more interesting way to ask the question at that time, but I was

nevertheless asked it the same way.

Yes.

Well, let's go back further and smaller than rather than just a single human or the entire

human species, let's look at a relatively isolated tribe.

In the relatively isolated, probably sub Dunbar number, sub 150 people tribe, do I look at

that as one entity where evolution is selecting for based on group selection or do I think

of it as 150 individuals that are interacting in some way?

Well, could those individuals exist without the group?

No.

The evolutionary adaptiveness of humans was involved critically group selection and individual

humans alone trying to figure out stone tools and protection and whatever aren't what was

selected for.

And so I think the or is the wrong frame.

I think it's individuals are affecting the group that they're a part of.

They're also dependent upon and being affected by the group that they're part of.

And so this now starts to get deep into political theories also, which is theories that orient

towards the collective at different scales, whether a tribal scale or an empire or a nation

state or something, and ones that orient towards the individual liberalism and stuff like that.

And I think there's very obvious failure modes on both sides.

And so the relationship between them is more interesting to me than either of them.

The relationship between the individual and the collective and the question around how

to have a virtuous process between those.

So a good social system would be one where the organism of the individual and the organism

of the group of individuals is they're both synergistic to each other.

So what is best for the individuals and what's best for the whole is aligned.

But there is nevertheless an individual.

They're not, it's a matter of degrees, I suppose, but what defines a human more, the social

network within which they've been brought up, through which they've developed their

intelligence or is it their own sovereign individual self?

What's your intuition of how much, not just for evolutionary survival, but as intellectual

beings, how much do we need others for our development?

Yeah.

I think we have a weird sense of this today relative to most previous periods of sapient

history.

I think the vast majority of sapient history is tribal, like depending upon your early

human model, 200,000 or 300,000 years of homo sapiens and little tribes, where they depended

upon that tribe for survival and excommunication from the tribe was fatal.

I think they, and our whole evolutionary genetic history is in that environment and the amount

of time we've been out of it is relatively so tiny.

And then we still depended upon extended families and local communities more and the big kind

of giant market complex where I can provide something to the market to get money, to be

able to get other things from the market where it seems like I don't need anyone.

It's almost like disintermediating our sense of need, even though you're in my ability

to talk to each other using these mics and the phones that we coordinated on took millions

of people over six continents to be able to run the supply chains that made all the stuff

that we depend on, but we don't notice that we depend upon them.

They all seem fungible.

If you take a baby, obviously that you didn't even get to a baby without a mom.

Was it dependent?

Are we dependent upon each other, right, without two parents at minimum and they depended upon

other people.

But if we take that baby and we put it out in the wild, it obviously dies.

So if we let it grow up for a little while, the minimum amount of time where it starts

to have some autonomy and then we put it out in the wild, and this has happened a few times,

it doesn't learn language and it doesn't learn the small motor articulation that we learn.

It doesn't learn the type of consciousness that we end up having that is socialized.

So I think we take for granted how much conditioning affects us.

Is it possible that it affects basically 99.9 or maybe the whole thing?

The whole thing is the connection between us humans and that we're no better than apes

without our human connections.

Because thinking of it that way forces us to think very differently about human society

and how to progress forward if the connections are fundamental.

I just have to object to the no better than apes, because better here I think you mean

a specific thing, which means have capacities that are fundamentally different than.

I think apes also depend upon troops.

And I think the idea of humans as better than nature in some kind of ethical sense ends

up having heaps of problems.

We'll table that.

We can come back to it.

But when we say what is unique about Homo sapien capacity relative to the other animals

we currently inhabit the biosphere with, and I'm saying it that way because there were

other early hominids that had some of these capacities, we believe.

Our tool creation and our language creation and our coordination are all kind of the results

of a certain type of capacity for abstraction.

And other animals will use tools, but they don't evolve the tools they use.

They keep using the same types of tools that they basically can find.

So a chimp will notice that a rock can cut a vine that it wants to, and it'll even notice

that a sharper rock will cut it better.

And experientially it'll use the sharper rock.

And if you even give it a knife, it'll probably use the knife because it's experiencing the

effectiveness.

But it doesn't make stone tools because that requires understanding why one is sharper

than the other.

What is the abstract principle called sharpness to then be able to invent a sharper thing?

That same abstraction makes language and the ability for abstract representation, which

makes the ability to coordinate in a more advanced set of ways.

So I do think our ability to coordinate with each other is pretty fundamental to the selection

of what we are as a species.

I wonder if that coordination, that connection is actually the thing that gives birth to

consciousness, that gives birth to, well, let's start with self awareness.

More like theory of mind.

Theory of mind.

Yeah.

You know, I suppose there's experiments that show that there's other mammals that have

a very crude theory of mind.

Not sure.

Maybe dogs, something like that.

But actually dogs probably has to do with that they co evolved with humans.

See it'd be interesting if that theory of mind is what leads to consciousness in the

way we think about it.

Is the richness of the subjective experience that is consciousness.

I have an inkling sense that that only exists because we're social creatures.

That doesn't come with the hardware and the software in the beginning.

That's learned as an effective tool for communication almost.

I think we think that consciousness is fundamental.

And maybe it's not, there's a bunch of folks kind of criticize the idea that the illusion

of consciousness is consciousness.

That it is just a facade we use to help us construct theories of mind.

You almost put yourself in the world as a subjective being.

And that experience, you want to richly experience it as an individual person so that I could

empathize with your experience.

I find that notion compelling.

Mostly because it allows you to then create robots that become conscious not by being

quote unquote conscious but by just learning to fake it till they make it.

Present a facade of consciousness with the task of making that facade very convincing

to us humans and thereby it will become conscious.

Have a sense that in some way that will make them conscious if they're sufficiently convincing

to humans.

Is there some element of that that you find convincing?

This is a much harder set of questions and deep end of the pool than starting with the

aliens was.

We went from aliens to consciousness.

This is not the trajectory I was expecting nor you, but let us walk a while.

We can walk a while and I don't think we will do it justice.

So what do we mean by consciousness versus conscious self reflective awareness?

What do we mean by awareness, qualia, theory of mind?

There's a lot of terms that we think of as slightly different things and subjectivity,

first person.

I don't remember exactly the quote, but I remember when reading when Sam Harris wrote

the book Free Will and then Dennett critiqued it and then there was some writing back and

forth between the two because normally they're on the same side of kind of arguing for critical

thinking and logical fallacies and philosophy of science against supernatural ideas.

And here Dennett believed there is something like free will.

He is a determinist compatibilist, but no consciousness and a radical element of this.

And Sam was saying, no, there is consciousness, but there's no free will.

And that's like the most fundamental kinds of axiomatic senses they disagreed on, but

neither of them could say it was because the other one didn't understand the philosophy

of science or logical fallacies.

And they kind of spoke past each other and at the end, if I remember correctly, Sam said

something that I thought was quite insightful, which was to the effect of it seems, because

they weren't making any progress in shared understanding, it seems that we simply have

different intuitions about this.

And what you could see was that what the words meant, right at the level of symbol grounding,

might be quite different.

One of them might have had deeply different enough life experiences that what is being

referenced and then also different associations of what the words mean.

This is why when trying to address these things, Charles Sanders Peirce said the first philosophy

has to be semiotics, because if you don't get semiotics right, we end up importing different

ideas and bad ideas right into the nature of the language that we're using.

And then it's very hard to do epistemology or ontology together.

So, I'm saying this to say why I don't think we're going to get very far is I think we

would have to go very slowly in terms of defining what we mean by words and fundamental concepts.

Well, and also allowing our minds to drift together for a time so that our definitions

of these terms align.

I think there's some, there's a beauty that some people enjoy with Sam that he is quite

stubborn on his definitions of terms without often clearly revealing that definition.

So in his mind, he can sense that he can deeply understand what he means exactly by a term

like free will and consciousness.

And you're right, he's very specific in fascinating ways that not only does he think that free

will is an illusion, he thinks he's able, not thinks, he says he's able to just remove

himself from the experience of free will and just be like for minutes at a time, hours

at a time, like really experience as if he has no free will, like he's a leaf flowing

down the river.

And given that, he's very sure that consciousness is fundamental.

So here's this conscious leaf that's subjectively experiencing the floating and yet has no ability

to control and make any decisions for itself.

It's only a, the decisions have all been made.

There's some aspect to which the terminology there perhaps is the problem.

So that's a particular kind of meditative experience and the people in the Vedantic

tradition and some of the Buddhist traditions thousands of years ago described similar experiences

and somewhat similar conclusions, some slightly different.

There are other types of phenomenal experience that are the phenomenal experience of pure

agency and, you know, like the Catholic theologian but evolutionary theorist Teilhard de Chardin

describes this and that rather than a creator agent God in the beginning, there's a creative

impulse or a creative process and he would go into a type of meditation that identified

as the pure essence of that kind of creative process.

And I think the types of experience we've had and then one, the types of experience

we've had make a big deal to the nature of how we do symbol grounding.

The other thing is the types of experiences we have can't not be interpreted through

our existing interpretive frames and most of the time our interpretive frames are unknown

even to us, some of them.

And so this is a tricky, this is a tricky topic.

So I guess there's a bunch of directions we could go with it but I want to come back to

what the impulse was that was interesting around what is consciousness and how does

it relate to us as social beings and how does it relate to the possibility of consciousness

with AIs.

Right, you're keeping us on track which is, which is wonderful, you're a wonderful hiking

partner.

Okay, yes.

Let's go back to the initial impulse of what is consciousness and how does the social impulse

connect to consciousness?

Is consciousness a consequence of that social connection?

I'm going to state a position and not argue it because it's honestly like it's a long

hard thing to argue and we can totally do it another time if you want.

I don't subscribe to consciousness as an emergent property of biology or neural networks.

Obviously a lot of people do, obviously the philosophy of science orients towards that

in not absolutely but largely.

I think of the nature of first person, the universe of first person, of qualia as experience,

sensation, desire, emotion, phenomenology, but the felt sense, not the we say emotion

and we think of a neurochemical pattern or an endocrine pattern.

But all of the physical stuff, the third person stuff has position and momentum and charge

and stuff like that that is measurable, repeatable.

I think of the nature of first person and third person as ontologically orthogonal to

each other, not reducible to each other.

They're different kinds of stuff.

So I think about the evolution of third person that we're quite used to thinking about from

subatomic particles to atoms to molecules to on and on.

I think about a similar kind of and corresponding evolution in the domain of first person from

the way Whitehead talked about kind of prehension or proto qualia in earlier phases of self

organization into higher orders of it and that there's correspondence, but that neither

like the idealists do we reduce third person to first person, which is what idealists do,

or neither like the physicalists do we reduce first person to third person.

Obviously Bohm talked about an implicate order that was deeper than and gave rise to the

explicate order of both.

Nagel talks about something like that.

I have a slightly different sense of that, but again, I'll just kind of not argue how

that occurs for a moment and say, so rather than say, does consciousness emerge from,

I'll talk about do higher capacities of consciousness emerge in relationship with.

So it's not first person as a category emerging from third person, but increased complexity

within the nature of first person and third person co evolving.

Do I think that it seems relatively likely that more advanced neural networks have deeper

phenomenology, more complex, where it goes just from basic sensation to emotion to social

awareness to abstract cognition to self reflexive abstract cognition?

Yeah.

But I wouldn't say that's the emergence of consciousness.

I would say it's increased complexity within the domain of first person corresponding to

increased complexity and the correspondence should not automatically be seen as causal.

We can get into the arguments for why that often is the case.

So would I say that obviously the sapient brain is pretty unique and a single sapient

now has that, right?

Even if it took sapiens evolving in tribes based on group selection to make that brain.

So the group made it now that brain is there.

Now if I take that single person with that brain out of the group and try to raise them

in a box, they'll still not be very interesting even with the brain.

But the brain does give hardware capacities that if conditioned in relationship can have

interesting things emerge.

So do I think that the human biology, types of human consciousness and types of social

interaction all co emerged and co evolved?

Yes.

As a small aside, as you're talking about the biology, let me comment that I spent,

this is what I do, this is what I do with my life.

This is why I will never accomplish anything is I spent much of the morning trying to do

research on how many computations the brain performs and how much energy it uses versus

the state of the art CPUs and GPUs arriving at about 20 quadrillion.

So that's two to the 10 to the 16 computations.

So synaptic firings per second that the brain does.

And that's about a million times faster than the let's say the 20 thread state of the

arts Intel CPU, the 10th generation.

And then there's similar calculation for the GPU and all ended up also trying to compute

that it takes 10 watts to run the brain about.

And then what does that mean in terms of calories per day, kilocalories?

That's about for an average human brain, that's 250 to 300 calories a day.

And so it ended up being a calculation where you're doing about 20 quadrillion calculations

that are fueled by something like depending on your diet, three bananas.

So three bananas results in a computation that's about a million times more powerful

than the current state of the art computers.

Now, let's take that one step further.

There's some assumptions built in there.

The assumption is that one, what the brain is doing is just computation.

Two, the relevant computations are synaptic firings and that there's nothing other than

synaptic firings that we have to factor.

So I'm forgetting his name right now.

There's a very famous neuroscientist at Stanford just passed away recently who did a lot of

the pioneering work on glial cells and showed that his assessment glial cells did a huge

amount of the thinking, not just neurons.

And it opened up this entirely different field of like what the brain is and what consciousness

is.

You look at Damasio's work on embodied cognition and how much of what we would consider consciousness

or feeling is happening outside of the nervous system completely, happening in endocrine

process involving lots of other cells and signal communication.

You talk to somebody like Penrose who you've had on the show and even though the Penrose

Hammerhoff conjecture is probably not right, is there something like that that might be

the case where we're actually having to look at stuff happening at the level of quantum

computation of microtubules?

I'm not arguing for any of those.

I'm arguing that we don't know how big the unknown unknown set is.

Well, at the very least, this has become like an infomercial for the human brain.

At the very, but wait, there's more.

At the very least, the three bananas buys you a million times.

At the very least.

At the very least.

That's impressive.

And then you could have, and then the synaptic firings we're referring to is strictly the

electrical signals.

That could be the mechanical transmission of information, there's chemical transmission

of information, there's all kinds of other stuff going on.

And then there's memory that's built in, that's also all tied in.

Not to mention, which I'm learning more and more about, it's not just about the neurons.

It's also about the immune system that's somehow helping with the computation.

So the entirety and the entire body is helping with the computation.

So the three bananas.

It could buy you a lot.

It could buy you a lot.

But on the topic of sort of the greater degrees of complexity emerging in consciousness, I

think few things are as beautiful and inspiring as taking a step outside of the human brain,

just looking at systems where simple rules create incredible complexity.

Not create.

Incredible complexity emerges.

So one of the simplest things to do that with is cellular automata.

And there's, I don't know what it is, and maybe you can speak to it, we will certainly

talk about the implications of this, but there's so few things that are as awe inspiring to

me as knowing the rules of a system and not being able to predict what the heck it looks

like.

And it creates incredibly beautiful complexity that when zoomed out on, looks like there's

actual organisms doing things that operate on a scale much higher than the underlying

mechanism.

So with cellular automata, that's cells that are born and die.

Born and die and they only know about each other's neighbors.

And there's simple rules that govern that interaction of birth and death.

And then they create, at scale, organisms that look like they take up hundreds or thousands

of cells and they're moving, they're moving around, they're communicating, they're sending

signals to each other.

And you forget at moments at a time before you remember that the simple rules on cells

is all that it took to create that.

It's sad in that we can't come up with a simple description of that system that generalizes

the behavior of the large organisms.

We can only come up, we can only hope to come up with the thing, the fundamental physics

or the fundamental rules of that system, I suppose.

It's sad that we can't predict everything we know about the mathematics of those systems.

It seems like we can't really in a nice way, like economics tries to do, to predict how

this whole thing will unroll.

But it's beautiful because of how simple it is underneath it all.

So what do you make of the emergence of complexity from simple rules?

What the hell is that about?

Yeah.

Well, we can see that something like flocking behavior, the murmuration, can be computer

coded.

It's a very hard set of rules to be able to see some of those really amazing types of

complexity.

And the whole field of complexity science and some of the subdisciplines like Stigma

G are studying how following fairly simple responses to a pheromone signal do ant colonies

do this amazing thing where what you might describe as the organizational or computational

capacity of the colony is so profound relative to what each individual ant is doing.

I am not anywhere near as well versed in the cutting edge of cellular automata as I would

like.

Unfortunately, in terms of topics that I would like to get to and haven't, like ET's more

Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, I have only skimmed and read reviews of and not read the

whole thing or his newer work since.

But his idea of the four basic kind of categories of emergent phenomena that can come from cellular

automata and that one of them is kind of interesting and looks a lot like complexity rather than

just chaos or homogeneity or self termination or whatever.

I think this is very interesting.

It does not instantly make me think that biology is operating on a similarly small set of rules

and or that human consciousness is.

I'm not that reductionist oriented.

So if you look at, say, Santa Fe Institute, one of the cofounders, Stuart Kaufman, his

work, you should really get him on your show.

So a lot of the questions that you like, one of Kaufman's more recent books after investigations

and some of the real fundamental stuff was called Reinventing the Sacred and it had to

do with some of these exact questions in kind of non reductionist approach, but that is

not just silly hippie ism.

And he was very interested in highly non ergodic systems where you couldn't take a lot of behavior

over a small period of time and predict what the behavior of subsets over a longer period

of time would do.

And then going further, someone who spent some time at Santa Fe Institute and then kind

of made a whole new field that you should have on, Dave Snowden, who some people call

the father of anthro complexity or what is the complexity unique to humans.

And he says something to the effect of that modeling humans as termites really doesn't

cut it.

Like we don't respond exactly identically to the same pheromone stimulus using Stigma

G like it works for flows of traffic and some very simple human behaviors, but it really

doesn't work for trying to make sense of the Sistine Chapel and Picasso and general relativity

creation and stuff like that.

And it's because the termites are not doing abstraction, forecasting deep into the future

and making choices now based on forecasts of the future, not just adaptive signals in

the moment and evolutionary code from history.

That's really different, right?

Like making choices now that can factor deep modeling of the future.

And with humans, our uniqueness one to the next in terms of response to similar stimuli

is much higher than it is with a termite.

One of the interesting things there is that their uniqueness is extremely low.

They're basically fungible within a class, right?

There's different classes, but within a class they're basically fungible and their system

uses that very high numbers and lots of loss, right?

Lots of death and loss.

But do you think the termite feels that way?

Don't, don't you think we humans are deceiving ourselves about our uniqueness?

Perhaps it doesn't, it just, isn't there some sense in which this emergence just creates

different higher and higher levels of abstraction where every, at every layer, each organism

feels unique?

Is that possible?

That we're all equally dumb but at different scales?

No, I think uniqueness is evolving.

I think that hydrogen atoms are more similar to each other than cells of the same type

are.

And I think that cells are more similar to each other than humans are.

And I think that highly K selected species are more unique than R selected species.

So they're different evolutionary processes.

The R selected species where you have a whole, a lot of death and very high birth rates,

and not looking for as much individuality within or individual possible expression to

cover the evolutionary search space within an individual.

You're looking at it more in terms of a numbers game.

So yeah, I would say there's probably more difference between one orca and the next than

there is between one Cape buffalo and the next.

Given that, it would be interesting to get your thoughts about memetic theory where we're

imitating each other in the context of this idea of uniqueness.

How much truth is there to that?

How compelling is this worldview to you of Girardian memetic theory of desire where maybe

you can explain it from your perspective, but it seems like imitating each other is

the fundamental property of the behavior of human civilization.

Well, imitation is not unique to humans, right?

Monkeys imitate.

So a certain amount of learning through observing is not unique to humans.

Humans do more of it.

It's actually kind of worth speaking to this for a moment.

Monkeys can learn new behaviors, new...

We've even seen teaching an ape sign language and then the ape teaching other apes sign

language.

So that's a kind of mimesis, right?

Kind of learning through imitation.

And that needs to happen if they need to learn or develop capacities that are not just coded

by their genetics, right?

So within the same genome, they're learning new things based on the environment.

And so based on someone else learn something first and so let's pick it up.

How much a creature is the result of just its genetic programming and how much it's

learning is a very interesting question.

And I think this is a place where humans really show up radically different than everything

else.

And you can see it in the neoteny, how long we're basically fetal.

That the closest ancestors to us, if we look at a chimp, a chimp can hold on to its mother's

fur while she moves around day one.

And obviously we see horses up and walking within 20 minutes.

The fact that it takes a human a year to be walking and it takes a horse 20 minutes and

you say how many multiples of 20 minutes go into a year, like that's a long period of

helplessness that wouldn't work for a horse, right?

Like they or anything else.

And not only could we not hold on to mom in the first day, it's three months before we

can move our head volitionally.

So it's like why are we embryonic for so long?

Obviously it's like it's still fetal on the outside, had to be because couldn't keep growing

inside and actually ever get out with big heads and narrower hips from going upright.

So here's a place where there's a coevolution of the pattern of humans, specifically here

our neoteny and what that portends to learning with our being tool making and environment

modifying creatures, which is because we have the abstraction to make tools, we change our

environments more than other creatures change their environments.

The next most environment modifying creature to us is like a beaver.

And then we're in LA, you fly into LAX and you look at the just orthogonal grid going

on forever in all directions.

And we've recently come into the Anthropocene where the surface of the earth is changing

more from human activity than geological activity and then beavers and you're like, okay, wow,

we're really in a class of our own in terms of environment modifying.

So as soon as we started tool making, we were able to change our environments much more

radically.

We could put on clothes and go to a cold place.

And this is really important because we actually went and became apex predators in every environment.

We functioned like apex predators, polar bear can't leave the Arctic and the lion can't

leave the Savannah and an orca can't leave the ocean.

And we went and became apex predators in all those environments because of our tool creation

capacity.

We could become better predators than them adapted to the environment or at least with

our tools adapted to the environment.

So in every aspect towards any organism in any environment, we're incredibly good at

becoming apex predators.

Yes.

And nothing else can do that kind of thing.

There is no other apex predator that, you see the other apex predator is only getting

better at being a predator through evolutionary process that's super slow and that super slow

process creates co selective process with their environment.

So as the predator becomes a tiny bit faster, it eats more of the slow prey, the genes of

the fast prey and breed and the prey becomes faster.

And so there's this kind of balancing and we in because of our tool making, we increased

our predatory capacity faster than anything else could increase its resilience to it.

As a result, we start outstripping the environment and extincting species following stone tools

and going and becoming apex predator everywhere.

This is why we can't keep applying apex predator theories because we're not an apex predator.

We're an apex predator, but we're something much more than that.

Like just for an example, the top apex predator in the world, an orca.

An orca can eat one big fish at a time, like one tuna, and it'll miss most of the time

or one seal.

And we can put a mile long drift net out on a single boat and pull up an entire school

of them.

Right?

We can deplete the entire oceans of them.

That's not an orca.

That's not an apex predator.

And that's not even including that we can then genetically engineer different creatures.

We can extinct species.

We can devastate whole ecosystems.

We can make built worlds that have no natural things that are just human built worlds.

We can build new types of natural creatures, synthetic life.

So we are much more like little gods than we are like apex predators now, but we're

still behaving as apex predators and little gods that behave as apex predators causes

a problem kind of core to my assessment of the world.

So what does it mean to be a predator?

So a predator is somebody that effectively can mine the resources from a place.

So for their survival, or is it also just purely like higher level objectives of violence

and what is, can predators be predators towards the same, each other towards the same species?

Like are we using the word predator sort of generally, which then connects to conflict

and military conflict, violent conflict in this base of human species.

Obviously we can say that plants are mining the resources of their environment in a particular

way, using photosynthesis to be able to pull minerals out of the soil and nitrogen and

carbon out of the air and like that.

And we can say herbivores are being able to mine and concentrate that.

So I wouldn't say mining the environment is unique to predator.

Predator is generally being defined as mining other animals, right?

We don't consider herbivores predators, but animal, which requires some type of violence

capacity because animals move, plants don't move.

So it requires some capacity to overtake something that can move and try to get away.

We'll go back to the Gerard thing and then we'll come back here.

Why are we neotenous?

Why are we embryonic for so long?

Because are we, did we just move from the Savannah to the Arctic and we need to learn

new stuff?

If we came genetically programmed, we would not be able to do that.

Are we throwing spears or are we fishing or are we running an industrial supply chain

or are we texting?

What is the adaptive behavior?

Horses today in the wild and horses 10,000 years ago are doing pretty much the same stuff.

And so since we make tools and we evolve our tools and then change our environment so quickly

and other animals are largely the result of their environment, but we're environment modifying

so rapidly, we need to come without too much programming so we can learn the environment

we're in, learn the language, right?

Which is going to be very important to learn the tool making.

And so we have a very long period of relative helplessness because we aren't coded how to

behave yet because we're imprinting a lot of software on how to behave that is useful

to that particular time.

So our mimesis is not unique to humans, but the total amount of it is really unique.

And this is also where the uniqueness can go up, right?

Is because we are less just the result of the genetics and that means the kind of learning

through history that they got coded in genetics and more the result of, it's almost like our

hardware selected for software, right?

Like if evolution is kind of doing these, think of as a hardware selection, I have problems

with computer metaphors for biology, but I'll use this one here, that we have not had hardware

changes since the beginning of sapiens, but our world is really, really different.

And that's all changes in software, right?

Changes on the same fundamental genetic substrate, what we're doing with these brains and minds

and bodies and social groups and like that.

And so, now, Gerard specifically was looking at when we watch other people talking, so

we learn language, you and I would have a hard time learning Mandarin today or it would

take a lot of work, we'd be learning how to conjugate verbs and stuff, but a baby learns

it instantly without anyone even really trying to teach it just through mimesis.

So it's a powerful thing.

They're obviously more neuroplastic than we are when they're doing that and all their

attention is allocated to that.

But they're also learning how to move their bodies and they're learning all kinds of stuff

through mimesis.

One of the things that Gerard says is they're also learning what to want.

And they learn what to want.

They learn desire by watching what other people want.

And so, intrinsic to this, people end up wanting what other people want and if we can't have

what other people have without taking it away from them, then that becomes a source of conflict.

So the mimesis of desire is the fundamental generator of conflict and that then the conflict

energy within a group of people will build over time.

This is a very, very crude interpretation of the theory.

Can we just pause on that?

For people who are not familiar and for me who hasn't, I'm loosely familiar but haven't

internalized it, but every time I think about it, it's a very compelling view of the world.

Whether it's true or not, it's quite, it's like when you take everything Freud says as

truth, it's a very interesting way to think about the world and in the same way, thinking

about the mimetic theory of desire that everything we want is imitation of other people's wants.

We don't have any original wants.

We're constantly imitating others.

And so, and not just others, but others we're exposed to.

So there's these little local pockets, however defined local, of people imitating each other.

And one that's super empowering because then you can pick which group you can join.

What do you want to imitate?

It's the old like, whoever your friends are, that's what your life is going to be like.

That's really powerful.

I mean, it's depressing that we're so unoriginal, but it's also liberating in that if this holds

true, that we can choose our life by choosing the people we hang out with.

So okay.

Thoughts that are very compelling that seem like they're more absolute than they actually

are end up also being dangerous.

We want to, I'm going to discuss here where I think we need to amend this particular theory.

But specifically, you just said something that everyone who's paid attention knows is

true experientially, which is who you're around affects who you become.

And as libertarian and self determining and sovereign as we'd like to be, everybody I

think knows that if you got put in the maximum security prison, aspects of your personality

would have to adapt or you wouldn't survive there, right?

You would become different.

If you grew up in Darfur versus Finland, you would be different with your same genetics,

like just there's no real question about that.

And that even today, if you hang out in a place with ultra marathoners as your roommates

or all people who are obese as your roommates, the statistical likelihood of what happens

to your fitness is pretty clear, right?

Like the behavioral science of this is pretty clear.

So the whole saying we are the average of the five people we spend the most time around.

I think the more self reflective someone is and the more time they spend by themselves

in self reflection, the less this is true, but it's still true.

So one of the best things someone can do to become more self determined is be self determined

about the environments they want to put themselves in, because to the degree that there is some

self determination and some determination by the environment, don't be fighting an environment

that is predisposing you in bad directions.

Try to put yourself in an environment that is predisposing the things that you want.

In turn, try to affect the environment in ways that predispose positive things for those

around you.

Or perhaps also there's probably interesting ways to play with this.

You could probably put yourself like form connections that have this perfect tension

in all directions to where you're actually free to decide whatever the heck you want,

because the set of wants within your circle of interactions is so conflicting that you're

free to choose whichever one.

If there's enough tension, as opposed to everybody aligned like a flock of birds.

Yeah, I mean, you definitely want that all of the dialectics would be balanced.

So if you have someone who is extremely oriented to self empowerment and someone who's extremely

oriented to kind of empathy and compassion, both the dialectic of those is better than

either of them on their own.

If you have both of them inhabiting, being inhabited better than you by the same person

and spending time around that person will probably do well for you.

I think the thing you just mentioned is super important when it comes to cognitive schools,

which is I think one of the fastest things people can do to improve their learning and

their not just cognitive learning, but their meaningful problem solving communication and

civic capacity, capacity to participate as a citizen with other people and making the

world better is to be seeking dialectical synthesis all the time.

And so in the Hegelian sense, if you have a thesis, you have an antithesis.

So maybe we have libertarianism on one side and Marxist kind of communism on the other

side.

And one is arguing that the individual is the unit of choice.

And so we want to increase the freedom and support of individual choice because as they

make more agentic choices, it'll produce a better whole for everybody.

The other side saying, well, the individuals are conditioned by their environment who would

choose to be born into Darfur rather than Finland.

So we actually need to collectively make environments that are good because the environment conditions

the individuals.

So you have a thesis and an antithesis.

And then Hegel's ideas, you have a synthesis, which is a kind of higher order truth that

understands how those relate in a way that neither of them do.

And so it is actually at a higher order of complexity.

So the first part would be, can I steel man each of these?

Can I argue each one well enough that the proponents of it are like, totally, you got

that?

And not just argue it rhetorically, but can I inhabit it where I can try to see and feel

the world the way someone seeing and feeling the world that way would?

Because once I do, then I don't want to screw those people because there's truth in it,

right?

And I'm not going to go back to war with them.

I'm going to go to finding solutions that could actually work at a higher order.

If I don't go to a higher order, then there's war.

And but then the higher order thing would be, well, it seems like the individual does

affect the commons and the collective and other people.

It also seems like the collective conditions individuals at least statistically.

And I can cherry pick out the one guy who got out of the ghetto and pulled himself up

by his bootstraps.

But I can also say statistically that most people born into the ghetto show up differently

than most people born into the Hamptons.

And so unless you want to argue that and have you take your child from the Hamptons and

put them in the ghetto, then like, come on, be realistic about this thing.

So how do we make, we don't want social systems that make weak dependent individuals, right?

The welfare argument.

But we also don't want no social system that supports individuals to do better.

We don't want individuals where their self expression and agency fucks the environment

and everybody else and employs slave labor and whatever.

So can we make it to where individuals are creating holes that are better for conditioning

other individuals?

Can we make it to where we have holes that are conditioning increased agency and sovereignty,

right?

That would be the synthesis.

So the thing that I'm coming to here is if people have that as a frame, and sometimes

it's not just thesis and antithesis, it's like eight different views, right?

Can I steel man each view?

This is not just, can I take the perspective, but am I seeking them?

Am I actively trying to inhabit other people's perspective?

Then can I really try to essentialize it and argue the best points of it, both the sense

making about reality and the values, why these values actually matter?

Then just like I want to seek those perspectives, then I want to seek, is there a higher order

set of understandings that could fulfill the values of and synthesize the sense making

of all of them simultaneously?

Maybe I won't get it, but I want to be seeking it and I want to be seeking progressively

better ones.

So this is perspective seeking, driving perspective taking, and then seeking synthesis.

I think that that one cognitive disposition might be the most helpful thing.

Would you put a title of dialectic synthesis on that process because that seems to be such

a part, so like this rigorous empathy, like it's not just empathy.

It's empathy with rigor, like you really want to understand and embody different worldviews

and then try to find a higher order synthesis.

Okay, so I remember last night you told me when we first met, you said that you looked

in somebody's eyes and you felt that you had suffered in some ways that they had suffered

and so you could trust them.

Empathy pathos, right, creates a certain sense of kind of shared bonding and shared intimacy.

So empathy is actually feeling the suffering of somebody else and feeling the depth of

their sentience.

I don't want to fuck them anymore.

I don't want to hurt them.

I don't want to behave, I don't want my proposition to go through when I go and inhabit the perspective

of the other people if they feel that's really going to mess them up, right?

And so the rigorous empathy, it's different than just compassion, which is I generally

care.

I have a generalized care, but I don't know what it's like to be them.

I can never know what it's like to be them perfectly and that there's a humility you

have to have, which is my most rigorous attempt is still not it.

My most rigorous attempt, mine, to know what it's like to be a woman is still not it.

I have no question that if I was actually a woman, it would be different than my best

guesses.

I have no question if I was actually black, it would be different than my best guesses.

So there's a humility in that which keeps me listening because I don't think that I

know fully, but I want to, and I'm going to keep trying better to.

And then I want to accross them, and then I want to say, is there a way we can forward

together and not have to be in war?

It has to be something that could meet the values that everyone holds, that could reconcile

the partial sensemaking that everyone holds, and that could offer a way forward that is

more agreeable than the partial perspectives at war with each other.

But so the more you succeed at this empathy with humility, the more you're carrying the

burden of other people's pain, essentially.

Now, this goes back to the question of do I see us as one being or 7.8 billion.

I think if I'm overwhelmed with my own pain, I can't empathize that much because I don't

have the bandwidth.

I don't have the capacity.

If I don't feel like I can do something about a particular problem in the world, it's hard

to feel it because it's just too devastating.

And so a lot of people go numb and even go nihilistic because they just don't feel the

agency.

So as I actually become more empowered as an individual and have more sense of agency,

I also become more empowered to be more empathetic for others and be more connected to that shared

burden and want to be able to make choices on behalf of and in benefit of.

So this way of living seems like a way of living that would solve a lot of problems

in society from a cellular automata perspective.

So if you have a bunch of little agents behaving in this way, my intuition, there'll be interesting

complexities that emerge, but my intuition is it will create a society that's very different

and recognizably better than the one we have today.

How much like...

Oh, wait, hold that question because I want to come back to it, but this brings us back

to Gerard, which we didn't answer.

The conflict theory.

Yes.

Because about how to get past the conflict theory.

Yes.

You know the Robert Frost poem about the two paths and you never have enough time to return

back to the other?

We're going to have to do that quite a lot.

We're going to be living that poem over and over again, but yes, how to...

Let's return back.

Okay.

So the rest of the argument goes, you learn to want what other people want, therefore

fundamental conflict based in our desire because we want the thing that somebody else has.

And then people are in conflict over trying to get the same stuff, power, status, attention,

physical stuff, a mate, whatever it is.

And then we learn the conflict by watching.

And so then the conflict becomes metic.

And we become on the Palestinian side or the Israeli side or the communist or capitalist

side or the left or right politically or whatever it is.

And until eventually the conflict energy in the system builds up so much that some type

of violence is needed to get the bad guy, whoever it is that we're going to blame.

And you know, Gerard talks about why scapegoating was kind of a mechanism to minimize the amount

of violence.

Let's blame a scapegoat as being more relevant than they really were.

But if we all believe it, then we can all kind of calm down with the conflict energy.

It's a really interesting concept, by the way.

I mean, you beautifully summarized it, but the idea that there's a scapegoat, that there's

this kind of thing naturally leads to a conflict and then they find the other, some group that's

the other that's either real or artificial as the cause of the conflict.

Well, it's always artificial because the cause of the conflict in Gerard is the mimesis of

desire itself.

And how do we attack that?

How do we attack that it's our own desire?

So this now gets to something more like Buddha said, right, which was desire is the cause

of suffering.

Gerard and Buddha would kind of agree in this way.

So but that's that explains I mean, again, it's a compelling description of human history

that we do tend to come up with the other.

And

okay, kind of I just I just had such a funny experience with someone critiquing Gerard

the other day in such an elegant and beautiful and simple way.

It's a friend who's grew up Aboriginal Australian, is a scholar of Aboriginal social technologies.

He's like, nah man, Gerard just made shit up about how tribes work.

Like we come from a tribe, we've got tens of thousands of years, and we didn't have

increasing conflict and then scapegoat and kill someone.

We'd have a little bit of conflict and then we would dance and then everybody'd be fine.

We'd dance around the campfire, everyone would like kind of physically get the energy out,

we'd look in each other's eyes, we'd have positive bonding, and then we're fine.

And nobody, no scapegoats.

And

I think that's called the Joe Rogan theory of desire, which is, he's like, all all of

human problems have to do with the fact that you don't do enough hard shit in your day.

So maybe, maybe just dance it because he says like doing exercise and running on the treadmill

gets gets all the demons out and maybe just dancing gets all the demons out.

So this is why I say we have to be careful with taking an idea that seems too explanatory

and then taking it as a given and then saying, well, now that we're stuck with the fact that

conflict is inexorable because human, because mimetic desire and therefore, how do we deal

with the inexorability of the conflict and how to sublimate violence?

Well, no, the whole thing might be actually gibberish, meaning it's only true in certain

conditions and other conditions it's not true.

So the deeper question is under which conditions is that true?

Under which conditions is it not true?

What do those other conditions make possible and look like?

And in general, we should stay away from really compelling models of reality because there's

something about, about our brains that these models become sticky and we can't even think

outside of them.

So.

It's not that we stay away from them.

It's that we know that the model of reality is never reality.

That's the key thing.

Humility again, it goes back to just having the humility that you don't have a perfect

model of reality.

There's an ep, the, the model of reality could never be reality.

The process of modeling is inherently information reduction and I can never show that the unknown

unknown set has been factored.

It's back to the cellular automata.

You can't, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

Like when you realize it's unfortunately, sadly impossible to, to create a model of

cellular automata, even if you know the basic rules that predict to even any degree of accuracy,

what how that system will evolve, which is fascinating mathematically.

Sorry.

I think about it quite a lot.

It's very annoying.

Wolfram has this rule 30, like you should be able to predict it.

It's so simple, but you can't predict what's going to be like, there's a, there's a problem

he defines, like try to predict some aspect of the middle, middle column of the system,

just anything about it.

What's going to happen in the future.

And you can't, you can't, it sucks because then we can't make sense of this world in

a real, in a reality, in a definitive way.

It's always like in the striving, like it, we're always striving.

Yeah.

I don't think this sucks.

That so that's a feature, not a bug.

Well, that's assuming a designer.

I would say I don't think it sucks.

I think it's not only beautiful, but maybe necessary for beauty.

The mess.

So you're a, so you're, you're disagree Jordan Pearson should clean up your room.

You like the rooms messy.

It's a, it's essential for the, for beauty.

It's not, it's not that it's okay.

I take, I have no idea if it was intended this way.

And so I'm just interpreting it a way I like the commandment about having no false idols

to me, the way I interpret that that is meaningful is that re reality is sacred to me.

I have a reverence for reality, but I know my best understanding of it is never complete.

I know my best model of it is a model where I tried to make some kind of predictive capacity

by reducing the complexity of it to a set of stuff that I could observe and then a subset

of that stuff that I thought was the causal dynamics and then some set of, you know, mechanisms

that are involved.

And what we find is that it can be super useful, like Newtonian gravity can help us do ballistic

curves and all kinds of super useful stuff.

And then we get to the place where it doesn't explain what's happening at the cosmological

scale or at a quantum scale.

And at each time, what we're finding is we excluded stuff.

And it also doesn't explain the reconciliation of gravity with quantum mechanics and the

other kind of fundamental laws.

So models can be useful, but they're never true with a capital T, meaning they're never

an actual real full, they're never a complete description of what's happening in real systems.

They can be a complete description of what's happening in an artificial system that was

the result of applying a model.

So the model of a circuit board and the circuit board are the same thing, but I would argue

that the model of a cell and the cell are not the same thing.

And I would say this is key to what we call complexity versus the complicated, which is

a distinction Dave Snowden made well in defining the difference between simple, complicated,

complex and chaotic systems.

But one of the definers in complex systems is that no matter how you model the complex

system, it will still have some emergent behavior not predicted by the model.

Can you elaborate on the complex versus the complicated?

Complicated means we can fully explicate the phase space of all the things that it can

do.

We can program it.

All human, not all, for the most part, human built things are complicated.

They don't self organize.

They don't self repair.

They're not self evolving and we can make a blueprint for them where, sorry, for human

systems, for human technologies, human technologies, that are basically the application of models

right.

And engineering is kind of applied science, science as the modeling process.

And but with humans are complex, complex stuff with biological type stuff and sociological

type stuff, it more has generator functions and even those can't be fully explicated than

it has or our explanation can't prove that it has closure of what would be in the unknown

unknown set where we keep finding like, oh, it's just the genome.

Oh, well now it's the genome and the epigenome and then a recursive change on the epigenome

because of the proteome.

And then there's mitochondrial DNA and then viruses affected and fuck, right?

So it's like we get overexcited when we think we found the thing.

So on Facebook, you know how you can list your relationship as complicated?

It should actually say it's, it's complex.

That's the more accurate description.

You self terminating is a really interesting idea that you talk about quite a bit.

First of all, what is a self terminating system?

And I think you have a sense, correct me if I'm wrong, that human civilization is a currently

is, is a self terminating system.

Why do you have that intuition combined with the definition of what soft self terminating

means?

Okay, so if we look at human societies historically, human civilizations, it's not that hard to

realize that most of the major civilizations and empires of the past don't exist anymore.

So they had a life cycle, they died for some reason.

So we don't still have the early Egyptian empire or Inca or Maya or Aztec or any of

those, right?

So they, they terminated, sometimes it seems like they were terminated from the outside

in war.

Sometimes it seems like they self terminated.

When we look at Easter Island, it was a self termination.

So let's go ahead and take an island situation.

If I have an island and we are consuming the resources on that island faster than the resources

can replicate themselves and there's a finite space there, that system is going to self

terminate.

It's not going to be able to keep doing that thing because you'll get to a place of there's

no resources left and then you get a, so now if I'm utilizing the resources faster than

they can replicate or faster than they can replenish and I'm actually growing our population

in the process, I'm even increasing the rate of the utilization of resources, I might get

an exponential curve and then hit a wall and then just collapse the exponential curve rather

than do an S curve or some other kind of thing.

So self terminating system is any system that depends upon a substrate system that is debasing

its own substrate, that is debasing what it depends upon.

So you're right that if you look at empires, they rise and fall throughout human history,

but not this time, bro.

This one's going to last forever.

I like that idea.

I think that if we don't understand why all the previous ones failed, we can't ensure

that.

And so I think it's very important to understand it well so that we can have that be a designed

outcome with somewhat decent probability.

So we're, it's sort of in terms of consuming the resources on the island, we're a clever

bunch and we keep coming up, especially when on the horizon there is a termination point,

we keep coming up with clever ways of avoiding disaster, of avoiding collapse, of constructing.

This is where technological innovation, this is where growth comes in, coming up with different

ways to improve productivity and the way society functions such that we consume less resources

or get a lot more from the resources we have.

So there's some sense in which there's a human ingenuity is a source for optimism about the

future of this particular system that may not be self terminating.

If there's more innovation than there is consumption.

So overconsumption of resources is just one way I think can self terminate.

We're just kind of starting here.

But there are reasons for optimism and pessimism then they're both worth understanding and

there's failure modes on understanding either without the other.

As we mentioned previously, there's what I would call naive techno optimism, naive techno

capital optimism that says stuff just has been getting better and better and we wouldn't

want to live in the dark ages and tech has done all this awesome stuff and we know the

proponents of those models and this stuff is going to kind of keep getting better.

Of course there are problems, but human ingenuity rises to its supply and demand will solve

the problems, whatever.

Would you put Rick or as well in that, or in that bucket, is there some specific people

you have in mind or naive optimism is truly naive to where you're essentially just have

an optimism that's blind to any kind of realities of the way technology progresses.

I don't think that anyone who thinks about it and writes about it is perfectly naive.

Gotcha.

But there might be.

It's a platonic ideal.

There might be a bias in the nature of the assessment.

I would also say there's kind of naive techno pessimism and there are critics of technology.

I mean, you read the Unabomber's Manifesto on why technology can't not result in our

self termination, so we have to take it out before it gets any further.

But also if you read a lot of the X risk community, you know, Bostrom and friends, it's like our

total number of existential risks and the total probability of them is going up.

And so I think that there are, we have to hold together where our positive possibilities

and our risk possibilities are both increasing and then say for the positive possibilities

to be realized long term, all of the catastrophic risks have to not happen.

Any of the catastrophic risks happening is enough to keep that positive outcome from

occurring.

So how do we ensure that none of them happen?

If we want to say, let's have a civilization that doesn't collapse.

So again, Collapse Theory, it's worth looking at books like The Collapse of Complex Societies

by Joseph Tainter.

It does an analysis of that many of the societies fell for internal institutional decay, civilizational

decay reasons.

Baudrillard in Simulation and Simulacra looks at a very different way of looking at how

institutional decay and the collective intelligence of a system happens and it becomes kind of

more internally parasitic on itself.

Obviously Jared Diamond made a more popular book called Collapse.

And as we were mentioning, the anticatheria mechanism has been getting attention in the

news lately.

It was like a 2000 year old clock, right?

Like metal gears.

And does that mean we lost like 1500 years of technological progress?

And from a society that was relatively technologically advanced.

So what I'm interested in here is being able to say, okay, well, why did previous societies

fail?

Can we understand that abstractly enough that we can make a civilizational model that isn't

just trying to solve one type of failure, but solve the underlying things that generate

the failures as a whole?

Are there some underlying generator functions or patterns that would make a system self

terminating?

And can we solve those and have that be the kernel of a new civilizational model that

is not self terminating?

And can we then be able to actually look at the categories of extras we're aware of and

see that we actually have resilience in the presence of those?

Not just resilience, but antifragility.

And I would say for the optimism to be grounded, it has to actually be able to understand the

risk space well and have adequate solutions for it.

So can we try to dig into some basic intuitions about the underlying sources of catastrophic

failures of the system and overconsumption that's built in into self terminating systems?

So both the overconsumption, which is like the slow death, and then there's the fast

death of nuclear war and all those kinds of things.

AGI, biotech, bioengineering, nanotechnology, nano, my favorite nanobots.

Nanobots are my favorite because it sounds so cool to me that I could just know that

I would be one of the scientists that would be full steam ahead in building them without

sufficiently thinking about the negative consequences.

I would definitely be, I would be podcasting all about the negative consequences, but when

I go back home, I'd be, I'd just in my heart know the amount of excitement is a dumb descendant

of ape, no offense to apes.

I want to backtrack on my previous comments about, negative comments about apes.

That I have that sense of excitement that would result in problems.

So sorry, a lot of things said, but what's, can we start to pull it a thread because you've

also provided a kind of a beautiful general approach to this, which is this dialectic

synthesis or just rigorous empathy, whatever, whatever word we want to put to it, that seems

to be from the individual perspective as one way to sort of live in the world as we tried

to figure out how to construct non self terminating systems.

So what, what are some underlying sources?

Yeah.

First I have to say, I actually really respect Drexler for emphasizing Grey Goo and engines

of creation back in the day to make sure the world was paying adequate attention to the

risks of the nanotech as someone who was right at the cutting edge of what could be.

There's definitely game theoretic advantage to those who focus on the opportunities and

don't focus on the risks or pretend there aren't risks because they get to market first.

And then they externalize all of the costs through limited liability or whatever it is

to the commons or wherever happen to have it.

Other people are going to have to solve those, but now they have the power and capital associated.

The person who looked at the risks and tried to do better design and go slower is probably

not going to move into positions of as much power influences quickly.

So this is one of the issues we have to deal with is some of the bad game theoretic dispositions

in the system relative to its own stability.

And the key aspect to that, sorry to interrupt, is the externalities generated.

Yes.

What flavors of catastrophic risk are we talking about here?

What's your favorite flavor in terms of ice cream?

So mine is coconut.

Nobody seems to like coconut ice cream.

So ice cream aside, what are you most worried about in terms of catastrophic risk that will

help us kind of make concrete the discussion we're having about how to fix this whole thing?

Yeah.

I think it's worth taking a historical perspective briefly to just kind of orient everyone to

it.

We don't have to go all the way back to the aliens who've seen all of civilization.

But to just recognize that for all of human history, as far as we're aware, there were

existential risks to civilizations and they happened, right?

Like there were civilizations that were killed in war, tribes that were killed in tribal

warfare or whatever.

So people faced existential risk to the group that they identified with.

It's just those were local phenomena, right?

It wasn't a fully global phenomena.

So an empire could fall and surrounding empires didn't fall.

Maybe they came in and filled the space.

The first time that we were able to think about catastrophic risk, not from like a solar

flare or something that we couldn't control, but from something that humans would actually

create at a global level was World War II and the bomb.

Because it was the first time that we had tech big enough that could actually mess up

everything at a global level that could mess up habitability.

We just weren't powerful enough to do that before.

It's not that we didn't behave in ways that would have done it.

We just only behaved in those ways at the scale we could affect.

And so it's important to get that there's the entire world before World War II where

we don't have the ability to make a nonhabitable biosphere, nonhabitable for us.

And then there's World War II and the beginning of a completely new phase where global human

induced catastrophic risk is now a real thing.

And that was such a big deal that it changed the entire world in a really fundamental way,

which is, you know, when you study history, it's amazing how big a percentage of history

is studying war, right, and the history of war, as you said, European history and whatever.

It's generals and wars and empire expansions.

And so the major empires near each other never had really long periods of time where they

weren't engaged in war or preparation for war or something like that was – humans

don't have a good precedent in the post tribal phase, the civilization phase of being able

to solve conflicts without war for very long.

World War II was the first time where we could have a war that no one could win.

And so the superpowers couldn't fight again.

They couldn't do a real kinetic war.

They could do diplomatic wars and Cold War type stuff and they could fight proxy wars

through other countries that didn't have the big weapons.

And so mutually assured destruction and like coming out of World War II, we actually realized

that nation states couldn't prevent world war.

And so we needed a new type of supervening government in addition to nation states, which

was the whole Bretton Woods world, the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, the globalization

trade type agreements, mutually assured destruction that was how do we have some coordination

beyond just nation states between them since we have to stop war between at least the superpowers.

And it was pretty successful given that we've had like 75 years of no superpower on superpower

war.

We've had lots of proxy wars during that time.

We've had Cold War.

And I would say we're in a new phase now where the Bretton Woods solution is basically over

or almost over.

Can you describe the Bretton Woods solution?

Yeah.

So the Bretton Woods, the series of agreements for how the nations would be able to engage

with each other in a solution other than war was these IGOs, these intergovernmental organizations

and was the idea of globalization.

Since we could have global effects, we needed to be able to think about things globally

where we had trade relationships with each other where it would not be profitable to

war with each other.

It'd be more profitable to actually be able to trade with each other.

So our own self interest was gonna drive our non war interest.

And so this started to look like, and obviously this couldn't have happened that much earlier

either because industrialization hadn't gotten far enough to be able to do massive global

industrial supply chains and ship stuff around quickly.

But like we were mentioning earlier, almost all the electronics that we use today, just

basic cheap stuff for us is made on six continents, made in many countries.

There's no single country in the world that could actually make many of the things that

we have and from the raw material extraction to the plastics and polymers and the et cetera.

And so the idea that we made a world that could do that kind of trade and create massive

GDP growth, we could all work together to be able to mine natural resources and grow

stuff.

With the rapid GDP growth, there was the idea that everybody could keep having more without

having to take each other's stuff.

And so that was part of kind of the Bretton Woods post World War II model.

The other was that we'd be so economically interdependent that blowing each other up

would never make sense.

That worked for a while.

Now it also brought us up into planetary boundaries faster, the unrenewable use of resource and

turning those resources into pollution on the other side of the supply chain.

So obviously that faster GDP growth meant the overfishing of the oceans and the cutting

down of the trees and the climate change and the mining, toxic mining tailings going into

the water and the mountaintop removal mining and all those types of things.

That's the overconsumption side of the risk that we're talking about.

And so the answer of let's do positive GDP is the answer rapidly and exponentially obviously

accelerated the planetary boundary side.

And that started to be, that was thought about for a long time, but it started to be modeled

with the Club of Rome and limits of growth.

But it's just very obvious to say if you have a linear materials economy where you take

stuff out of the earth faster, whether it's fish or trees or oil, you take it out of the

earth faster than it can replenish itself and you turn it into trash after using it

for a short period of time, you put the trash in the environment faster than it can process

itself and there's toxicity associated with both sides of this.

You can't run an exponentially growing linear materials economy on a finite planet forever.

That's not a hard thing to figure out.

And it has to be exponential if there's an exponentiation in the monetary supply because

of interest and then fractional reserve banking and to then be able to keep up with the growing

monetary supply, you have to have growth of goods and services.

So that's that kind of thing that has happened.

But you also see that when you get these supply chains that are so interconnected across the

world, you get increased fragility because a collapse or a problem in one area then affects

the whole world in a much bigger area as opposed to the issues being local, right?

So we got to see with COVID and an issue that started in one part of China affecting the

whole world so much more rapidly than would have happened before Bretton Woods, right?

Before international travel, supply chains, you know, that whole kind of thing and with

a bunch of second and third order effects that people wouldn't have predicted, okay,

we have to stop certain kinds of travel because of viral contaminants, but the countries doing

agriculture depend upon fertilizer they don't produce that is shipped into them and depend

upon pesticides they don't produce.

So we got both crop failures and crops being eaten by locusts in scale in Northern Africa

and Iran and things like that because they couldn't get the supplies of stuff in.

So then you get massive starvation or future kind of hunger issues because of supply chain

shutdowns.

So you get this increased fragility and cascade dynamics where a small problem can end up

leading to cascade effects.

And also we went from two superpowers with one catastrophe weapon to now that same catastrophe

weapon is there's more countries that have it, eight or nine countries that have it,

and there's a lot more types of catastrophe weapons.

We now have catastrophe weapons with weaponized drones that can hit infrastructure targets

with bio, with in fact every new type of tech has created an arms race.

So we have not with the UN or the other kind of intergovernmental organizations, we haven't

been able to really do nuclear de proliferation.

We've actually had more countries get nukes and keep getting faster nukes, the race to

hypersonics and things like that.

And every new type of technology that has emerged has created an arms race.

And so you can't do mutually assured destruction with multiple agents the way you can with

two agents.

Two agents, it's much easier to create a stable Nash equilibrium that's forced.

But the ability to monitor and say if these guys shoot, who do I shoot?

Do I shoot them?

Do I shoot everybody?

Do I?

And so you get a three body problem.

You get a very complex type of thing when you have multiple agents and multiple different

types of catastrophe weapons, including ones that can be much more easily produced than

nukes.

Nukes are really hard to produce.

There's only uranium in a few areas.

uranium enrichment is hard, ICBMs are hard, but weaponized drones hitting smart targets

is not so hard.

There's a lot of other things where basically the scale at being able to manufacture them

is going way, way down to where even non state actors can have them.

And so when we talk about exponential tech and the decentralization of exponential tech,

what that means is decentralized catastrophe weapon capacity.

And especially in a world of increasing numbers of people feeling disenfranchised, frantic,

whatever for different reasons.

So I would say where the Bretton Woods world doesn't prepare us to be able to deal with

lots of different agents, having lots of different types of catastrophe weapons you can't put

mutually assured destruction on, where you can't keep doing growth of materials economy

in the same way because of hitting planetary boundaries and where the fragility dynamics

are actually now their own source of catastrophic risk.

So now we're, so like there was all the world until world war II and world war II is just

from a civilization timescale point of view is just a second ago.

It seems like a long time, but it is really not.

We get a short period of relative peace at the level of superpowers while building up

the military capacity for much, much, much worse war the entire time.

And then now we're at this new phase where the things that allowed us to make it through

the nuclear power are not the same systems that will let us make it through the next

stage.

So what is this next post Bretton Woods?

How do we become safe vessels, safe stewards of many different types of exponential technology

is a key question when we're thinking about X risk.

Okay.

And I'd like to try to answer the how a few ways, but first on the mutually assured destruction.

Do you give credit to the idea of two superpowers now blowing each other up with nuclear weapons

to the simple game theoretic model of mutually assured destruction or something you've said

previously this idea of inverse correlation, which I tend to believe between the, now you

were talking about tech, but I think it's maybe broadly true.

The inverse correlation between competence and propensity for destruction.

So the better, the, the, the bigger your weapons, not because you're afraid of a mutually assured

self destruction, but because we're human beings and there's a deep moral fortitude

there that somehow aligned with competence and being good at your job that like, it's

very hard to be a psychopath and be good at killing at scale.

Do you share any of that intuition?

Kind of.

I think most people would say that Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan and Napoleon were

effective people that were good at their job that were actually maybe asymmetrically good

at being able to organize people and do certain kinds of things that were pretty oriented

towards certain types of destruction or pretty willing to, maybe they would say they were

oriented towards empire expansion, but pretty willing to commit certain acts of destruction

in the name of it.

What are you worried about?

The Genghis Khan, or you could argue he's not a psychopath.

That are you worried about Genghis Khan, are you worried about Hitler or are you worried

about a terrorist who is, has a very different ethic, which is not even for, it's not trying

to preserve and build and expand my community.

It's more about just the destruction in itself is the goal.

I think the thing that you're looking at that I do agree with is that there's a psychological

disposition towards construction and a psychological disposition more towards destruction.

Obviously everybody has both and can toggle between both and oftentimes one is willing

to destroy certain things.

We have this idea of creative destruction, right?

Willing to destroy certain things to create other things and utilitarianism and trolley

problems are all about exploring that space and the idea of war is all about that.

I am trying to create something for our people and it requires destroying some other people.

Sociopathy is a funny topic because it's possible to have very high fealty to your in group

and work on perfecting the methods of torture to the out group at the same time because

you can dehumanize and then remove empathy.

And I would also say that there are types.

So the reason, the thing that gives hope about the orientation towards construction and destruction

being a little different in psychology is what it takes to build really catastrophic

tech, even today where it doesn't take what it took to make a nuke, a small group of people

could do it, takes still some real technical knowledge that required having studied for

a while and some then building capacity and there's a question of is that psychologically

inversely correlated with the desire to damage civilization meaningfully?

A little bit.

A little bit, I think.

I think a lot.

I think it's actually, I mean, this is the conversation I had like with, I think offline

with Dan Carlin, which is like, it's pretty easy to come up with ways that any competent,

I can come up with a lot of ways to hurt a lot of people and it's pretty easy, like I

alone could do it and there's a lot of people as smart or smarter than me, at least in their

creation of explosives.

Why are we not seeing more insane mass murder?

I think there's something fascinating and beautiful about this and it does have to do

with some deeply pro social types of characteristics in humans but when you're dealing with very

large numbers, you don't need a whole lot of a phenomena and so then you start to say,

well, what's the probability that X won't happen this year, then won't happen in the

next two years, three years, four years and then how many people are doing destructive

things with lower tech and then how many of them can get access to higher tech that they

didn't have to figure out how to build.

So when I can get commercial tech and maybe I don't understand tech very well but I understand

it well enough to utilize it, not to create it and I can repurpose it.

When we saw that commercial drone with a homemade thermite bomb hit the Ukrainian munitions

factory and do the equivalent of an incendiary bomb level of damage, that was just home tech,

that's just simple kind of thing.

And so the question is not does it stay being a small percentage of the population?

The question is can you bind that phenomena nearly completely and especially now as you

start to get into bigger things, CRISPR gene drive technologies and various things like

that, can you bind it completely long term over what period of time?

Not perfectly though, that's the thing.

I'm trying to say that there is some, let's call it, that's a random word, love, that's

inherent and that's core to human nature that's preventing destruction at scale.

And you're saying yeah but there's a lot of humans, there's going to be eight plus billion

and then there's a lot of seconds in the day to come up with stuff, there's a lot of pain

in the world that can lead to a distorted view of the world such that you want to channel

that pain into the destruction, all those kinds of things and it's only a matter of

time that any one individual can do large damage, especially as we create more and more

democratized decentralized ways to deliver that damage even if you don't know how to

build the initial weapon.

But the thing is it seems like it's a race between the cheapening of destructive weapons

and the capacity of humans to express their love towards each other and it's a race that

so far, I know on Twitter it's not popular to say but love is winning, okay?

So what is the argument that love is going to lose here against nuclear weapons and biotech

and AI and drones?

Okay I'm going to comment the end of this to a how love wins so I just want you to know

that that's where I'm oriented.

That's the end, okay.

But I'm going to argue against why that is a given because it's not a given, I don't

believe and I think that it's…

This is like a good romantic comedy so you're going to create drama right now but it will

end in a happy ending.

Well it's because it's only a happy ending if we actually understand the issues well

enough and take responsibility to shift it.

Do I believe like there's a reason why there's so much more dystopic sci fi than protopic

sci fi and the some protopic sci fi usually requires magic is because – or at least

magical tech, right, dilithium crystals and warp drives and stuff because it's very hard

to imagine people like the people we have been in the history books with exponential

type technology and power that don't eventually blow themselves up, that make good enough

choices as stewards of their environment and their commons and each other and etc.

So like it's easier to think of scenarios where we blow ourselves up than it is to think

of scenarios where we avoid every single scenario where we blow ourselves up.

And when I say blow ourselves up I mean the environmental versions, the terrorist versions,

the war versions, the cumulative externalities versions.

And I'm sorry if I'm interrupting your flow of thought but why is it easier?

Could it be a weird psychological thing where we either are just more capable to visualize

explosions and destruction and then the sicker thought which is like we kind of enjoy for

some weird reason thinking about that kind of stuff even though we wouldn't actually

act on it.

It's almost like some weird, like I love playing shooter games, you know, first person shooters

and like especially if it's like murdering zombies and doom, you're shooting demons.

I play one of my favorite games Diablo is like slashing through different monsters and

the screaming and pain and the hellfire and then I go out into the real world to eat my

coconut ice cream and I'm all about love.

So like can we trust our ability to visualize how it all goes to shit as an actual rational

way of thinking?

I think it's a fair question to say to what degree is there just kind of perverse fantasy

and morbid exploration and whatever else that happens in our imagination but I don't think

that's the whole of it.

I think there is also a reality to the combinatorial possibility space and the difference in the

probabilities that there's a lot of ways I could try to put the 70 trillion cells of

your body together that don't make you.

There's not that many ways I can put them together that make you.

There's a lot of ways I could try to connect the organs together that make some weird kind

of group of organs on a desk but that doesn't actually make a functioning human and you

can kill an adult human in a second but you can't get one in a second.

It takes 20 years to grow one and a lot of things happen right.

I could destroy this building in a couple of minutes with demolition but it took a year

or a couple of years to build it.

There is –

Calm down, Cole.

This is just an example.

He doesn't mean it.

There's a gradient where entropy is easier and there's a lot more ways to put a set

of things together that don't work than the few that really do produce higher order

synergies.

When we look at a history of war and then we look at exponentially more powerful warfare,

an arms race that drives that in all these directions, and when we look at a history

of environmental destruction and exponentially more powerful tech that makes exponential

externalities multiplied by the total number of agents that are doing it and the cumulative

effects, there's a lot of ways the whole thing can break, like a lot of different ways.

And for it to get ahead, it has to have none of those happen.

And so there's just a probability space where it's easier to imagine that thing.

So to say how do we have a protopic future, we have to say, well, one criteria must be

that it avoids all of the catastrophic risks.

So can we understand – can we inventory all the catastrophic risks?

Can we inventory the patterns of human behavior that give rise to them?

And could we try to solve for that?

And could we have that be the essence of the social technology that we're thinking about

to be able to guide, bind, and direct a new physical technology?

Because so far, our physical technology – like we were talking about the Genghis Khan's

like that, that obviously use certain kinds of physical technology and armaments and also

social technology and unconventional warfare for a particular set of purposes.

But we have things that don't look like warfare, like Rockefeller and Standard Oil.

And it looked like a constructive mindset to be able to bring this new energy resource

to the world, and it did.

And the second order effects of that are climate change and all of the oil spills that have

happened and will happen and all of the wars in the Middle East over the oil that have

been there and the massive political clusterfuck and human life issues that are associated

with it and on and on, right?

And so it's also not just the orientation to construct a thing can have a narrow focus

on what I'm trying to construct but be affecting a lot of other things through second and third

order effects I'm not taking responsibility for.

You often on another tangent mentioned second, third, and fourth order effects.

And order.

And order.

Cascading.

Which is really fascinating.

Like starting with the third order plus it gets really interesting because we don't

even acknowledge like the second order effects.

Right.

But like thinking because those it could get bigger and bigger and bigger in ways we were

not anticipating.

So how do we make those?

So it sounds like part of the thing that you are thinking through in terms of a solution

how to create an anti fragile, a resilient society is to make explicit acknowledge, understand

the externalities, the second order, third order, fourth order, and the order effects.

How do we start to think about those effects?

Yeah, the war application is harm we're trying to cause or that we're aware we're causing.

Right.

The externality is harm that at least supposedly we're not aware we're causing or at minimum

it's not our intention.

Right.

Maybe we're either totally unaware of it or we're aware of it but it is a side effect

of what our intention is.

It's not the intention itself.