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

Consilience Project that is aimed at improving public sense making and dialogue.

He's 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 Groud News, Netsuite, FourSigmatic, MagixBoon, 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 Schmacktenberger. 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 The Hitchhiker's Guide, there's I think

like a paragraph or a couple sentences. How would you summarize, sorry, how would the alien

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 and 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 2000 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 like 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 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 more 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. It would be hard to think otherwise. I know I think Posterum 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 in

story on it. But when I look at the total number of Kepler planets just that we're aware of just

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

six primary atoms that 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've had guests on your show discussing tic tac and oh 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 out 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's secret or otherworldly

technology. What do you make sense of all that because it's gaining quite a bit of popularity

recently. There is some sense of 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 visual 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 like we can 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 OK well could it be a hologram.

What would it show up on radar 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 is 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 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 much it

would be beyond the cognitive capabilities of us humans just as you were saying as per your answer

for alien summarizing earth it's 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 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 of 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. 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 not 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 up 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 uh for fun at night when I lay in bed I think about what it would be like to ride those

waves when they not not the low magnitude they are as that when they reach earth but get closer

to the black holes because they'll 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's travels at speed of light.

It travels at speed which a very weird thing to say when you're when you're uh morphing space time

it's it's it's you could argue it's faster than the speed of light so if you are able to communicate

by to summon enough energy to generate black holes and to orbit the uh to 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 uh

uh gravitational waves as something you can communicate with because the the radio will

be have to be the very large size of very dense but perhaps that's it you know perhaps that's one

way to communicate it's a very effective way and uh 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 so you're not just harnessing

the power of a star but harnessing the power of mutually rotating black holes um i i that's way

above my physics pay grade to think about including even uh non rotating black hole versions of

trans warp travel um i think uh 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 uh how to improve human civilization uh orbiting black holes is not in

on the first page for you and not on the first page okay i bet you did not expect us to start

this competition here but i'm glad the places it went i am excited under my smallest scale of uh

mars europe or titan venus potentially having very like bacteria like life forms just on a

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 they're not like us that's a little bit

scary i don't know what's scary actually i think both scary and exciting no matter what right the

idea that they could be very different and philosophically very interesting for us to

open our aperture on what life and consciousness and 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 in different in other ways um 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 memetic 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 uh one of us would die off quickly through basically mass murder without even even

accidentally 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

it either output something that was toxic or utilized up the same resource too quickly and it

just replicated faster mutated faster it wouldn't be a um memetic theory conflict theory kind of

harm it would just be uh a von Neumann machine a self replicating machine that was fundamentally

incompatible with these kinds of self replicating systems with faster ootaloops for one final time

putting your alien flash god hat on and you look at human civilization the 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 uh 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

about your conclusions um 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 uh rather than just a single human or the entire human species let's

look at uh in a relatively isolated tribe yes in the relatively isolated probably sub dunmar

number sub kind of 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 um that are interacting in some

way well could those individuals exist without the group no uh the evolutionary adaptiveness of humans

was involved critically group selection and individual humans alone trying to figure out

stone tools and protection and whatever uh 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 in deep into political theories also which is theories

that orient towards the collective at different scales whether a tribal scale or an empire or

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 uh it's a matter of degrees i suppose but what is uh what defines a human

more the the social network within the which they've been brought up through which they've

developed their intelligence or is it their own sovereign individual self

like 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 two or three hundred

thousand years of homo sapiens in the little tribes where they depended upon that tribe for

survival and excommunication from the tribe was 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 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 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 it made all the stuff that we depend on but we

don't notice that we depend upon them they all seem fungible um if you take a baby obviously

that you didn't even get to a baby without a mom was it dependent we depend upon each other right

without two 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 there this has happened a few times it doesn't learn language and it doesn't learn the

articulation 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 i think we take for granted how much

conditioning affects us um is it possible that uh it affects basically 99.9 or maybe the whole

thing the whole thing is the connection between us humans and there were no better than apes

without our human connections because that 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 um yes and i 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 uh 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 i suppose there's experiments that show that

there's other mammals that have a very crude theory of mind i'm 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 a inkling sense that that

only exists because we're social creatures that that doesn't come uh with this with the

hardware and the software any in the beginning that's like uh that's learned as an effective

uh tool for communication almost like we we think we i think we think uh that consciousness is

fundamental and uh maybe it's not uh there's um 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 to uh help us

construct theories of mind you almost put yourself in the world as a subjective being

in that experience you want to reach the experience 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 is uh creative you know present the facade of consciousness and with it with the task

of uh making that facade very convincing to us humans and thereby it will become conscious

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

to humans is there some element of that that you uh you find convincing this is a much harder set of

questions and deep end of the pool than starting with the aliens was um we went from aliens to

consciousness this is not the trajectory i was expecting nor you but let us walk a while we

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 um subjectivity

first person uh i i don't remember exactly the quote but i remember when reading when sam

Harris wrote the book free will and then denet 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 um supernatural

ideas and here denet believed there is something like free will he is a determinist

compatibilist but no consciousness and radical limitivist 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 was because the other one didn't understand the

philosophy of science um or logical fallacies and 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 to because they weren't making any progress and 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 per 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 uh 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 um well and also allowing our minds to drift together for time so there are definitions

of these terms aligned 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 like he could 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 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 experiences if he has no free will

like he's a a leaf flowing down the river and given that he's very sure that consciousness

is fundamental so here's a this conscious leaf that's subjectively experiencing the floating

the floating and yet there's no ability to control and make any decisions for for itself it's only a

the decisions have all 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

the catholic theologian but evolutionary theorist tear de chardon describes this and

that rather than a creator agent god in the beginning there's a creative impulse or a creative

process and he was 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 experiences we've had and then

one the types of experiences 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 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 it a eyes

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 gonna 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 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 of qualia as experience sensation desire emotion phenomenology the but the the felt sense not the

we say emotion and we think of a neurochemical pattern or a integrand 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 and 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 and to higher orders of it and that

there's correspondence but that neither like the like the idealists do we reduce third person

to first person which is what idealists do or neither like the physicalists or do we reduce

first person to third person obviously bone talked about an implicate order that was deeper than

and gave rise to the explicate order of both natal 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 increase 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 what I say that

obviously the sapien brain is pretty unique and a single sapien 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 a 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 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

we'll never accomplish anything is I spent much of the morning trying to calculate trying to do

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

versus the state of the R CPUs and GPUs now arriving at about 20 quadrillion so that's 2 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 the let's say the 20 thread state of the arts Intel CPU the the 10th generation

and then there's similar calculation for the for the 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 terms of calories

per day kilo calories that's about two 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 that are fueled by something like depending on your diet three bananas so three bananas results

in in computation it's about a million times more powerful than the current state of the

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 the relevant computations

are synaptic firings and that there's nothing other than synaptic firings that we have to

to factor so um i'm forgetting his name right now there's a very uh uh famous neuroscientists

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 demasio'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 uh 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 is 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 and then you could have uh and and then the synaptic firings we're referring to is strictly

the electrical signals that could be the mechanical transmission of information like

this chemical transmission of information there's there's all kinds of other stuff going on

and 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 uh 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 they could buy you a lot you could buy you a lot

but on the topic of sort of uh 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 or simple rules create incredible complexity uh not create incredible

complexity emerges so one of the simplest things to do that with is uh cellular automata and there's

i don't know what it is and maybe you can speak to it we can certainly 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 are much uh that operate on a scale much higher than the underlying mechanism so with

cellular automata that's cells that are born and die born or 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 moment of the time before you remember that the simple rules on cells is all

that it took to create that that's 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 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 can be computer coded it's not 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 sub disciplines like stigma g are are studying how following

fairly simple responses to a pheromone signal do ant colonies do this amazing thing where the

what what you might describe as the organizational or computational capacity of the colony is so

profound relative to what each individual um ants is doing i am not um anywhere near as well versed

in the cutting edge of cellular automatas i would like unfortunately i in terms of topics that i

would like to get to and haven't like uh et's more um all forms a new kind of science i have only

skimmed and read reviews of and not read the whole thing or his newer work since um but

his idea of the four basic kind of categories of uh 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 uh chaos or homogeneity or um 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

i'm not that reductionistly oriented and um so if you look at say santa fe institute one of the

cofounders to our kaufman um his work he should you should really get him on your show so a lot

of the questions that you like one of kaufman's you know 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 uh in kind of non reductionist approach but that is not just

silly hippieism um 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 um 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 uh dave snowden

who some people call the father of anthro complexity or what is the complexity unique to humans uh

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

cut it like we we we don't respond exactly identically to the same pheromone stimulus using

stigmer 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 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 um 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 um one of the interesting things there is that their uniqueness is extremely

low they're basically fungible within a class right the different classes but within a class

they're basically fungible and their system uses that very high numbers and lots of um loss right

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 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 the world i think you don't put in a 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 our selected species so

they're different evolutionary processes they are selected species where you have a whole

a lot of death and very high birth rates you're 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 um so yeah i would say there's probably more

difference between one orca in the next than there is between one cape buffalo in the next

given that it would be interesting to get your thoughts about mimetic 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 world view to you of gerardian mimetic 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 um so a certain amount of learning through observing is not unique to humans humans

do more of it uh it's actually kind of worth speaking to this for a moment um monkeys can

learn new behaviors new we've even seen teaching an ape sign language and then the ape teaching

other apes sign language um 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 uh 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 in the neotony how long we're basically fetal um

that a 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 and not only can we not hold

on to mom in the first day it's three months before we can move our head volitionally um so it's like

why why are we embryonic for so long basically that it's like 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 um so here's a place where there's a co evolution of the pattern

of humans specifically here are our neotony 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 tusks is like a beaver and then you wear an la you fly

into lax and you look at the just orthogonal grid going on forever in all directions and you know

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

for 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 yeah um 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 right and this is really important because we actually went and became apex

predators in every environment we functioned like apex predators but polar bear can't leave the arctic

right 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 and them adapted to the environment or at least with our tools adapted to the environment

so then every aspect towards any organism in any environment were incredibly good at

becoming apex predators yes and nothing else can do that kind of thing there 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 started out stripping 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 um like just for an example

the the top apex predator in the world in 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 right like that's not an apex predator um 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 uh 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 think are we using the word predator sort of generally

which then connects to conflict and uh military conflict violent conflict in in this space 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 um 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

you know uh generally being defined as mining other animals right we don't consider herbivores

predators but um animal which requires some type of violence capacity because animals move plants

don't move so requires some capacity to uh overtake something that can move and try to get away um

we'll go back to the juridzing then we'll come back here why are we neoteness 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 we're doing

pretty much the same stuff and so since we make tools and we involve 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 uh gonna be very important learn the

tool making learn the um and so we have a very long period of relative helpless of 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 it's 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 um 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 in 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 um now giard 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'd 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 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 giard 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 uh 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'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 is true it's a very interesting way to think about

the world and in the same way thinking about the memetic 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 you know others we're exposed to so there's these like

little local pockets however define local of people like imitating each other and uh one

that's super empowering because then you can pick which group you can join like what what do you

want to imitate it's uh it's the old like you know 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 communism um i'm i'm

gonna 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 as libertarian and self determining and sovereign as we'd like

to be um 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 were if if you grew up in darfur versus finland you would be different with your same

genetics like just just no real question about that um and that even today if you hang out in a place

with ultramarathoners as your roommates or um 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 pretty clear so uh 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 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 to predispose positive things for those

around you or perhaps also to there 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 so 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 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 they're 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 that the

environment conditions the individuals so you have a thesis and an antithesis and then Hegel's

idea is 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 steal 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 want 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 nante thesis it's like eight different views right

can I steal 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 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 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 sure shared 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 the depth of their sentience I don't want to fuck

them anymore and I mean I hurt them I don't want to behave in a I don't want my proposition to go

through when I go and inhabit the perspective of the other people 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 like 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's 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 across 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 it could reconcile the partial sense making that

everyone holds and they could offer a way forward that is more agreeable than the partial perspectives

that were with each other but the more you succeeded this empathy with humility the more

you're carrying the burden of their 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 them 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

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

like little agents behaving in this way my intuition there'll be interesting complexities

that are merged 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 Jared 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 he never had time to turn back to the other we're gonna have to do that quite a lot

we're gonna be uh living that poem over and over again but yes how how to uh 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

they're in conflict over trying to get the same stuff power status attention physical stuff

a mate whatever it is and then the we learn the conflict by watching and so then the conflict

becomes a medic so the and you know we become on the the Palestinian side of the Israeli side of

the communist like 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 gonna blame and you know Jorard talks about why scapegoating

was kind of a mechanism to minimize the amount of violence let's blame let's blame it a set 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 went

you beautifully summarized it but the idea that there's a scapegoat that there's a this kind of

thing naturally still conflict and then they find the other some group that's the other that's either

real artificial as the cause of the conflict well it's always artificial because the cause of the

conflict in jorard 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 as

the cause of suffering um jorard and buddha would kind of agree in this way so and 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 jorard the other day in such a elegant and beautiful and simple way it's a a friend who's a

uh grew up aboriginal australian uh is a scholar of aboriginal social technologies and he's like

nah man jorard 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

like 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 uh 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 uh so maybe maybe

just dance it because he says like doing exercise and running on that treadmill gets gets all the

demons out 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

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 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 um it's back to the cellular automata you can't you can't uh put the uh

genie back in bottle like uh when you realize it's unfortunately sadly impossible to um

um to create a model of cellular automata even if you know the basic rules that predict to even

any degree of accuracy what uh um how that system will evolve which is fascinating mathematically

sorry i 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 um 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 uh so you're you're

disagree jordan pierce you should clean up your room see you like the rooms messy it's uh 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 is meaningful is that 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 uh we

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

and the other kind of fundamental laws and the 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 davis noden made well um in defining the difference between simple complicated complex

and chaotic systems um 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 uh 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

um where sorry for human systems for human technologies human technologies sorry so okay

so so not that are basically the application of models right right and engineering is kind

of applied science science as the modeling process and but with but humans are complex

complex stuff with biological type stuff um 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 virus is 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 uh 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 as it currently is is a self terminating system

um why do you have that intuition combined with the definition of what's of self terminating

means okay so if we look at human societies historically human civilizations uh 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 in it

the early egyptian empire or inka or maya or aztec or any of those right and so

they they terminated sometimes it seems like they were terminated from the outside in war

sometimes it seems like they self terminate when we look at easter island it was a self

termination um 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 uh

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

um 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 uh if you

look at empires they rise and fall throughout human history but but not this time bro where

where this one's gonna last forever that's 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 some what 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 the 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 that may

not be self terminating if if there's more innovation than there is consumption so over

consumption of resources 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

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 apply and demand will solve the problems whatever would you put raker as well

on 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 play time it's a platonic ideal there 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 unabombers 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 ex risk community you know boss drum 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 bowdryard 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 um obviously jarrod diamond made a more popular book called collapse

and as we were mentioning the anti catheria mechanism has been getting attention in the

news lately but it's like a 2000 year old clock right like like metal gears and

and does that mean we lost like 1500 years of technological progress um and from a society

that was relatively technologically advanced um 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

and 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 anti fragility 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 a agi biotech bioengineering nanotechnology

nano my favorite nanobots okay 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 consequence i would definitely be

i would be podcasting all about the negative consequences but when i go back home i'd be

i just in my heart know the amount of excitement is a dumb descendant of ape no offense to apes

so 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 can we start to pull it a thread because you've also provided kind of a beautiful

general approach to this which is this dialectic synthesis or just rigorous empathy whatever

whatever word we're going to put to it that seems to be from the individual perspective

is one way to sort of live in the world as we try to figure out how to construct non self

terminating systems so what what are some underlying sources yeah first i have to say

uh i i actually really respect Drexler for emphasizing gray goo and engines of creation

back in the day um to make sure the world was paying adequate attention to the risks of the

the nanotech um as someone who was right at the cutting edge of what could be um

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 um because they get to market first um and

then they externalize all of the costs through limited liability or whatever it is to the commons

or wherever happened 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 um is probably not going to move into positions of as much power influence as quickly

so this one of the issues we have to deal with is some of the the bad game theoretic dispositions

in the system relative to its own um stability and the key aspect of 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 uh so ice cream aside what's uh what do you most worry about there's a catastrophic

risk that will help us kind of um make concrete the the 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 um go all the way back to the aliens who've seen all

of civilization but to just recognize that um 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 um that 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 they it wasn't a fully global phenomena so an empire could fall in surrounding

empires didn't fall maybe they came in filled the space um 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 two in 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 it's not that we didn't behave in ways that would have

done it we just you 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 two where we don't have the ability to make a

non habitable biosphere non habitable for us and then there's world war two 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 in the the history of wars you study european history whatever it's generals

and wars and empire expansions and and so the 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 two 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 two we actually realized

that nation states couldn't prevent world war and so we needed a new type of of supervening

government in addition to nation states which was the whole bread and 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 you know cold war

and i would say we're in a new phase now where the bread and wood solution is basically over

almost over you described the bread most solution yeah so the bread and 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 be more profitable to actually be able to trade with each other so our own self

interest was you know going to drive our non more interest and so this started to look like

and obviously this 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 you know quickly but like we were mentioning earlier almost all the electronics that we

used 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 you know etc and so the idea

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 that was part of kind of the the breton woods post world war two model the other

was that we would 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

unrenovable use of resource and turning those resources into pollution on the other side of

the supply chain so obviously that faster gdp growth meant uh the overfishing of the oceans

and the cutting down of the trees and the climate change and the uh mining toxic mining tailings

going into the water and the mountaintop removal mining and all those types of things that's the

over consumption side of the 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 that was thought about for a long time but it started to be modeled

with the club of rome and limits of growth um and it 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 or or and you take or oil and 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 and so that's that kind of thing that has happened um 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 breton 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 deproliferation 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 a much easier to create a stable Nash equilibrium that's forced but the ability

to modern 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 two and world war two is just from a

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 how do we become safe vessels safe stewards of many different types of exponential technology

is a key question when we're thinking about ex risk okay so and I'd like to try to answer the

how a few a few ways but first on the mutually assured destruction do you give credit to the

idea of two superpowers not 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 bigger your weapons not because you're afraid of mutually

assured self destruction but because we're human beings and there's a deep moral fortitude there

that's 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 is 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 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 new small group people could do it takes still some real

technical knowledge that required having studied for a while and some in 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 what 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

like there's a lot of people as smarter 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 yes and it does have to do with some deeply pro social types of characteristics in

humans and 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

Ukraine Ukrainian munitions factory and do the equivalent of an incendiary bomb level of damage

that's just home tech that's just simple kind of thing and so the question is not

what is does it stay being a small percentage of the population the question is does can you

bind that phenomena nearly completely and especially now when you as you start to get

into bigger things crisper 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

I'm trying to say that there is some let's call it that's a random word love that's inherent in

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 anyone individual could 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 you can 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 of

biotech and and AI and and drones okay I'm gonna come at 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 but I'm I'm gonna argue

against why that is a given because it because it's not a given I don't believe and I think this

is like a good romantic comedy so you're gonna create drama right now but it will end with 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 in the sum 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 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 also I mean the environmental versions the terrorist versions the war versions

the cumulative externalities versions um can I and I'm sorry if I'm interrupting your flow of

thought but why is it easier is it could it be a weird psychological thing where we either I'm

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 uh like I love playing shooter games

you know uh first person shooters and like especially if it's like murdering zombie and doom

you're shooting demons I play one of my favorite games diabolus like slashing through different

monsters and the screaming and pain and the hellfire and then I go out into the real world uh to eat

my coconut ice cream and I'm all about love so I got that can we trust our ability to visualize

how all 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 um morbid exploration and whatever

else that happens in our imagination uh 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 on a

desk but that doesn't actually make a functioning human and and you can kill an adult human in a

second but you can't get one in a second takes 20 years to grow one and a lot of things to happen

right I could destroy this building in a couple minutes with demolition but it took a year or

a couple years to build it there is uh I'm down cold this is just an example it's not he doesn't

mean it there's a 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

and so when we look at a history of war and then we look at exponentially more powerful warfare

norm's race it drives out 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 in 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 what 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 risk 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 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

and 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 and you often another tangent mentioned second third and fourth order

effects and order and and fascinating which is really fascinating like starting with the third

order plus it gets really interesting because we don't we don't even acknowledge like the second

order effects right but like thinking because those it could map it could get bigger and bigger

and bigger in ways we're not anticipating so how do we make those so it sounds like part of the

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

there are catastrophic risks from both types the direct application of increased technological

power to a rival risk intent which is going to cause harm for some out group for some in group

to win but the out group is also working on growing the tech and if they don't lose completely they

reverse engineer the tech up regulated come back with more capacity so there's the exponential tech

arms race side of in group out group rivalry using exponential tech that is one set of risks

and the other set of risks is the application of exponentially more powerful tech not intentionally

to try and beat an out group but to try to achieve some goal that we have but to produce a second

and third order effects that do have harm to the commons to other people to environment to other

groups that might actually be bigger problems than the problem we were originally trying to

solve with the thing we were building when facebook was building a dating app and then

building a social app where people could tag pictures they weren't trying to build a democracy

destroying app uh that would maximize time on site as part of its ad model through ai

optimization of a news feed to the thing that made people spend most time on site which is usually

them being limbically hijacked more than something else which ends up appealing to people's cognitive

biases and group identities and creates no sense of shared reality they weren't trying to do that

but it was a second order effect and it's a pretty fucking powerful second order effect

and a pretty fast one because the rate of tech is obviously able to get distributed to much larger

scale much faster and with a bigger jump in terms of total vertical capacity then that's what it

means to get to the verticalizing part of an exponential curve so um just like we can see

that oil had these second order environmental effects and also social and political effects

war and so much of the whole like the total amount of oil used is has a proportionality to

total global GDP and this way we have this you know the petrodollar and um and so the the oil

thing also had the externalities of a major aspect of what happened with military industrial

complex and things like that so but we can see the same thing with with more current technologies

with facebook and google um and and other things so i don't think we can run and the more powerful

the tech is we build it for reason x whatever reason x is maybe x is three things maybe it's

one thing right we we're doing the oil thing because we want to make cars because it's a

better method of individual transportation we're building the facebook thing because we're going

to connect people socially in the personal sphere but it it interacts with it interacts with complex

systems with ecologies economies psychologies cultures and so it has effects on other than the

thing we're intending some of those effects can end up being negative effects but because this

technology if if we make it to solve a problem it has to overcome the problem the problem's been

around for a while it's going to overcome in a short period of time so it usually has greater

scale greater rate of magnitude in some way that also means that the externalities that it creates

might be bigger problems and you can say well but then that's the new problem and humanity will

innovate its way out of that well i don't think that's paying attention to the fact that we can't

keep up with exponential curves like that nor do finite spaces allow exponential externalities

forever and this is why a lot of the smartest people thinking about this are thinking well

no i think we're totally screwed and unless we can make a benevolent ai singleton that

rules all of us um you know guys like boss drum and and others uh thinking in those directions

because they're like how do humans try to do multi polarity and make it work and i i have a

different answer of what i think it looks like that does have more to do with the love but some

applied social tech aligning aligned with love because i have a bunch of really dumb ideas i

prefer to uh i'd like to hear i'd like to hear some of them first i think the idea i would have is

uh to be a bit more rigorous in trying to measure the amount of love you add or subtract from the

world in second third fourth fifth order effects it's actually i think especially in the world of

tech quite doable you know you just might not like you know the the shareholders may not like

that kind of metric but it's pretty easy to measure like that's not even uh um perhaps half

joking about love but we could talk about just happiness and well being long term well being

that's pretty easy from facebook for youtube for all these companies to measure that

they do a lot of kinds of surveys they could do i mean there's very simple solutions here

that you can just survey how i mean servers are in some sense use useless because they're um

a subset of the population you're just trying to get a sense it's very loose kind of understanding

but integrated deeply as part of the technology most of our tech is recommender systems most of the

sorry not tech uh online interaction is driven by recommender systems that learn very little data

about you and use that data based on mostly based on traces of your previous behavior to

suggest future things this is how twitter this is facebook works this is how uh adsense for google

adsense works is how netflix youtube work and so on and and for them to just track as opposed to

engagement how much you spend in a particular video particular site is also track give you the

technology to do self report of what makes you feel good of what makes you grow as a person

of what makes you uh you know the best version of yourself the the the the rogan uh idea of

the hero of your movie and just add that little bit of information if you you have people you have

this like happiness surveys of how you feel about the last five days how would you report

your experience you can lay out the set of videos this is kind of fascinating to me i don't know if

you ever look at youtube the history of videos you've looked at it's fascinating it's very embarrassing

for me like you'll be like a lecture and then like a set of videos that i don't want anyone to know

about which is which is which will be like uh i don't know maybe like five videos in a row where

it looks like i watched the whole thing which i probably did i bought like how to cook a steak

even though or just like the best chefs in the world cooking steaks and i'm just like

sitting there watching it for no purpose whatsoever wasting away my life or like funny

cat videos or like legit that doesn't that's always a good one and i could look back and rate

which videos made me a better person and not and i mean on a more serious note there's a bunch of

conversations podcasts or lectures i've watched which made me a better person and some of them

made me a worse person uh quite honestly not for stupid reasons like i feel dumber but because i do

have a sense that that started me on a path of um of not being kind to other people for example

i'll give you uh for my own and i'm sorry for rantic but maybe there's some usefulness to this

kind of exploration of self when i focus on creating on programming on science i'd become

a much deeper thinker and a kinder person to others when i listen to too many a little bit

is good but too many podcasts or videos about how how our world is melting down or criticizing

ridiculous people the worst of the quote unquote woke for example all there's all these groups

that are misbehaving in fascinating ways because they've been corrupted by power the more i what

the more i watch criticism of them the worse i become and i'm aware of this but i'm also aware

that for some reason it's pleasant to watch those sometimes and so for for me to be able to self

report that to the youtube algorithm to the systems around me and they ultimately try to optimize to

make me the best person the best version of myself which i personally believe would make youtube a

lot more money because i'd be much more willing to spend time i need to have been given youtube a

lot more a lot more of my money that's uh that's great for business and great for humanity because

it'll make me a kinder person it'll increase the the love quotient the love metric and uh it'll

make them a lot of money i feel like everything's aligned and so you you should do that not just

for youtube algorithm but also for military strategy and for this to go to war or not

because one externality you can think of about going to war which i think we talked about offline

is we often go to war with kind of governments with uh with not with the people you have to think

about the kids of countries that see a soldier and because of what they experience the interaction

with the soldier hate is born when you're like eight years old six years old you lose your dad

you lose your mom you lose a friend somebody close to you that want a really powerful externality

that could be reduced to love positive and negative is uh the hate that's born when you

make decisions and that's going to take fruition that that little seed is going to become a tree

that then leads to the kind of destruction that we talk about uh so but in my sense it's possible

to reduce everything to a measure of how much love does this add to the world

all that to say uh do you have ideas of how we practically uh build systems

that that that create a resilient society there are a lot of good things that you shared where

there's like 15 different ways that we could enter this that are all interesting so i'm

trying to see which one will probably be most useful pick the uh the one or two things that are

least ridiculous when you're mentioning if we could see some of the second order effects

or externalities that we aren't used to seeing specifically the one of a kid being radicalized

somewhere else which engenders enmity and them towards us which decreases our own future security

even if you don't care about the kid if you care about the kids the whole other thing um yeah i mean

i think when we saw this when jane fonda and others went to vietnam and took photos and videos

of what was happening and you got to see the pictures of the kids with napalm on them uh that

like the anti war effort was bolstered by that in a way it couldn't have been without that there's

there's a until we can see the images you can't have a mere neuron effect in the same way and when

you can that starts to have a powerful effect i think there's a deep principle that you're

sharing there which is that if we we can have a rivalrous intent where our in group whatever

it is maybe it's our political party wanting to win within the us maybe it's our nation state wanting

to win in a a war or an economic war over resource or whatever it is that if we don't obliterate the

other people completely they don't go away they're they're not engendered to like us more

or they're they didn't become less smart so they have more enmity towards us and whatever

technologies we employed to be successful they will now reverse engineer make iterations on

and come back and so you you drive in arms race which is why you can see that the wars were over

history employing more lethal weaponry and not just the kinetic war um the information war and

the narrative war and the economic war right like it just increased capacity in all of those fronts

and so what seems like a win to us on the short term might actually really produce losses in the

long term and what's even in our own best interest in the long term is probably more aligned with

everyone else because we inter affect each other and i think the thing about globalism

globalization and exponential tech and the rate at which we affect each other and the rate at which

we affect the biosphere that we're all affected by is that this this kind of proverbial spiritual

idea that we're all interconnected and need to think about that in some way that was easy for

tribes to get because everyone in the tribe so clearly saw their interconnection independence

on each other but in terms of a global level the the speed at which we are actually interconnected

the speed at which the harm happening to something in Wuhan affects the rest of the world or a new

technology developed somewhere affects the entire world or an environmental issue or whatever

is making it to where we either actually all get not as a spiritual idea just even as physics right

we all get the interconnectedness of everything and that we either all consider that and see how

to make it through more effectively together or failures anywhere in that becoming decreased

quality of life and failures and increased risk everywhere don't you think people are beginning

to experience that at the individual level so governments are resisting it they're they're

trying to make us not empathize with each other feel connected but don't you think people are

beginning to feel more and more connected like isn't that exactly what the technology is enabling

like social networks we tend to criticize them but isn't there a sense which we're experiencing you

know yeah when you watch those videos that are criticizing whether it's the woke antifa side

or the QAnon Trump supporter side does it seem like they have increased empathy for people

that are outside of their ideologic camp not at all so I may be I may be conflating my own

experience of the world and that of that of the populace I I tend to see those videos

as feeding something that's a relic of the past they figured out that drama fuels clicks but

whether I'm right or wrong I don't know but I tend to sense that that is not that hunger for drama

is not fundamental to human beings that we want to actually that we want to understand antifa

and we want to like empathize we want to take radical ideas and be able to empathize with them

and synthesize it all okay let's look at cultural outliers in terms of violence versus

compassion we can see that a lot of cultures have relatively lower in group violence bigger

out group violence and there's some variants in them in variants of different times based on the

scarcity or abundance of resource and other things but you can look at say Jains whose whole

religion is around nonviolent so much so that they don't even hurt plants they only take fruits that

fall off them and stuff or to go to a larger population you take Buddhists where for the most

part with a few exceptions for the most part across three millennia and across lots of

different countries and geographies and whatever you have 10 million people plus or minus who don't

hurt bugs the whole spectrum of genetic variants that is happening within a culture of that many

people um and head traumas and whatever and nobody hurts bugs and then you look at a group where

the kids grew up as child soldiers and Liberia or Darfur were to make it to adulthood pretty much

everybody's killed people hand to hand and killed people who were civilian or innocent type of people

and you say okay so we were very in the oddness we can be conditioned by our environment and humans

can be conditioned where almost all the humans show up in these two different bell curves it

doesn't mean that the buddhas had no violence it doesn't mean that these people had no compassion

but the they're very different Gaussian distributions and so I think one of the important

things that I like to do is look at the examples of the populations what Buddhism shows regarding

compassion or what Judaism shows around education the average level of education that everybody

gets because of a culture that is really working on conditioning it or various cultures what are

the positive deviants outside of this statistical deviance to see what is actually possible and

then say what are the conditioning factors and can we condition those across a few of them

simultaneously and could we build a civilization like that becomes a very interesting question

so there's this kind of real politic idea that humans are violent large groups of humans become

violent they become irrational specifically those two things rivalrous and violent and

irrational and so in order to minimize the total amount of violence and have some good decisions

they need ruled somehow and that not getting that as some kind of naive utopianism that doesn't

understand human nature yet this gets back to like mimesis of desire as an inexorable thing

I think the idea of the masses is actually a kind of propaganda that is useful for the classes that

control to popularize the idea that most people are too violent lazy undisciplined and irrational

to make good choices and therefore their choices should be sublimated in some kind of way I think

that if we look back at these conditioning environments we can say okay so the kids that

go to a really fancy school and have a good developmental environment like exeter academy

there's still a Gaussian distribution of how well they do on any particular metric

but on average they become senators and the worst ones become high end lawyers or whatever

and then I look at the inner city school with a totally different set of things and I see a very

very differently displaced Gaussian distribution but a very different set of conditioning factors

so then I say the masses well if all those kids who were one of the parts of the masses got to go

to exeter and have that family and whatever would they still be the masses um could we actually

condition more social virtue more civic virtue more orientation towards dialectical synthesis

more empathy more rationality widely yes would that lead to better capacity for something like

participatory governance democracy or republic or some kind of participatory governance

or yes is it necessary for it actually yes and is it good for class interests not not really

by the way when you say class interest this is the powerful leading over the the less

powerful that kind of idea anyone that benefits from asymmetries of power doesn't necessarily

benefit from decreasing those asymmetries of power and you kind of increasing the capacity

of people more widely and um so when we talk about power we're talking about asymmetries

and agency influence and control you think that hunger for power is fundamental to human nature

I think we should get that straight before we talk about other stuff so like uh this uh

this this pickup line that I use at a bar off which is uh power crops and absolute power crops

absolutely is that true or is that just a fancy thing to say in modern society they get there's

something to be said have we changed as societies over time in terms of how much we crave power

that there is an impulse towards power that is innate in people and can be conditioned one

way or the other yes but you can see that buddhist society does a very different thing with it at

scale that you don't end up seeing the emergence of the same types of sociopathic behavior

and particularly then creating sociopathic institutions um and so it's like is eating

the foods that were rare in our evolutionary environment to give us more dopamine hit because

they were rare and they're not anymore salt fat sugar um is there something pleasurable

about those where humans have an orientation to overeat if they can well the fact that there is

that possibility doesn't mean everyone will obligately be obese and I have obesity right

like it's possible to have a particular impulse and to be able to understand it have other ones

and be able to balance them and so to say that um power dynamics are are obligate in humans and

we can't do anything about it is very similar to me to saying like we could everyone is going

to be obligately obese yeah so there's some degree to which those the control those impulses

has to do with the conditioning early in life yes and the culture that creates the environment

to be able to do that and then the recursion on that okay so what if we were to uh bear with me

just asking for a friend if we're to kill all humans on earth and then start over is their

ideas about how to build up okay we don't have to kill let's leave the humans on earth they're fine

and go to mars and start a new society is there ways to construct systems of conditioning education

of how we live with each other that would um that would incentivize us properly to not seek

power not to not construct systems that are of asymmetry of power and to create systems that

are resilient to all kinds of terrorist attacks to the all kinds of destructions i believe so

so is there some inclinings we get of course you probably don't have the all the answers but you

have insights about what that looks like i mean yeah is it just rigorous practice of

dialectic synthesis as essentially conversations with assholes of various flavors until they're

not assholes anymore because you've become a deeply empathetic with their experience

okay so there's a lot of things that we would need to construct to come back to this like

what is the basis of rivalry what how do you bind it how does it relate to tech if you have a

culture that is doing less rivalry does it always lose in war to those who do war better and how

do you make something on the enactment of how to get there from here um great great so what's

rivalry well is rivalry bad or good is so is another word for rivalry competition

yes i think roughly yes i think bad and good are kind of silly concepts here good for some

things bad for other things for resilience contexts and others even that um okay let me give you

an example that relates back to the facebook measuring thing you were mentioning a moment ago

so first i think what you're saying is actually aligned with the right direction and what i want

to get to in a moment but it's not the devil is in the details here so i i enjoy praise

it feeds my ego i grow stronger so i appreciate that i will make sure to include one piece every

15 minutes as we go thank you so it's easier to measure their problems with this argument but

there's also utility to it so let's take it for the utility it has first

it's harder to measure happiness than it is to measure comfort

uh we can measure with technology that the shocks in a car making the car bounce less

that the bed is um softer and you know material science and those types of things and happiness

is actually hard for philosophers to define because some people find that there's certain

kinds of overcoming suffering that are necessary for happiness there's happiness it feels more

like contentment and happiness it feels more like passion does is passion the source of all

suffering or the source of all creativity like the there's deep stuff and it's mostly first

person not measurable third person stuff even if maybe it corresponds to third person stuff to

some degree but we also see examples of some of our favorite examples as people who are in the

worst environments who end up finding happiness right where the third person stuff looks to be

less conducive and there's some victor frankle nelson mendela whatever um but it's pretty easy

to measure comfort it's pretty universal and i think we can see that the industrial revolution

started to replace happiness with comfort quite heavily as the thing it was optimizing for and

we can see that when increased comfort is given maybe because of the evolutionary disposition

that expending extra calories when for the majority of our history we didn't have extra

calories was not a safe thing to do who knows why um when extra comfort is given it's very

easy to take that path even if it's not the path that supports overall well being long term

and um so we can see that you know when you when you look at the techno optimist idea that we have

better lives than egyptian pharaohs and kings and whatever what they're largely looking at

is how comfortable our beds are and how comfortable the transportation systems are and things like

that in which case there's massive improvement but we also see that in some of the nations where

people have access to the most comfort suicide and mental illness are the highest and we also

see that some of the happiest cultures are actually some of the ones that are in materially

lame environments and so there's a very interesting question here and if i understand correctly you

do cold showers and joe rogan was talking about how he needs to do some fairly intensive kind of

um struggle that is a non comfort to actually induce being better as a person this concept of

hormesis that it's actually stressing an adaptive system that increases its adaptive capacity and

that there's something that the happiness of a system has something to do with its adaptive

capacity its overall resilience health well being which requires a decent bit of discomfort and yet

in the in the presence of the comfort solution it's very hard to not choose it and then as you're

choosing it regularly to actually down regulate your overall adaptive capacity and so when we

start saying can we make tech where we're measuring for the things that it produces beyond just the

measure of gdp or whatever particular measures look like the revenue generation or profit generation

of my business are all the meaningful things measurable and what are the right measures

and what are the externalities of optimizing for that measurement set what meaningful things

aren't included in that measurement set that might have their own externalities these are

some of the questions we actually have to take seriously yeah and we i think they're answerable

questions right progressively better not perfect right so like so first of all let me throw out

happiness and comfort out of the discussion those seem like useless the distinction so i

because i said they're useful well being is useful but i think i take it back

i'm i knew i proposed new metrics in this brainstorm session which is so one is like

personal growth which is intellectual growth i think we're able to make that concrete

for ourselves like you're a better person than you were a week ago or a worse person than you

were a week ago i think we can ourselves report that and and and understand what that means it's

this gray area and we try to define it but i think we humans are pretty good at that because we

have a sense an idealistic sense of the person we might be able to become we we all dream of

becoming a certain kind of person and i think we have a sense of getting closer and not towards

that person maybe this is not a great metric fine the other one is love actually

fuck if you're happy or not or you're comfortable or not how much love do you have towards your

fellow human beings i feel like if you try to optimize that and increasing that that's going to have

that's a good metric how many times a day sorry if i can make quantify how many times a day have you

thought positively of another human being just put that down as a number and increase that number

i think the process of saying okay so let's not take gdp or gdp per capita is the metric we

want to optimize for because gdp goes up during war and it goes up with more health care spending

from sicker people and various things that we wouldn't say correlate to quality of life

addiction drives gdp awesomely um by the way when i said growth i wasn't referring to gdp

i know i'm giving an example now of the primary metric we use and why it's not an adequate metric

and because we're exploring other ones so the idea of saying what would the metrics for a

good civilization be if i had to pick a set of metrics what would the best ones be if i was going

to optimize for those and then really try to run the thought experiment more deeply and say okay so

what happens if we optimize for that try to think through the first and second and third order effects

of what happens it's positive and then also say what negative things can happen from optimizing

that what actually matters that is not included in that or in that way of defining it because love

versus number of positive thoughts per day i could just make a long list of names and just

say positive thing about each one it's all very superficial not include animals with the rest of

life have a have a very shallow total amount of it but i'm optimizing the number and if i get some

credit for the number so the and this is when i said the model of reality isn't reality when you

make a set of metrics they were going to optimize for this whatever reality is that is not included

in those metrics can be the areas where harm occurs which is why i would say that wisdom is something

like the discernment that leads to right choices beyond what metrics based optimization would offer

yeah but another way to say that is wisdom is constantly expanding an evolving set of metrics

which means that there is something in you that is recognizing a new metric that's important that

isn't part of that metric set so there's a certain kind of connection discernment awareness

and this is an iterative game theory there's a girdles in completeness there right which is if

the system if the set of things is consistent it won't be complete so we're going to keep adding

to it which is why we were saying earlier i don't think it's not beautiful and especially if you

were just saying one of the metrics you want to optimize for at the individual level is becoming

right that we're becoming more well that's then becomes true for the civilization and our metrics

sets as well yeah and our definition of how to think about a meaningful life and a meaningful

civilization i can tell you what some of my favorite metrics are what's that

well love is obviously not a metric it's like you can bench yeah it's a good metric yeah i want

to optimize that across the entire population starting with infants um so in the same way that

love isn't a metric but you could make metrics that look at certain parts of it the thing i'm

about to say isn't a metric but it's a it's a consideration because i thought about this a lot

i don't think there is a metric a right one um i think that every metric by itself without this

thing we talked about of the continuous improvement becomes a paperclip maximizer i think that's why

why what the idea of false idol means in terms of the model of reality not being reality then

my sacred relationship is to reality itself which also binds me to the unknown forever

to the known but also to the unknown and there's a sense of sacredness connected to the unknown

that creates an epistemic humility that is always seeking not just to optimize the thing i know

but to learn new stuff and to be open to perceive reality directly so my model never becomes sacred

my model is useful my so the model can't be the false idol correct yeah and this is why the first

verse of the Tao Te Ching is the Tao that is nameable is not the eternal Tao the naming then

can become the source of the 10 000 things that if you get too carried away with it can actually

obscure you from paying attention to reality beyond in the models it sounds a lot a lot like

Steven Wolfram but in a different language much more poetic i can't imagine that no i'm referring

i'm joking but there's echoes of cellular phenomena which you can't name you can't construct a good

model cellular phenomena you can only watch in awe i apologize i'm distracting your train of thought

horribly and miserably making a difference by the way something robots aren't good at

and uh dealing with the uncertainty of uneven ground you've been okay so far you've been doing

wonderfully so what's your favorite metrics okay so i know you're not so i have a fascinating

so one metric and there are problems with this but one metric that i like to just as a thought

experiment to consider is because you're actually asking where i mean i know you ask your guests

about the meaning of life because ultimately when you're deciding when you're saying what is a

desirable civilization you can't answer that without answering what is a meaningful human life and

to say what is a good civilization because it's going to be in relationship to that

right um and then you have whatever your answer is how do you know what is the what is the

epistemic basis for for postulating that there's also a whole nother reason for asking that question

i don't i mean that doesn't even apply to you whatsoever which is it's interesting how few

people have been asked questions like it we we we joke about these questions is silly right

it's it's funny to watch a person and if i was more of an asshole i would really stick on that

question right it's a silly question in some sense but like we haven't really considered

what it means just a more concrete version of that question is what is what is a better world

what is the kind of world we're trying to create really i think have you really thought okay i'll

give you some kind of simple answers to that that are meaningful to me but let me do the societal

indices first because they're fun yes we should take a note of this meaningful thing because it's

important to come back to um are you reminding me to ask you about the meaning of life noted

let me jot that down yeah so um well because i think i stopped tracking it like 25 open threads

okay let her all burn one index that i find very interesting is the inverse correlation of

addiction within the society the more a society produces addiction within the people in it the

less healthy i think the society is as a pretty fundamental metric and so the more the individuals

feel that there are less compulsive things in compelling them to behave in ways that are destructive

to their own values and insofar as a civilization is conditioning and influencing the individuals

within it the inverse of addiction broadly defined correct addiction what's yeah compulsive behavior

that is destructive towards things that we value yeah i think that's a very interesting one to

think about that's a really interesting one yeah and this is then also where comfort and

addiction start to get very close and the ability to go in the other direction from addiction is

the ability to be exposed to hypernormal stimuli and not go down the path of desensitizing to other

stimuli and needing that hypernormal stimuli which does involve a kind of hormesis so i do think

the civilization of the future has to create something like ritualized discomfort and um

um ritualized discomfort yeah i think that's what the sweat lodge and the vision quest

and the solo journey and the ayahuasca journey and the sundance were i think it's even a big

part of what yoga asana was um is to make beings that are resilient and strong they have to overcome

some things to make beings that can control their own mind and fear they have to face some fears

but we don't want to put everybody in war or real trauma and yet we can see that

the most fucked up people we know had childhoods of a lot of trauma but some of the most incredible

people we know had childhoods of a lot of trauma whether or not they happen to make it through

and overcome that or not so how do we get the benefits of the stealing of character and the

resilience and the whatever that happened from the difficulty without traumatizing people

a certain kind of ritualized discomfort that not only has us overcome something by ourselves

but overcome it together with each other where nobody bails when it gets hard because the other

people are there so it's both a resilience of the individuals and a resilience of the bonding

so i think we'll keep getting more and more comfortable stuff but we have to also

develop resilience in the presence of that um for the anti addiction direction and the fullness

of character um and the trustworthiness to others so you have to be uh consistently

injecting discomfort into the system ritualize i mean this sounds like uh you have to imagine

sycophas happy you have to uh imagine sycophas with his rock optimally resilient from a metrics

perspective in society so we want we want to constantly be throwing rocks at ourselves

not constantly uh you didn't have to frequently um periodically yes and there's different levels

of intensity different period of disease now i do not think this should be imposed by states

i think it should emerge from cultures and i think the cultures are developing people that

understand the value of it so the people so there is both a cultural cohesion to it but

there's also a voluntarism because the people value the thing that is being developed to understand

it and that's what condition so it's conditioning it's conditioning some of these um some of these

values and conditioning is a bad word because we like our idea of sovereignty but when we recognize

the language that we speak and the words that we think in and the patterns of thought built

into that language and the aesthetics that we like and so much is conditioned in us just

based on where we're born you can't not condition people so all you can do is take more responsibility

for what the conditioning factors are and then you have to think about this question of what is

a meaningful human life because we're unlike the other animals born into environment that they're

genetically adapted for we're building new environments that we were not adapted for and

then we're becoming affected by those so then we have to say well what kinds of environments

digital environments physical environments social environments would we want to create that would

develop the healthiest happiest most moral noble meaningful people and what are even those

sets of things that matter so you end up getting deep existential consideration at the heart of

civilization design when you start to rise how powerful we're becoming and how much

what we're building it in service towards matters before I pull it I think three threads you just

lay down is there another metric index say you're interested I'll tell you one more that I really

like there's a there's a number but the one then the next one that comes to mind is

I have to make a very quick model

healthy human bonding say we were in a tribal type setting my positive emotional states and your

positive emotional states would most of the time be correlated your negative emotional

states in mind and so you start laughing I start laughing you start crying my eyes might tear up

and we would call that the compassion compersion axis I would this is a model I find useful so

compassion is when you're feeling something negative I feel some pain I feel some empathy

something in relationship compersion is when you do well I'm stoked for you right like I actually

feel happiness right down I like compersion yeah the fact that it's such an uncommon word in English

is actually a problem culturally because I feel that often and I think that's a really good feeling

to feel and maximize for actually that's actually the metric I'm gonna say oh is the compassion

compersion at axis is the thing I would optimize for now there is a state where my emotional states

and your emotional states are just totally decoupled and that is like sociopathy I don't want

to hurt you but I don't care if I do or for you to do well or whatever but there's a worst state

and it's extremely common which is where they're inversely coupled where my positive emotions

correspond to your negative ones and vice versa and that is the I would call it the jealousy

sadism axis the jealousy axis is when you're doing really well I feel something bad I feel

taken away from less than upset envious whatever and that's so common but I think of it as kind of a

low grade psychopathology that we've just normalized the idea that I'm actually upset at the happiness

or fulfillment or success of another is like a profoundly fucked up thing no we shouldn't

shame it and repress it so it gets worse we should study it where does it come from and it

comes from our own insecurities and stuff and but then the next part that everybody knows is

really fucked up is just on the same axis it's the same inverted which is to the jealousy or the

envy is the I feel badly when you're doing well the sadism side is I actually feel good when you

lose or when you're in pain I feel some happiness that's associated and you can see when someone

feels jealous sometimes they feel jealous with a partner and then they feel they want that partner

to get it revenge comes up or something so sadism is really like jealousy is one step on the path

to sadism from the healthy compassion conversion axis so I would like to see a society that is

inversely that is conditioning sadism and jealousy inversely right the lower that amount and the more

the compassion conversion and if I had to summarize that very simply I'd say it would optimize for

conversion which is because notice that's not just saying love for you where I might be self

sacrificing and miserable and I love people but I kill myself which I don't think anybody thinks

great idea or happiness where I might be sociopathically happy where I'm causing problems all over

the place or even sadistically happy but it's a coupling right that I'm actually feeling happiness

in relationship to yours and even in causal relationship where I my own agentic desire to

get happier wants to support you too that's actually speaking of another pickup line

that's quite honestly what I this is a guy who's single this is going to come out very ridiculous

because it's like oh yeah where's your girlfriend bro but that's what I look for in a relationship

because it's like it's so much it's so it's such an amazing life where you actually get joy from

another person's success and they get joy from your success and then it becomes like you don't

actually need to succeed much for that to have a like a a loop like a cycle of just like happiness

that just increases like exponentially it's weird so like just be just enjoying the the happiness

of others this success of others so this this is like the let's call this because the first

person that drilled this into my head is Rogan Joe Rogan he was the embodiment of that because I saw

somebody who is successful rich and nonstop true I mean you could tell when somebody's full of

shit and somebody's not really genuinely enjoying the success of his friends that that was weird to

me that was interesting and I mean the way you're kind of speaking to it the reason Joe stood out

to me is I guess I haven't witnessed genuine expression of that often in this culture I've

just real joy for others I mean part of that has to do there hasn't been many channels where you can

watch or listen to people being their authentic selves so I'm sure there's a bunch of people

who live life with compulsion they probably don't seek public attention also but the

that that was yeah if there was any word that could express what what I've learned from Joe

why he's been a really inspiring figure is that compulsion and I wish our world was had a lot more

of that because then I mean my own sorry to go in a small tangent but like you're speaking how

society should function but I feel like if you optimize for that metric in your own personal life

you're going to live a truly fulfilling life I don't know what the great word to use but that's

a really good way to live life you will also learn what gets in the way of it right and how to work

with it that if you wanted to help try to build systems at scale or apply Facebook or exponential

technologies to do that you would have more actual depth of real knowledge of what that takes and