back to indexJaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #218
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The following is a conversation with Jaron Lanier,
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a computer scientist, visual artist, philosopher,
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writer, futurist, musician,
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and the founder of the field of virtual reality.
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To support this podcast,
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please check out our sponsors in the description.
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you may know that Jaron is a staunch critic
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of social media platforms.
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Him and I agree on many aspects of this,
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except perhaps I am more optimistic
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about it being possible to build better platforms.
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And better artificial intelligence systems
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that put longterm interests
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and happiness of human beings first.
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Let me also say a general comment about these conversations.
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I try to make sure I prepare well,
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remove my ego from the picture,
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and focus on making the other person shine
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as we try to explore the most beautiful
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and insightful ideas in their mind.
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This can be challenging
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when the ideas that are close to my heart
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are being criticized.
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In those cases, I do offer a little pushback,
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but respectfully, and then move on,
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trying to have the other person come out
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looking wiser in the exchange.
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I think there's no such thing as winning in conversations,
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My goal is to learn and to have fun.
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I ask that you don't see my approach
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to these conversations as weakness.
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It is my attempt at showing respect
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and love for the other person.
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That said, I also often just do a bad job of talking,
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but you probably already knew that.
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So please give me a pass on that as well.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,
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and here is my conversation with Jaron Lanier.
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You're considered the founding father of virtual reality.
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Do you think we will one day spend most
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or all of our lives in virtual reality worlds?
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I have always found the very most valuable moment
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in virtual reality to be the moment
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when you take off the headset and your senses are refreshed
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and you perceive physicality afresh,
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as if you were a newborn baby,
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but with a little more experience.
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So you can really notice just how incredibly strange
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and delicate and peculiar and impossible the real world is.
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So the magic is, and perhaps forever will be
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in the physical world.
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Well, that's my take on it.
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I mean, I think I don't get to tell everybody else
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how to think or how to experience virtual reality.
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And at this point, there have been multiple generations
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of younger people who've come along and liberated me
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from having to worry about these things.
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But I should say also even in what some,
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well, I called it mixed reality,
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back in the day, and these days it's called
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augmented reality, but with something like a HoloLens,
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even then, like one of my favorite things
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is to augment a forest, not because I think the forest
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needs augmentation, but when you look at the augmentation
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next to a real tree, the real tree just pops out
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as being astounding, it's interactive,
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it's changing slightly all the time if you pay attention,
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and it's hard to pay attention to that,
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but when you compare it to virtual reality,
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all of a sudden you do.
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And even in practical applications,
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my favorite early application of virtual reality,
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which we prototyped going back to the 80s
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when I was working with Dr. Joe Rosen at Stanford Med
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near where we are now, we made the first surgical simulator.
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And to go from the fake anatomy of the simulation,
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which is incredibly valuable for many things,
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for designing procedures, for training,
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for all kinds of things, then to go to the real world
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is then to go to the real person,
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boy, it's really something like surgeons
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really get woken up by that transition, it's very cool.
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So I think the transition is actually more valuable
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than the simulation.
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That's fascinating, I never really thought about that.
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It's almost, it's like traveling elsewhere
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in the physical space can help you appreciate
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how much you value your home once you return.
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Well, that's how I take it.
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I mean, once again, people have different attitudes
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towards it, all are welcome.
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What do you think is the difference
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between the virtual world and the physical meat space world
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that you are still drawn, for you personally,
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still drawn to the physical world?
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Like there clearly then is a distinction.
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Is there some fundamental distinction
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or is it the peculiarities of the current set of technology?
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In terms of the kind of virtual reality that we have now,
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it's made of software and software is terrible stuff.
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Software is always the slave of its own history,
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It's always infinitely arbitrarily messy and arbitrary.
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Working with it brings out a certain kind
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of nerdy personality in people, or at least in me,
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which I'm not that fond of.
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And there are all kinds of things about software
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And so that's different from the physical world.
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It's not something we understand, as you just pointed out.
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On the other hand, I'm a little mystified
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when people ask me, well,
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do you think the universe is a computer?
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And I have to say, well, I mean,
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what on earth could you possibly mean
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if you say it isn't a computer?
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If it isn't a computer,
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it wouldn't follow principles consistently
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and it wouldn't be intelligible
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because what else is a computer ultimately?
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I mean, and we have physics, we have technology,
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so we can do technology so we can program it.
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So, I mean, of course it's some kind of computer,
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but I think trying to understand it as a Turing machine
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is probably a foolish approach.
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Right, that's the question, whether it performs,
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this computer we call the universe,
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performs the kind of computation that can be modeled
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as a universal Turing machine,
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or is it something much more fancy,
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so fancy, in fact, that it may be
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beyond our cognitive capabilities to understand?
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Turing machines are kind of,
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I call them teases in a way,
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because if you have an infinitely smart programmer
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with an infinite amount of time,
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an infinite amount of memory,
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and an infinite clock speed, then they're universal,
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but that cannot exist.
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So they're not universal in practice.
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And they actually are, in practice,
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a very particular sort of machine within the constraints,
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within the conservation principles of any reality
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that's worth being in, probably.
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And so I think universality of a particular model
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is probably a deceptive way to think,
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even though at some sort of limit,
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of course something like that's gotta be true
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at some sort of high enough limit,
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but it's just not accessible to us, so what's the point?
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Well, to me, the question of whether we're living
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inside a computer or a simulation
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is interesting in the following way.
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There's a technical question that's here.
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How difficult is it to build a machine,
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not that simulates the universe,
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but that makes it sufficiently realistic
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that we wouldn't know the difference,
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or better yet, sufficiently realistic
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that we would kinda know the difference,
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but we would prefer to stay in the virtual world anyway?
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I wanna give you a few different answers.
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I wanna give you the one that I think
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has the most practical importance
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to human beings right now,
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which is that there's a kind of an assertion
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sort of built into the way the questions usually asked
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that I think is false, which is a suggestion
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that people have a fixed level of ability
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to perceive reality in a given way.
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And actually, people are always learning,
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evolving, forming themselves.
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We're also programmable, self programmable,
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changing, adapting.
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And so my favorite way to get at this
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is to talk about the history of other media.
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So for instance, there was a peer review paper
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that showed that an early wire recorder
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playing back an opera singer behind a curtain
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was indistinguishable from a real opera singer.
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And so now, of course, to us,
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it would not only be distinguishable,
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but it would be very blatant
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because the recording would be horrible.
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But to the people at the time,
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without the experience of it, it seemed plausible.
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There was an early demonstration
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of extremely crude video teleconferencing
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between New York and DC in the 30s, I think so,
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that people viewed as being absolutely realistic
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and indistinguishable, which to us would be horrible.
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And there are many other examples.
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Another one, one of my favorite ones,
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is in the Civil War era,
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there were itinerant photographers
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who collected photographs of people
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who just looked kind of like a few archetypes.
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So you could buy a photo of somebody
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who looked kind of like your loved one
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to remind you of that person
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because actually photographing them was inconceivable
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and hiring a painter was too expensive
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and you didn't have any way for the painter
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to represent them remotely anyway.
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How would they even know what they looked like?
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So these are all great examples
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of how in the early days of different media,
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we perceived the media as being really great,
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but then we evolved through the experience of the media.
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This gets back to what I was saying.
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Maybe the greatest gift of photography
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is that we can see the flaws in a photograph
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and appreciate reality more.
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Maybe the greatest gift of audio recording
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is that we can distinguish that opera singer now
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from that recording of the opera singer
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on the horrible wire recorder.
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So we shouldn't limit ourselves
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by some assumption of stasis that's incorrect.
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So that's the first thing, that's my first answer,
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which is I think the most important one.
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Now, of course, somebody might come back and say,
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oh, but you know, technology can go so far.
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There must be some point at which it would surpass.
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That's a different question.
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I think that's also an interesting question,
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but I think the answer I just gave you
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is actually the more important answer
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to the more important question.
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That's profound, yeah.
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But can you, the second question,
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which you're now making me realize is way different.
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Is it possible to create worlds
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in which people would want to stay
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instead of the real world?
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Like, en masse, like large numbers of people.
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What I hope is, you know, as I said before,
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I hope that the experience of virtual worlds
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helps people appreciate this physical world we have
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and feel tender towards it
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and keep it from getting too fucked up.
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Do you see all technology in that way?
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So basically technology helps us appreciate
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the more sort of technology free aspect of life.
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Well, media technology.
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You know, I mean, you can stretch that.
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I mean, you can, let me say,
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I could definitely play McLuhan
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and turn this into a general theory.
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It's totally doable.
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The program you just described is totally doable.
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In fact, I will psychically predict
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that if you did the research,
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you could find 20 PhD theses that do that already.
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I don't know, but they might exist.
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But I don't know how much value there is
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in pushing a particular idea that far.
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Claiming that reality isn't a computer in some sense
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seems incoherent to me because we can program it.
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We have technology.
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It seems to obey physical laws.
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What more do you want from it to be a computer?
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I mean, it's a computer of some kind.
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We don't know exactly what kind.
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We might not know how to think about it.
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We're working on it, but.
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Sorry to interrupt, but you're absolutely right.
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Like, that's my fascination with the AI as well,
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is it helps, in the case of AI,
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I see it as a set of techniques
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that help us understand ourselves, understand us humans.
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In the same way, virtual reality,
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and you're putting it brilliantly,
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which it's a way to help us understand reality,
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appreciate and open our eyes more richly to reality.
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That's certainly how I see it.
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And I wish people who become incredibly fascinated,
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who go down the rabbit hole of the different fascinations
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with whether we're in a simulation or not,
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or, you know, there's a whole world of variations on that.
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I wish they'd step back
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and think about their own motivations
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and exactly what they mean, you know?
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And I think the danger with these things is,
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so if you say, is the universe
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some kind of computer broadly,
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it has to be because it's not coherent to say that it isn't.
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On the other hand, to say that that means
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you know anything about what kind of computer,
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that's something very different.
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And the same thing is true for the brain.
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The same thing is true for anything
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where you might use computational metaphors.
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Like, we have to have a bit of modesty about where we stand.
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And the problem I have with these framings of computation
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is these ultimate cosmic questions
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is that it has a way of getting people
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to pretend they know more than they do.
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Can you maybe, this is a therapy session,
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psychoanalyze me for a second.
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I really liked the Elder Scrolls series.
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It's a role playing game, Skyrim, for example.
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Why do I enjoy so deeply just walking around that world?
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And then there's people and you could talk to
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and you can just like, it's an escape.
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But you know, my life is awesome.
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I'm truly happy, but I also am happy
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with the music that's playing in the mountains
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and carrying around a sword and just that.
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I don't know what that is.
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It's very pleasant though to go there.
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And I miss it sometimes.
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I think it's wonderful to love artistic creations.
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It's wonderful to love contact with other people.
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It's wonderful to love play and ongoing evolving
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meaning and patterns with other people.
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I think it's a good thing.
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I'm not like anti tech
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and I'm certainly not anti digital tech.
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I'm anti, as everybody knows by now,
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I think the manipulative economy of social media
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is making everybody nuts and all that.
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So I'm anti that stuff.
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But the core of it, of course, I worked for many, many years
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on trying to make that stuff happen
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because I think it can be beautiful.
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Like I don't like, why not?
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And by the way, there's a thing about humans,
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which is we're problematic.
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Any kind of social interaction with other people
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is gonna have its problems.
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People are political and tricky.
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And like, I love classical music,
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but when you actually go to a classical music thing
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and it turns out, oh, actually,
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this is like a backroom power deal kind of place
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and a big status ritual as well.
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And that's kind of not as fun.
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That's part of the package.
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And the thing is, it's always going to be,
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there's always gonna be a mix of things.
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I don't think the search for purity
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is gonna get you anywhere.
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So I'm not worried about that.
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I worry about the really bad cases
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where we're making ourselves crazy or cruel enough
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that we might not survive.
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And I think the social media criticism rises to that level,
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but I'm glad you enjoy it.
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I think it's great.
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And I like that you basically say
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that every experience has both beauty and darkness,
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as in with classical music.
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I also play classical piano, so I appreciate it very much.
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But it's interesting.
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I mean, every, and even the darkness,
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it's a man's search for meaning
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with Viktor Frankl in the concentration camps.
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Even there, there's opportunity to discover beauty.
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And so that's the interesting thing about humans,
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is the capacity to discover beautiful
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in the darkest of moments,
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but there's always the dark parts too.
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Well, I mean, it's our situation is structurally difficult.
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We are, no, it is, it's true.
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We perceive socially, we depend on each other
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for our sense of place and perception of the world.
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I mean, we're dependent on each other.
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And yet there's also a degree in which we're inevitably,
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we never really let each other down.
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We are set up to be competitive as well as supportive.
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I mean, it's just our fundamental situation
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is complicated and challenging,
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and I wouldn't have it any other way.
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Okay, let's talk about one of the most challenging things.
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One of the things I unfortunately am very afraid of
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being human, allegedly.
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You wrote an essay on death and consciousness
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in which you write a note.
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Certainly the fear of death
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has been one of the greatest driving forces
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in the history of thought
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and in the formation of the character of civilization.
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And yet it is under acknowledged.
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The great book on the subject,
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The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
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deserves a reconsideration.
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I'm Russian, so I have to ask you about this.
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What's the role of death in life?
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See, you would have enjoyed coming to our house
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because my wife is Russian and we also have,
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we have a piano of such spectacular qualities,
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you wouldn't, you would have freaked out.
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But anyway, we'll let all that go.
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So the context in which,
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I remember that essay sort of,
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this was from maybe the 90s or something.
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And I used to publish in a journal
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called the Journal of Consciousness Studies
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because I was interested in these endless debates
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about consciousness and science,
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which certainly continue today.
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And I was interested in how the fear of death
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and the denial of death played into
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different philosophical approaches to consciousness.
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Because I think on the one hand,
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the sort of sentimental school of dualism,
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meaning the feeling that there's something
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apart from the physical brain,
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some kind of soul or something else,
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is obviously motivated in a sense
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by a hope that whatever that is
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will survive death and continue.
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And that's a very core aspect of a lot of the world religions,
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not all of them, not really, but most of them.
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The thing I noticed is that the opposite of those,
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which might be the sort of hardcore,
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no, the brain's a computer and that's it.
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In a sense, we're motivated in the same way
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with a remarkably similar chain of arguments,
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which is no, the brain's a computer
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and I'm gonna figure it out in my lifetime
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and upload myself and I'll live forever.
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That's interesting.
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Yeah, that's like the implied thought, right?
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Yeah, and so it's kind of this,
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in a funny way, it's the same thing.
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It's peculiar to notice that these people
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who would appear to be opposites in character
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and cultural references and in their ideas
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actually are remarkably similar.
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And to an incredible degree,
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this sort of hardcore computationalist idea
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about the brain has turned into medieval Christianity
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with together, like there's the people who are afraid
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that if you have the wrong thought,
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you'll piss off the super AIs of the future
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who will come back and zap you and all that stuff.
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It's really turned into medieval Christianity
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This is so the Ernest Becker's idea that death,
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the fear of death is the warm at the core,
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which is like, that's the core motivator
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of everything we see humans have created.
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The question is if that fear of mortality is somehow core,
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is like a prerequisite to consciousness.
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You just moved across this vast cultural chasm
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that separates me from most of my colleagues in a way.
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And I can't answer what you just said on the level
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without this huge deconstruction.
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Yes, what's the chasm?
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Let us travel across this vast chasm.
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Okay, I don't believe in AI.
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I don't think there's any AI.
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There's just algorithms, we make them, we control them.
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Now, they're tools, they're not creatures.
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Now, this is something that robs a lot of people,
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the wrong way, and don't I know it.
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When I was young, my main mentor was Marvin Minsky,
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who's the principal author of the computer
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as creature rhetoric that we still use.
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He was the first person to have the idea at all,
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but he certainly populated AI culture
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with most of its tropes, I would say,
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because a lot of the people will say,
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oh, did you hear this new idea about AI?
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And I'm like, yeah, I heard it in 1978.
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Sure, yeah, I remember that.
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So Marvin was really the person.
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And Marvin and I used to argue all the time about this stuff
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because I always rejected it.
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And of all of his,
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of all of his, I wasn't formally his student,
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but I worked for him as a researcher,
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but of all of his students and student like people
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of his young adoptees,
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I think I was the one who argued with him
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about this stuff in particular, and he loved it.
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Yeah, I would have loved to hear that conversation.
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Did you ever converse to a place?
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So the very last time I saw him, he was quite frail.
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And I was in Boston, and I was going to the old house
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in Brookline, his amazing house.
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And one of our mutual friends said,
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hey, listen, Marvin's so frail.
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Don't do the argument with him.
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Don't argue about AI, you know?
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And so I said, but Marvin loves that.
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And so I showed up, and he's like, he was frail.
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He looked up and he said, are you ready to argue?
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He's such an amazing person for that.
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So it's hard to summarize this
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because it's decades of stuff.
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The first thing to say is that nobody can claim
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absolute knowledge about whether somebody
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or something else is conscious or not.
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This is all a matter of faith.
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And in fact, I think the whole idea of faith
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needs to be updated.
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So it's not about God,
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but it's just about stuff in the universe.
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We have faith in each other, being conscious.
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And then I used to frame this
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as a thing called the circle of empathy in my old papers.
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And then it turned into a thing
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for the animal rights movement too.
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I noticed Peter Singer using it.
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I don't know if it was coincident or,
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but anyway, there's this idea
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that you draw a circle around yourself
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and the stuff inside is more like you,
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might be conscious, might be deserving of your empathy,
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of your consideration,
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and the stuff outside the circle isn't.
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And outside the circle might be a rock or,
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And that circle is fundamentally based on faith.
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Well, if you don't know it.
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Your faith in what is and what isn't.
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The thing about this circle is it can't be pure faith.
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It's also a pragmatic decision
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and this is where things get complicated.
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If you try to make it too big,
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you suffer from incompetence.
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If you say, I don't wanna kill a bacteria,
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I will not brush my teeth.
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I don't know, like, what do you do?
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Like, there's a competence question
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where you do have to draw the line.
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People who make it too small become cruel.
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People are so clannish and political
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and so worried about themselves ending up
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on the bottom of society
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that they are always ready to gang up
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on some designated group.
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And so there's always these people who are being,
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we're always trying to shove somebody out of the circle.
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So aren't you shoving AI outside the circle?
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Well, give me a second.
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So there's a pragmatic consideration here.
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And so, and the biggest questions
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are probably fetuses and animals lately,
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but AI is getting there.
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Now with AI, I think,
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and I've had this discussion so many times.
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People say, but aren't you afraid if you exclude AI,
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you'd be cruel to some consciousness?
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And then I would say, well, if you include AI,
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you make yourself, you exclude yourself
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from being able to be a good engineer or designer.
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And so you're facing incompetence immediately.
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So like, I really think we need to subordinate algorithms
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and be much more skeptical of them.
link |
Your intuition, you speak about this brilliantly
link |
with social media, how things can go wrong.
link |
Isn't it possible to design systems
link |
that show compassion, not to manipulate you,
link |
but give you control and make your life better
link |
if you so choose to, like grow together with systems.
link |
And the way we grow with dogs and cats, with pets,
link |
with significant others in that way,
link |
they grow to become better people.
link |
I don't understand why that's fundamentally not possible.
link |
You're saying oftentimes you get into trouble
link |
by thinking you know what's good for people.
link |
Well, look, there's this question
link |
of what framework we're speaking in.
link |
Do you know who Alan Watts was?
link |
So Alan Watts once said, morality is like gravity
link |
that in some absolute cosmic sense, there can't be morality
link |
because at some point it all becomes relative
link |
and who are we anyway?
link |
Like morality is relative to us tiny creatures.
link |
But here on earth, we're with each other,
link |
this is our frame and morality is a very real thing.
link |
Same thing with gravity.
link |
At some point, you get into interstellar space
link |
and you might not feel much of it, but here we are on earth.
link |
And I think in the same sense,
link |
I think this identification with a frame that's quite remote
link |
cannot be separated from a feeling of wanting to feel
link |
sort of separate from and superior to other people
link |
or something like that.
link |
There's an impulse behind it that I really have to reject.
link |
And we're just not competent yet
link |
to talk about these kinds of absolutes.
link |
Okay, so I agree with you that a lot of technologists
link |
sort of lack this basic respect, understanding
link |
and love for humanity.
link |
There's a separation there.
link |
The thing I'd like to push back against,
link |
it's not that you disagree,
link |
but I believe you can create technologies
link |
and you can create a new kind of technologist engineer
link |
that does build systems that respect humanity,
link |
not just respect, but admire humanity,
link |
that have empathy for common humans, have compassion.
link |
I mean, no, no, no.
link |
I think, yeah, I mean, I think musical instruments
link |
are a great example of that.
link |
Musical instruments are technologies
link |
that help people connect in fantastic ways.
link |
And that's a great example.
link |
My invention or design during the pandemic period
link |
was this thing called together mode
link |
where people see themselves seated sort of
link |
in a classroom or a theater instead of in squares.
link |
And it allows them to semi consciously perform to each other
link |
as if they have proper eye contact,
link |
as if they're paying attention to each other nonverbally
link |
and weirdly that turns out to work.
link |
And so it promotes empathy so far as I can tell.
link |
I hope it is of some use to somebody.
link |
The AI idea isn't really new.
link |
I would say it was born with Adam Smith's invisible hand
link |
with this idea that we build this algorithmic thing
link |
and it gets a bit beyond us
link |
and then we think it must be smarter than us.
link |
And the thing about the invisible hand
link |
is absolutely everybody has some line they draw
link |
where they say, no, no, no,
link |
we're gonna take control of this thing.
link |
They might have different lines,
link |
they might care about different things,
link |
but everybody ultimately became a Keynesian
link |
because it just didn't work.
link |
It really wasn't that smart.
link |
It was sometimes smart and sometimes it failed, you know?
link |
And so if you really, you know,
link |
people who really, really, really wanna believe
link |
in the invisible hand is infinitely smart,
link |
screw up their economies terribly.
link |
You have to recognize the economy as a subservient tool.
link |
Everybody does when it's to their advantage.
link |
They might not when it's not to their advantage.
link |
That's kind of an interesting game that happens.
link |
But the thing is, it's just like that with our algorithms,
link |
you know, like, you can have a sort of a Chicago,
link |
you know, economic philosophy about your computer.
link |
Say, no, no, no, my things come alive,
link |
it's smarter than anything.
link |
I think that there is a deep loneliness within all of us.
link |
This is what we seek, we seek love from each other.
link |
I think AI can help us connect deeper.
link |
Like this is what you criticize social media for.
link |
I think there's much better ways of doing social media
link |
than doing social media that doesn't lead to manipulation,
link |
but instead leads to deeper connection between humans,
link |
leads to you becoming a better human being.
link |
And what that requires is some agency on the part of AI
link |
to be almost like a therapist, I mean, a companion.
link |
It's not telling you what's right.
link |
It's not guiding you as if it's an all knowing thing.
link |
It's just another companion that you can leave at any time.
link |
You have complete transparency control over.
link |
There's a lot of mechanisms that you can have
link |
that are counter to how current social media operates
link |
that I think is subservient to humans,
link |
or no, deeply respects human beings
link |
and is empathetic to their experience
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
I think it's possible to create AI systems like that.
link |
And I think they, I mean, that's a technical discussion
link |
of whether they need to have something that looks like more,
link |
something that looks like more like AI versus algorithms,
link |
something that has a identity,
link |
something that has a personality, all those kinds of things.
link |
AI systems, and you've spoken extensively
link |
how AI systems manipulate you within social networks.
link |
And that's the biggest problem,
link |
isn't necessarily that there's advertisement
link |
that social networks present you with advertisements
link |
that then get you to buy stuff.
link |
That's not the biggest problem.
link |
The biggest problem is they then manipulate you.
link |
They alter your human nature to get you to buy stuff
link |
or to get you to do whatever the advertiser wants.
link |
Or maybe you can correct me.
link |
Yeah, I don't see it quite that way,
link |
but we can work with that as an approximation.
link |
I think the actual thing is even sort of more ridiculous
link |
and stupider than that, but that's okay, let's...
link |
So my question is, let's not use the word AI,
link |
but how do we fix it?
link |
Oh, fixing social media,
link |
that diverts us into this whole other field in my view,
link |
which is economics,
link |
which I always thought was really boring,
link |
but we have no choice but to turn into economists
link |
if we wanna fix this problem,
link |
because it's all about incentives.
link |
But I've been around this thing since it started,
link |
and I've been in the meetings
link |
where the social media companies sell themselves
link |
to the people who put the most money into them,
link |
which are usually the big advertising holding companies
link |
And there's this idea that I think is kind of a fiction,
link |
and maybe it's even been recognized as that by everybody,
link |
that the algorithm will get really good
link |
at getting people to buy something.
link |
Because I think people have looked at their returns
link |
and looked at what happens,
link |
and everybody recognizes it's not exactly right.
link |
It's more like a cognitive access blackmail payment
link |
Like just to be connected, you're paying the money.
link |
It's not so much that the persuasion algorithms...
link |
So Stanford renamed its program,
link |
but it used to be called Engage Persuade.
link |
The engage part works, the persuade part is iffy,
link |
but the thing is that once people are engaged,
link |
in order for you to exist as a business,
link |
in order for you to be known at all,
link |
you have to put money into the...
link |
Oh, no, that's not...
link |
It doesn't work, but they have to...
link |
But they're still...
link |
It's a giant cognitive access blackmail scheme
link |
So because the science behind the persuade part,
link |
it's not entirely a failure,
link |
but it's not what...
link |
We play make believe that it works more than it does.
link |
The damage doesn't come...
link |
Honestly, as I've said in my books,
link |
I'm not anti advertising.
link |
I actually think advertising can be demeaning
link |
and annoying and banal and ridiculous
link |
and take up a lot of our time with stupid stuff.
link |
Like there's a lot of ways to criticize advertising
link |
that's accurate and it can also lie and all kinds of things.
link |
However, if I look at the biggest picture,
link |
I think advertising, at least as it was understood
link |
before social media, helped bring people into modernity
link |
in a way that overall actually did benefit people overall.
link |
And you might say, am I contradicting myself
link |
because I was saying you shouldn't manipulate people?
link |
Yeah, I am, probably here.
link |
I mean, I'm not pretending to have
link |
this perfect airtight worldview without some contradictions.
link |
I think there's a bit of a contradiction there, so.
link |
Well, looking at the long arc of history,
link |
advertisement has, in some parts, benefited society
link |
because it funded some efforts that perhaps...
link |
Yeah, I mean, I think like there's a thing
link |
where sometimes I think it's actually been of some use.
link |
Now, where the damage comes is a different thing though.
link |
Social media, algorithms on social media
link |
have to work on feedback loops
link |
where they present you with stimulus
link |
and they have to see if you respond to the stimulus.
link |
Now, the problem is that the measurement mechanism
link |
for telling if you respond in the engagement feedback loop
link |
is very, very crude.
link |
It's things like whether you click more
link |
or occasionally if you're staring at the screen more
link |
if there's a forward facing camera that's activated,
link |
but typically there isn't.
link |
So you have this incredibly crude back channel of information
link |
and so it's crude enough that it only catches
link |
sort of the more dramatic responses from you
link |
and those are the fight or flight responses.
link |
Those are the things where you get scared or pissed off
link |
or aggressive or horny.
link |
These are these ancient,
link |
the sort of what are sometimes called the lizard brain
link |
circuits or whatever, these fast response,
link |
old, old, old evolutionary business circuits that we have
link |
that are helpful in survival once in a while
link |
but are not us at our best.
link |
They're not who we wanna be.
link |
They're not how we relate to each other.
link |
They're this old business.
link |
So then just when you're engaged using those intrinsically
link |
totally aside from whatever the topic is,
link |
you start to get incrementally just a little bit
link |
more paranoid, xenophobic, aggressive.
link |
You get a little stupid and you become a jerk
link |
and it happens slowly.
link |
It's not like everybody's instantly transformed,
link |
but it does kind of happen progressively
link |
where people who get hooked kind of get drawn
link |
more and more into this pattern of being at their worst.
link |
Would you say that people are able to,
link |
when they get hooked in this way,
link |
look back at themselves from 30 days ago
link |
and say, I am less happy with who I am now
link |
or I'm not happy with who I am now
link |
versus who I was 30 days ago.
link |
Are they able to self reflect
link |
when you take yourself outside of the lizard brain?
link |
I wrote a book about people suggesting people take a break
link |
from their social media to see what happens
link |
and maybe even, actually the title of the book
link |
was just the arguments to delete your account.
link |
Yeah, 10 arguments.
link |
Although I always said, I don't know that you should.
link |
I can give you the arguments.
link |
I'm always very clear about that.
link |
But you know, I get like,
link |
I don't have a social media account obviously
link |
and it's not that easy for people to reach me.
link |
They have to search out an old fashioned email address
link |
on a super crappy antiquated website.
link |
Like it's actually a bit, I don't make it easy.
link |
And even with that, I get this huge flood of mail
link |
from people who say, oh, I quit my social media.
link |
I'm doing so much better.
link |
I can't believe how bad it was.
link |
But the thing is, what's for me a huge flood of mail
link |
would be an imperceptible trickle
link |
from the perspective of Facebook, right?
link |
And so I think it's rare for somebody
link |
to look at themselves and say,
link |
oh boy, I sure screwed myself over.
link |
It's a really hard thing to ask of somebody.
link |
None of us find that easy, right?
link |
The reason I asked this is,
link |
is it possible to design social media systems
link |
that optimize for some longer term metrics
link |
of you being happy with yourself?
link |
Well see, I don't think you should try
link |
to engineer personal growth or happiness.
link |
I think what you should do is design a system
link |
that's just respectful of the people
link |
and subordinates itself to the people
link |
and doesn't have perverse incentives.
link |
And then at least there's a chance
link |
of something decent happening.
link |
You have to recommend stuff, right?
link |
So you're saying like, be respectful.
link |
What does that actually mean engineering wise?
link |
People have to be responsible.
link |
Algorithms shouldn't be recommending.
link |
Algorithms don't understand enough to recommend.
link |
Algorithms are crap in this era.
link |
I mean, I'm sorry, they are.
link |
And I'm not saying this as somebody
link |
as a critic from the outside.
link |
I'm in the middle of it.
link |
I know what they can do.
link |
I know what the corpora are.
link |
I know the best ones.
link |
Our office is funding GPT3 and all these things
link |
that are at the edge of what's possible.
link |
And they do not have yet.
link |
I mean, it still is statistical emergent pseudo semantics.
link |
It doesn't actually have deep representation
link |
emerging of anything.
link |
It's just not like, I mean that I'm speaking the truth here
link |
Well, let me push back on this.
link |
This, there's several truths here.
link |
So one, you're speaking to the way
link |
certain companies operate currently.
link |
I don't think it's outside the realm
link |
of what's technically feasible to do.
link |
There's just not incentive,
link |
like companies are not, why fix this thing?
link |
I am aware that, for example, the YouTube search
link |
and discovery has been very helpful to me.
link |
And there's a huge number of, there's so many videos
link |
that it's nice to have a little bit of help.
link |
But I'm still in control.
link |
Let me ask you something.
link |
Have you done the experiment of letting YouTube
link |
recommend videos to you either starting
link |
from a absolutely anonymous random place
link |
where it doesn't know who you are
link |
or from knowing who you or somebody else is
link |
and then going 15 or 20 hops?
link |
Have you ever done that and just let it go
link |
top video recommend and then just go 20 hops?
link |
I've done that many times now.
link |
I have, because of how large YouTube is
link |
and how widely it's used,
link |
it's very hard to get to enough scale
link |
to get a statistically solid result on this.
link |
I've done it with high school kids,
link |
with dozens of kids doing it at a time.
link |
Every time I've done an experiment,
link |
the majority of times after about 17 or 18 hops,
link |
you end up in really weird, paranoid, bizarre territory.
link |
Because ultimately, that is the stuff
link |
the algorithm rewards the most
link |
because of the feedback crudeness I was just talking about.
link |
So I'm not saying that the video
link |
never recommends something cool.
link |
I'm saying that its fundamental core
link |
is one that promotes a paranoid style
link |
that promotes increasing irritability,
link |
that promotes xenophobia, promotes fear, anger,
link |
promotes selfishness, promotes separation between people.
link |
And the thing is, it's very hard to do this work solidly.
link |
Many have repeated this experiment
link |
and yet it still is kind of anecdotal.
link |
I'd like to do a large citizen science thing sometime
link |
and do it, but then I think the problem with that
link |
is YouTube would detect it and then change it.
link |
Yes, I love that kind of stuff on Twitter.
link |
So Jack Dorsey has spoken about doing healthy conversations
link |
on Twitter or optimizing for healthy conversations.
link |
What that requires within Twitter
link |
are most likely citizen experiments
link |
of what does healthy conversation actually look like
link |
and how do you incentivize those healthy conversations
link |
you're describing what often happens
link |
and what is currently happening.
link |
What I'd like to argue is it's possible
link |
to strive for healthy conversations,
link |
not in a dogmatic way of saying,
link |
I know what healthy conversations are and I will tell you.
link |
I think one way to do this is to try to look around
link |
at social, maybe not things that are officially social media,
link |
but things where people are together online
link |
and see which ones have more healthy conversations,
link |
even if it's hard to be completely objective
link |
in that measurement, you can kind of, at least crudely.
link |
You could do subjective annotation
link |
like have a large crowd source annotation.
link |
One that I've been really interested in is GitHub
link |
because it could change.
link |
I'm not saying it'll always be, but for the most part,
link |
GitHub has had a relatively quite low poison quotient.
link |
And I think there's a few things about GitHub
link |
that are interesting.
link |
One thing about it is that people have a stake in it.
link |
It's not just empty status games.
link |
There's actual code or there's actual stuff being done.
link |
And I think as soon as you have a real world stake
link |
in something, you have a motivation
link |
to not screw up that thing.
link |
And I think that that's often missing
link |
that there's no incentive for the person
link |
to really preserve something.
link |
If they get a little bit of attention
link |
from dumping on somebody's TikTok or something,
link |
they don't pay any price for it.
link |
But you have to kind of get decent with people
link |
when you have a shared stake, a little secret.
link |
So GitHub does a bit of that.
link |
GitHub is wonderful, yes.
link |
But I'm tempted to play the Jaren Becker at you,
link |
which is that, so GitHub is currently is amazing.
link |
But the thing is, if you have a stake,
link |
then if it's a social media platform,
link |
they can use the fact that you have a stake
link |
to manipulate you because you want to preserve the stake.
link |
Right, well, this is why,
link |
all right, this gets us into the economics.
link |
So there's this thing called data dignity
link |
that I've been studying for a long time.
link |
I wrote a book about an earlier version of it
link |
called Who Owns the Future?
link |
And the basic idea of it is that,
link |
once again, this is a 30 year conversation.
link |
It's a fascinating topic.
link |
Let me do the fastest version of this I can do.
link |
The fastest way I know how to do this
link |
is to compare two futures, all right?
link |
So future one is then the normative one,
link |
the one we're building right now.
link |
And future two is gonna be data dignity, okay?
link |
And I'm gonna use a particular population.
link |
I live on the hill in Berkeley.
link |
And one of the features about the hill
link |
is that as the climate changes,
link |
we might burn down and I'll lose our houses
link |
or die or something.
link |
Like it's dangerous, you know, and it didn't used to be.
link |
And so who keeps us alive?
link |
Well, the city does.
link |
The city does some things.
link |
The electric company kind of sort of,
link |
maybe hopefully better.
link |
Individual people who own property
link |
take care of their property.
link |
But there's this other middle layer,
link |
which is fascinating to me,
link |
which is that the groundskeepers
link |
who work up and down that hill,
link |
many of whom are not legally here,
link |
many of whom don't speak English,
link |
cooperate with each other
link |
to make sure trees don't touch
link |
to transfer fire easily from lot to lot.
link |
They have this whole little web
link |
that's keeping us safe.
link |
I didn't know about this at first.
link |
I just started talking to them
link |
because they were out there during the pandemic.
link |
And so I try to just see who are these people?
link |
Who are these people who are keeping us alive?
link |
Now, I want to talk about the two different phases
link |
for those people in your future one and future two.
link |
Future one, some weird like kindergarten paint job van
link |
with all these like cameras and weird things,
link |
drives up, observes what the gardeners
link |
and groundskeepers are doing.
link |
A few years later, some amazing robots
link |
that can shimmy up trees and all this show up.
link |
All those people are out of work
link |
and there are these robots doing the thing
link |
and the robots are good.
link |
And they can scale to more land
link |
and they're actually good.
link |
But then there are all these people out of work
link |
and these people have lost dignity.
link |
They don't know what they're going to do.
link |
And then somebody will say,
link |
well, they go on basic income, whatever.
link |
They become wards of the state.
link |
My problem with that solution is every time in history
link |
that you've had some centralized thing
link |
that's doling out the benefits,
link |
that things get seized by people
link |
because it's too centralized and it gets seized.
link |
This happened to every communist experiment I can find.
link |
So I think that turns into a poor future
link |
that will be unstable.
link |
I don't think people will feel good in it.
link |
I think it'll be a political disaster
link |
with a sequence of people seizing this central source
link |
of the basic income.
link |
And you'll say, oh no, an algorithm can do it.
link |
Then people will seize the algorithm.
link |
They'll seize control.
link |
Unless the algorithm is decentralized
link |
and it's impossible to seize the control.
link |
Yeah, but 60 something people
link |
own a quarter of all the Bitcoin.
link |
Like the things that we think are decentralized
link |
are not decentralized.
link |
So let's go to future two.
link |
Future two, the gardeners see that van with all the cameras
link |
and the kindergarten paint job,
link |
and they say, the groundskeepers,
link |
and they say, hey, the robots are coming.
link |
We're going to form a data union.
link |
And amazingly, California has a little baby data union law
link |
emerging in the books.
link |
And so they say, we're going to form a data union
link |
and we're going to,
link |
not only are we going to sell our data to this place,
link |
but we're going to make it better than it would have been
link |
if they were just grabbing it without our cooperation.
link |
And we're going to improve it.
link |
We're going to make the robots more effective.
link |
We're going to make them better
link |
and we're going to be proud of it.
link |
We're going to become a new class of experts
link |
that are respected.
link |
And then here's the interesting,
link |
there's two things that are different about that world
link |
One thing, of course, the people have more pride.
link |
They have more sense of ownership, of agency,
link |
but what the robots do changes.
link |
Instead of just like this functional,
link |
like we'll figure out how to keep the neighborhood
link |
from burning down,
link |
you have this whole creative community
link |
that wasn't there before thinking,
link |
well, how can we make these robots better
link |
so we can keep on earning money?
link |
There'll be waves of creative groundskeeping
link |
with spiral pumping, pumpkin patches
link |
and waves of cultural things.
link |
There'll be new ideas like,
link |
wow, I wonder if we could do something
link |
about climate change mitigation with how we do this.
link |
What about, what about fresh water?
link |
Can we, what about, can we make the food healthier?
link |
What about, what about all of a sudden
link |
there'll be this whole creative community on the case?
link |
And isn't it nicer to have a high tech future
link |
with more creative classes
link |
than one with more dependent classes?
link |
Isn't that a better future?
link |
But, but, but, but, future one and future two
link |
have the same robots and the same algorithms.
link |
There's no technological difference.
link |
There's only a human difference.
link |
And that second future two, that's data dignity.
link |
The economy that you're, I mean,
link |
the game theory here is on the humans
link |
and then the technology is just the tools
link |
that enable both possibilities.
link |
I mean, I think you can believe in AI
link |
and be in future two.
link |
I just think it's a little harder.
link |
You have to do more contortions, it's possible.
link |
So in the case of social media,
link |
what does data dignity look like?
link |
Is it people getting paid for their data?
link |
Yeah, I think what should happen is in the future
link |
there should be massive data unions
link |
for people putting content into the system
link |
and those data unions should smooth out
link |
the results a little bit.
link |
So it's not winner take all, but at the same time,
link |
and people have to pay for it too.
link |
They have to pay for Facebook
link |
the way they pay for Netflix
link |
with an allowance for the poor.
link |
There has to be a way out too.
link |
But the thing is people do pay for Netflix.
link |
It's a going concern.
link |
People pay for Xbox and PlayStation.
link |
Like people, there's enough people
link |
to pay for stuff they want.
link |
This could happen too.
link |
It's just that this precedent started
link |
that moved it in the wrong direction.
link |
And then what has to happen,
link |
the economy is a measuring device.
link |
If it's an honest measuring device,
link |
the outcomes for people form a normal distribution,
link |
And then, so there should be a few people
link |
who do really well, a lot of people who do okay.
link |
And then we should have an expanding economy
link |
reflecting more and more creativity and expertise
link |
flowing through the network.
link |
And that expanding economy moves the result
link |
just a bit forward.
link |
So more people are getting money out of it
link |
than are putting money into it.
link |
So it gradually expands the economy
link |
and lifts all boats.
link |
And the society has to support the lower wing
link |
of the bell curve too, but not universal basic income.
link |
It has to be for the,
link |
cause if it's an honest economy,
link |
there will be that lower wing
link |
and we have to support those people.
link |
There has to be a safety net.
link |
But see what I believe, I'm not gonna talk about AI,
link |
but I will say that I think there'll be more
link |
and more algorithms that are useful.
link |
And so I don't think everybody's gonna be supplying data
link |
to grounds keeping robots,
link |
nor do I think everybody's gonna make their living
link |
with TikTok videos.
link |
I think in both cases,
link |
there'll be a rather small contingent
link |
that do well enough at either of those things.
link |
But I think there might be many, many, many,
link |
many of those niches that start to evolve
link |
as there are more and more algorithms,
link |
more and more robots.
link |
And it's that large number that will create
link |
the economic potential for a very large part of society
link |
to become members of new creative classes.
link |
Do you think it's possible to create a social network
link |
that competes with Twitter and Facebook
link |
that's large and centralized in this way?
link |
Not centralized, sort of large, large.
link |
How to get, all right, so I gotta tell you
link |
how to get from where we are
link |
to anything kind of in the zone
link |
of what I'm talking about is challenging.
link |
I know some of the people who run,
link |
like I know Jack Dorsey at H1N1,
link |
and I view Jack as somebody who's actually,
link |
I think he's really striving and searching
link |
and trying to find a way to make it better,
link |
but is kind of like,
link |
it's very hard to do it while in flight
link |
and he's under enormous business pressure too.
link |
So Jack Dorsey to me is a fascinating study
link |
because I think his mind is in a lot of good places.
link |
He's a good human being,
link |
but there's a big Titanic ship
link |
that's already moving in one direction.
link |
It's hard to know what to do with it.
link |
I think that's the story of Twitter.
link |
I think that's the story of Twitter.
link |
One of the things that I observed is that
link |
if you just wanna look at the human side,
link |
meaning like how are people being changed?
link |
What does the culture like?
link |
Almost all of the social media platforms that get big
link |
have an initial sort of honeymoon period
link |
where they're actually kind of sweet and cute.
link |
Like if you look at the early years of Twitter,
link |
it was really sweet and cute,
link |
but also look at Snap, TikTok.
link |
And then what happens is as they scale
link |
and the algorithms become more influential
link |
instead of just the early people,
link |
when it gets big enough that it's the algorithm running it,
link |
then you start to see the rise of the paranoid style
link |
and then they start to get dark.
link |
And we've seen that shift in TikTok rather recently.
link |
But I feel like that scaling reveals the flaws
link |
within the incentives.
link |
I feel like I'm torturing you.
link |
No, because I have hope for the world with humans
link |
and I have hope for a lot of things that humans create,
link |
including technology.
link |
And I just, I feel it is possible to create
link |
social media platforms that incentivize
link |
different things than the current.
link |
I think the current incentivization is around
link |
like the dumbest possible thing that was invented
link |
like 20 years ago, however long.
link |
And it just works and so nobody's changing it.
link |
I just think that there could be a lot of innovation
link |
for more, see, you kind of push back this idea
link |
that we can't know what longterm growth or happiness is.
link |
If you give control to people to define
link |
what their longterm happiness and goals are,
link |
then that optimization can happen
link |
for each of those individual people.
link |
Well, I mean, imagine a future where
link |
probably a lot of people would love to make their living
link |
doing TikTok dance videos, but people recognize generally
link |
that's kind of hard to get into.
link |
Nonetheless, dance crews have an experience
link |
that's very similar to programmers working together on GitHub.
link |
So the future is like a cross between TikTok and GitHub
link |
and they get together and they have rights.
link |
They're negotiating for returns.
link |
They join different artists societies
link |
in order to soften the blow of the randomness
link |
of who gets the network effect benefit
link |
because nobody can know that.
link |
And I think an individual person
link |
might join a thousand different data unions
link |
in the course of their lives, or maybe even 10,000.
link |
I don't know, but the point is that we'll have
link |
like these very hedge distributed portfolios
link |
of different data unions we're part of.
link |
And some of them might just trickle in a little money
link |
for nonsense stuff where we're contributing
link |
to health studies or something.
link |
But I think people will find their way.
link |
They'll find their way to the right GitHub like community
link |
in which they find their value in the context
link |
of supplying inputs and data and taste
link |
and correctives and all of this into the algorithms
link |
and the robots of the future.
link |
And that is a way to resist
link |
the lizard brain based funding system mechanisms.
link |
It's an alternate economic system
link |
that rewards productivity, creativity,
link |
value as perceived by others.
link |
It's a genuine market.
link |
It's not doled out from a center.
link |
There's not some communist person deciding who's valuable.
link |
It's actual market.
link |
And the money is made by supporting that
link |
instead of just grabbing people's attention
link |
in the cheapest possible way,
link |
which is definitely how you get the lizard brain.
link |
So we're finally at the agreement.
link |
But I just think that...
link |
So yeah, I'll tell you how I think to fix social media.
link |
There's a few things.
link |
So one, I think people should have complete control
link |
over their data and transparency of what that data is
link |
and how it's being used if they do hand over the control.
link |
Another thing they should be able to delete,
link |
walk away with their data at any moment, easy.
link |
Like with a single click of a button, maybe two buttons,
link |
I don't know, just easily walk away with their data.
link |
The other is control of the algorithm,
link |
individualized control of the algorithm for them.
link |
So each one has their own algorithm.
link |
Each person has their own algorithm.
link |
They get to be the decider of what they see in this world.
link |
And to me, that's, I guess, fundamentally decentralized
link |
in terms of the key decisions being made.
link |
But if that's made transparent,
link |
I feel like people will choose that system
link |
over Twitter of today, over Facebook of today,
link |
when they have the ability to walk away,
link |
to control their data
link |
and to control the kinds of things they see.
link |
Now, let's walk away from the term AI.
link |
In this case, you have full control
link |
of the algorithms that help you
link |
if you want to use their help.
link |
But you can also say a few to those algorithms
link |
and just consume the raw, beautiful waterfall
link |
I think that, to me, that's not only fixes social media,
link |
but I think it would make a lot more money.
link |
So I would like to challenge the idea.
link |
I know you're not presenting that,
link |
but that the only way to make a ton of money
link |
is to operate like Facebook is.
link |
I think you can make more money by giving people control.
link |
Yeah, I mean, I certainly believe that.
link |
We're definitely in the territory
link |
of a wholehearted agreement here.
link |
I do want to caution against one thing,
link |
which is making a future that benefits programmers
link |
versus this idea that people are in control of their data.
link |
So years ago, I cofounded an advisory board for the EU
link |
with a guy named Jay.
link |
Giovanni Bottarelli, who passed away.
link |
It's one of the reasons I wanted to mention it.
link |
A remarkable guy who'd been,
link |
he was originally a prosecutor
link |
who was throwing mafioso in jail in Sicily.
link |
So he was like this intense guy who was like,
link |
I've dealt with death threats.
link |
Mark Zuckerberg doesn't scare me or whatever.
link |
So we worked on this path of saying,
link |
let's make it all about transparency and consent.
link |
And it was one of the feeders that led to this huge data
link |
privacy and protection framework in Europe called the GDPR.
link |
And so therefore we've been able to have empirical feedback
link |
And the problem is that most people actually get stymied
link |
by the complexity of that kind of management.
link |
They have trouble and reasonably so.
link |
I don't, I'm like a techie.
link |
I can go in and I can figure out what's going on.
link |
But most people really do.
link |
And so there's a problem that it differentially benefits
link |
those who kind of have a technical mindset
link |
and can go in and sort of have a feeling
link |
for how this stuff works.
link |
I kind of still want to come back to incentives.
link |
And so if the incentive for whoever is,
link |
if the commercial incentive is to help the creative people
link |
of the future make more money,
link |
because you get a cut of it,
link |
that's how you grow an economy.
link |
Not the programmers.
link |
Well, some of them will be programmers.
link |
It's not anti programmer.
link |
I'm just saying that it's not only programmers, you know?
link |
So, yeah, you have to make sure the incentives are right.
link |
I mean, I like control is an interface problem
link |
to where you have to create something that's compelling
link |
to everybody, to the creatives, to the public.
link |
I mean, there's, I don't know, Creative Commons,
link |
like the licensing, there's a bunch of legal speak
link |
just in general, the whole legal profession.
link |
It's nice when it can be simplified
link |
in the way that you can truly simply understand.
link |
Everybody can simply understand the basics.
link |
In the same way, it should be very simple to understand
link |
how the data is being used
link |
and what data is being used for people.
link |
But then you're arguing that in order for that to happen,
link |
you have to have the incentives alike.
link |
I mean, a lot of the reason that money works
link |
is actually information hiding and information loss.
link |
Like one of the things about money
link |
is a particular dollar you get
link |
might have passed through your enemy's hands
link |
and you don't know it.
link |
But also, I mean, this is what Adam Smith,
link |
if you wanna give the most charitable interpretation possible
link |
to the invisible hand is what he was saying,
link |
is that like there's this whole complicated thing
link |
and not only do you not need to know about it,
link |
the truth is you'd never be able to follow it if you tried
link |
and just like let the economic incentives
link |
solve for this whole thing.
link |
And that in a sense, every transaction
link |
is like a neuron and a neural net.
link |
If he'd had that metaphor, he would have used it
link |
and let the whole thing settle to a solution
link |
and don't worry about it.
link |
I think this idea of having incentives
link |
that reduce complexity for people
link |
can be made to work.
link |
And that's an example of an algorithm
link |
that could be manipulative or not,
link |
going back to your question before
link |
about can you do it in a way that's not manipulative?
link |
And I would say a GitHub like,
link |
if you just have this vision,
link |
GitHub plus TikTok combined, is it possible?
link |
I really think it is.
link |
I'm not gonna be able to unsee that idea
link |
of creatives on TikTok collaborating
link |
in the same way that people on GitHub collaborate.
link |
I like that kind of version.
link |
I like it, I love it.
link |
I just like, right now when people use,
link |
by the way, father of teenage daughter.
link |
It's all about TikTok, right?
link |
So, when people use TikTok,
link |
there's a lot of, it's kind of funny,
link |
I was gonna say cattiness,
link |
but I was just using the cat
link |
as this exemplar of what we're talking about.
link |
I contradict myself.
link |
But anyway, there's all this cattiness
link |
where people are like,
link |
ee, this person's ee.
link |
And I just, what about people getting together
link |
and kind of saying,
link |
okay, we're gonna work on this move.
link |
We're gonna get a better,
link |
can we get a better musician?
link |
Like, and they do that,
link |
but that's the part
link |
that's kind of off the books right now.
link |
That should be like right there.
link |
That should be the center.
link |
That's where the, that's the really best part.
link |
Well, that's where the invention of Git period,
link |
the versioning is brilliant.
link |
And so some of the things
link |
you're talking about,
link |
technology, algorithms, tools can empower.
link |
And that's the thing for humans to connect,
link |
to collaborate and so on.
link |
Can we upset more people a little bit?
link |
Maybe we'd have to try.
link |
Can we, can I ask you to elaborate?
link |
Cause I, my intuition was that
link |
you would be a supporter of something
link |
like cryptocurrency and Bitcoin
link |
because it is fundamentally emphasizes decentralization.
link |
What do you, so can you elaborate?
link |
Your thoughts on Bitcoin.
link |
I, it's kind of funny.
link |
Um, I, I wrote, I, I've been advocating
link |
some kind of digital currency for a long time.
link |
And when the, the, uh, when, when Bitcoin came out
link |
and the original paper on, on blockchain,
link |
um, my heart kind of sank because I thought,
link |
Oh my God, we're applying all of this fancy thought
link |
and all these very careful distributed security
link |
measures to recreate the gold standard.
link |
Like it's just so retro.
link |
It's so dysfunctional.
link |
It's so useless from an economic point of view.
link |
So it's always, and then the other thing
link |
is using computational inefficiency
link |
at a boundless scale as your form of security
link |
is a crime against this atmosphere.
link |
Obviously a lot of people know that now,
link |
but we knew that at the start.
link |
Like the thing is when the first paper came out,
link |
I remember a lot of people saying,
link |
Oh my God, I think this thing scales.
link |
It's a carbon disaster, you know?
link |
And, and, um, I, I just like, I'm just mystified,
link |
but that's a different question than when you asked,
link |
can you have, um, a cryptographic currency
link |
or at least some kind of digital currency
link |
that's of a benefit?
link |
Like I'm, and there are people who are trying
link |
to be thoughtful about this.
link |
You should, uh, if you haven't,
link |
you should interview, uh, Vitalik Buterin sometime.
link |
Yeah, I've interviewed him twice.
link |
So like there are people in the community
link |
who are trying to be thoughtful
link |
and trying to figure out how to do this better.
link |
It has nice properties though, right?
link |
So the, one of the nice properties is that
link |
like government centralized, it's hard to control.
link |
Uh, and then the other one to fix some of the issues
link |
that you're referring to,
link |
I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here is,
link |
you know, there's lightning network.
link |
There's ideas how to, how you, uh, build stuff
link |
on top of Bitcoin, similar with gold
link |
that allow you to have this kind of vibrant economy
link |
that operates not on the blockchain,
link |
but outside the blockchain.
link |
And you use this, uh, Bitcoin for, uh, for like
link |
checking the security of those transactions.
link |
So Bitcoin's not new.
link |
It's been around for a while.
link |
I've been watching it closely.
link |
I've not, I've not seen one example of it
link |
creating economic growth.
link |
There was this obsession with the idea
link |
that government was the problem,
link |
that idea that government's the problem.
link |
Let's say government earned that wrath, honestly,
link |
because if you look at some of the things
link |
that governments have done in recent decades,
link |
it's not a pretty story.
link |
Like, uh, after, uh, after a very small number
link |
of people in the US government decided to bomb
link |
in landmine Southeast Asia, it's hard to come back
link |
and say, oh, government's this great thing.
link |
But, uh, then the problem is that this resistance
link |
to government is basically resistance to politics.
link |
It's a way of saying, if I can get rich,
link |
nobody should bother me.
link |
It's a way of not, of not having obligations to others.
link |
And that ultimately is a very suspect motivation.
link |
But does that mean that the impulse that the government, um,
link |
should not overreach its power is flawed?
link |
Well, I mean, what I want to ask you to do
link |
is to replace the word government with politics.
link |
Like our politics is people having to deal with each other.
link |
My theory about freedom is that the only authentic form
link |
of freedom is perpetual annoyance.
link |
So annoyance means you're actually dealing with people
link |
because people are annoying.
link |
Perpetual means that that annoyance is survivable
link |
so it doesn't destroy us all.
link |
So if you have perpetual annoyance,
link |
then you have freedom.
link |
And that's politics.
link |
If you don't have perpetual annoyance,
link |
something's gone very wrong and you've suppressed those people
link |
that it's only temporary.
link |
It's going to come back and be horrible.
link |
You should seek perpetual annoyance.
link |
I'll invite you to a Berkeley city council meeting
link |
so you can know what that feels like.
link |
What perpetual annoyance feels like.
link |
But anyway, so freedom is being...
link |
The test of freedom is that you're annoyed by other people.
link |
If you're not, you're not free.
link |
If you're not, you're trapped in some temporary illusion
link |
that's going to fall apart.
link |
Now, this quest to avoid government
link |
is really a quest to avoid that political feeling,
link |
but you have to have it.
link |
You have to deal with it.
link |
And it sucks, but that's the human situation.
link |
That's the human condition.
link |
And this idea that we're going to have this abstract thing
link |
that protects us from having to deal with each other
link |
is always an illusion.
link |
The idea, and I apologize,
link |
I overstretched the use of the word government.
link |
The idea is there should be some punishment from the people
link |
when a bureaucracy, when a set of people
link |
or a particular leader, like in an authoritarian regime,
link |
which more than half the world currently lives under,
link |
if they become, they stop representing the people,
link |
it stops being like a Berkeley meeting
link |
and starts being more like a dictatorial kind of situation.
link |
And so the point is, it's nice to give people,
link |
the populace in a decentralized way,
link |
power to resist that kind of government becoming over authoritarian.
link |
Yeah, but people see this idea that the problem
link |
is always the government being powerful is false.
link |
The problem can also be criminal gangs.
link |
The problem can also be weird cults.
link |
The problem can be abusive clergy.
link |
The problem can be infrastructure that fails.
link |
The problem can be poisoned water.
link |
The problem can be failed electric grids.
link |
The problem can be a crappy education system
link |
that makes the whole society less and less able to create value.
link |
There are all these other problems
link |
that are different from an overbearing government.
link |
Like you have to keep some sense of perspective
link |
and not be obsessed with only one kind of problem
link |
because then the others will pop up.
link |
But empirically speaking, some problems are bigger than others.
link |
So like some groups of people,
link |
like governments or gangs or companies lead to problems.
link |
Are you a US citizen?
link |
Has the government ever really been a problem for you?
link |
So first of all, I grew up in the Soviet Union.
link |
Yeah, my wife did too.
link |
So I have seen, and has the government bothered me?
link |
I would say that that's a really complicated question,
link |
especially because the United States is such,
link |
it's a special place like a lot of other countries.
link |
My wife's family were refused NICs.
link |
And so we have like a very,
link |
and her dad was sent to the Gulag.
link |
For what it's worth on my father's side,
link |
all but a few were killed by a pogrom
link |
in a post Soviet pogrom in Ukraine.
link |
So I would say because you did a little trick
link |
of eloquent trick of language
link |
that you switched to the United States
link |
to talk about government.
link |
So I believe unlike my friend,
link |
Michael Malus, who's an anarchist,
link |
I believe government can do a lot of good in the world.
link |
That is exactly what you're saying,
link |
which is it's politics.
link |
The thing that Bitcoin folks and cryptocurrency folks argue
link |
is that one of the big ways that government
link |
can control the populace is centralized bank,
link |
like control the money.
link |
That was the case in the Soviet Union too.
link |
There's inflation can really make poor people suffer.
link |
And so what they argue is this is one way to go around
link |
that power that government has
link |
of controlling the monetary system.
link |
So that's a way to resist.
link |
That's not actually saying government bad.
link |
That's saying some of the ways
link |
that central banks get into trouble
link |
can be resisted through centralized.
link |
So let me ask you on balance today in the real world
link |
in terms of actual facts,
link |
do you think cryptocurrencies are doing more
link |
to prop up corrupt, murderous, horrible regimes
link |
or to resist those regimes?
link |
Where do you think the balance is right now?
link |
I know exactly having talked to a lot of cryptocurrency folks
link |
what they would tell me, right?
link |
I, it's hard, it's, I don't, no, no.
link |
I'm asking it as a real question.
link |
There's no way to know the answer perfectly.
link |
There's no way to know the answer perfectly.
link |
However, I gotta say, if you look at people
link |
who've been able to decode blockchains
link |
and they do leak a lot of data.
link |
They're not as secure as this widely thought.
link |
There are a lot of unknown Bitcoin whales
link |
from pretty early and they're huge.
link |
And if you ask, who are these people?
link |
There's evidence that a lot of them are quite
link |
not the people you'd wanna support, let's say.
link |
And I just don't, like, I think empirically
link |
this idea that there's some intrinsic way
link |
that bad governments will be disempowered
link |
and people will be able to resist them more
link |
than new villains or even villainous governments
link |
will be empowered.
link |
There's no basis for that assertion.
link |
It just is kind of circumstantial.
link |
And I think in general, Bitcoin ownership is one thing,
link |
but Bitcoin transactions have tended
link |
to support criminality more than productivity.
link |
Of course, they would argue that was the story
link |
of its early days, that now more and more Bitcoin
link |
is being used for legitimate transactions, but...
link |
That's the difference.
link |
I didn't say for legitimate transactions.
link |
I said for economic growth, for creativity.
link |
Like, I think what's happening is people are using it
link |
a little bit for buying, I don't know,
link |
maybe some of these companies make it available
link |
for this and that, they buy a Tesla with it or something.
link |
Investing in a startup hard, it might've happened
link |
a little bit, but it's not an engine of productivity,
link |
creativity, and economic growth,
link |
whereas old fashioned currency still is.
link |
And anyway, look, I think something...
link |
I'm pro the idea of digital currencies.
link |
I am anti the idea of economics wiping out politics
link |
I think they have to exist in some balance
link |
to avoid the worst dysfunctions of each.
link |
In some ways, there's parallels to our discussion
link |
of algorithms and cryptocurrency is you're pro the idea,
link |
but it can be used to manipulate,
link |
you can be used poorly by aforementioned humans.
link |
Well, I think that you can make better designs
link |
and worse designs.
link |
And the thing about cryptocurrency that's so interesting
link |
is how many of us are responsible for the poor designs
link |
because we're all so hooked on that Horatio Alger story
link |
on like, I'm gonna be the one who gets the viral benefit.
link |
Way back when all this stuff was starting,
link |
I remember it would have been in the 80s,
link |
somebody had the idea of using viral
link |
as a metaphor for network effect.
link |
And the whole point was to talk about
link |
how bad network effect was,
link |
that it always created distortions
link |
that ruined the usefulness of economic incentives
link |
that created dangerous distortions.
link |
Like, but then somehow, even after the pandemic,
link |
we think of viral as this good thing
link |
because we imagine ourselves as the virus, right?
link |
We wanna be on the beneficiary side of it.
link |
But of course, you're not likely to be.
link |
There is a sense because money is involved,
link |
people are not reasoning clearly always
link |
because they want to be part of that first viral wave
link |
that makes them rich.
link |
And that blinds people from their basic morality.
link |
I had an interesting conversation.
link |
I sort of feel like I should respect some people's privacy,
link |
but some of the initial people who started Bitcoin,
link |
I remember having an argument about like,
link |
it's intrinsically a Ponzi scheme,
link |
like the early people have more than the later people.
link |
And the further down the chain you get,
link |
the more you're subject to gambling like dynamics
link |
where it's more and more random
link |
and more and more subject to weird network effects
link |
and whatnot unless you're a very small player perhaps
link |
and you're just buying something,
link |
but even then you'll be subject to fluctuations
link |
because the whole thing is just kind of,
link |
it's gonna wave around the little people more.
link |
And I remember the conversation turned to gambling
link |
because gambling is a pretty large economic sector.
link |
And it's always struck me as being nonproductive.
link |
Like somebody goes to Las Vegas and they lose money.
link |
And so one argument is, well, they got entertainment.
link |
They paid for entertainment as they lost money.
link |
And Las Vegas does up the losing of money
link |
in an entertaining way.
link |
It's like going to a show.
link |
So that's one argument.
link |
The argument that was made to me was different from that.
link |
It's that, no, what they're doing
link |
is they're getting a chance to experience hope.
link |
And a lot of people don't get that chance.
link |
And so that's really worth it.
link |
Even if they're gonna lose,
link |
they have that moment of hope
link |
and they need to be able to experience that.
link |
And it was a very interesting argument.
link |
That's so heartbreaking, but I've seen that.
link |
I have that a little bit of a sense.
link |
I've talked to some young people
link |
who invest in cryptocurrency.
link |
And what I see is this hope.
link |
This is the first thing that gave them hope.
link |
And that's so heartbreaking to me
link |
that you've gotten hope from that.
link |
So much is invested.
link |
It's like hope from somehow becoming rich
link |
as opposed to something to me.
link |
I apologize, but money is in the longterm
link |
not going to be a source of that deep meaning.
link |
It's good to have enough money,
link |
but it should not be the source of hope.
link |
And it's heartbreaking to me
link |
how many people is the source of hope.
link |
Yeah, you've just described the psychology of virality
link |
or the psychology of trying to base a civilization
link |
on semi random occurrences of network effect peaks.
link |
Yeah, and it doesn't really work.
link |
I mean, I think we need to get away from that.
link |
We need to soften those peaks
link |
and accept Microsoft, which deserves every penny,
link |
but in every other case.
link |
Well, you mentioned GitHub.
link |
I think what Microsoft did with GitHub was brilliant.
link |
Okay, if I can give a, not a critical,
link |
but on Microsoft because they recently purchased Bethesda.
link |
So Elder Scrolls is in their hands.
link |
I'm watching you, Microsoft,
link |
do not screw up my favorite game.
link |
Yeah, well, look, I'm not speaking for Microsoft.
link |
I have an explicit arrangement with them
link |
where I don't speak for them, obviously,
link |
like that should be very clear.
link |
I do not speak for them.
link |
I am not saying I like them.
link |
I think such is amazing.
link |
The term data dignity was coined by Sacha.
link |
Like, so, you know, we have, it's kind of extraordinary,
link |
but, you know, Microsoft's this giant thing.
link |
It's going to screw up this or that.
link |
You know, it's not, I don't know.
link |
It's kind of interesting.
link |
I've had a few occasions in my life
link |
to see how things work from the inside of some big thing.
link |
And, you know, it's always just people kind of,
link |
I don't know, there's always like coordination problems.
link |
There's always human problems.
link |
Oh God, there's some good people.
link |
There's some bad people.
link |
It's always, I hope Microsoft doesn't screw up your game.
link |
And I hope they bring Clippy back.
link |
You should never kill Clippy.
link |
Bring Clippy back.
link |
But Clippy promotes the myth of AI.
link |
Well, that's why, this is why I think you're wrong.
link |
How about if we, all right.
link |
Could we bring back Bob instead of Clippy?
link |
Which one was Bob?
link |
Oh, Bob was another thing.
link |
Bob was this other screen character
link |
who was supposed to be the voice of AI.
link |
Would Cortana do it for you?
link |
Cortana is too corporate.
link |
I like it, Cortana's fine.
link |
There's a woman in Seattle who's like the model for Cortana,
link |
did Cortana's voice.
link |
No, the voice is great.
link |
We had her as a, she used to walk around
link |
if you were wearing Hollands for a bit.
link |
I don't think that's happening anymore.
link |
I think, I don't think you should turn a software
link |
Get a cat, just get a cat.
link |
You and I, you and I.
link |
You coauthored a paper, you mentioned Lee Smolin,
link |
titled The Autodidactic Universe,
link |
which describes our universe as one that learns its own physical laws.
link |
That's a trippy and beautiful and powerful idea.
link |
What are, what would you say are the key ideas in this paper?
link |
Well, I should say that paper reflected work from last year
link |
and the project, the program has moved quite a lot.
link |
So it's a little, there's a lot of stuff that's not published
link |
that I'm quite excited about.
link |
So I have to kind of keep my frame in that,
link |
in that last year's thing.
link |
So I have to try to be a little careful about that.
link |
We can think about it in a few different ways.
link |
The core of the paper, the technical core of it
link |
is a triple correspondence.
link |
One part of it was already established
link |
and then another part is in the process.
link |
The part that was established was, of course,
link |
understanding different theories of physics as matrix models.
link |
The part that was fresher is understanding those
link |
as machine learning systems so that we could move fluidly
link |
between these different ways of describing systems.
link |
And the reason to want to do that is to just have more tools
link |
and more options because, well,
link |
theoretical physics is really hard
link |
and a lot of programs have kind of run into a state
link |
where they feel a little stalled, I guess.
link |
I want to be delicate about this
link |
because I'm not a physicist,
link |
I'm the computer scientist collaborating.
link |
So I don't mean to diss anybody's.
link |
So this is almost like gives a framework
link |
for generating new ideas in physics.
link |
As we start to publish more about where it's gone,
link |
I think you'll start to see there's tools
link |
and ways of thinking about theories
link |
that I think open up some new paths
link |
that will be of interest.
link |
There's the technical core of it,
link |
which is this idea of a correspondence
link |
to give you more facility.
link |
But then there's also the storytelling part of it.
link |
And this is something Lee loves stories and I do.
link |
And the idea here is that a typical way
link |
of thinking about physics is that there's some kind
link |
of starting condition and then there's some principle
link |
by which the starting condition evolves.
link |
And the question is like, why the starting condition?
link |
The starting condition has to be fine tuned
link |
and all these things about it have to be kind of perfect.
link |
And so we were thinking, well, look,
link |
what if we could push the storytelling
link |
about where the universe comes from much further back
link |
by starting with really simple things that evolve
link |
and then through that evolution,
link |
explain how things got to be how they are
link |
through very simple principles, right?
link |
And so we've been exploring a variety of ways
link |
to push the start of the storytelling
link |
further and further back,
link |
and it's really kind of interesting
link |
because like for all of his,
link |
Lee is sometimes considered to be,
link |
to have a radical quality in the physics world.
link |
But he still is like, no, this is gonna be like,
link |
the kind of time we're talking about
link |
in which evolution happens is the same time we're now
link |
and we're talking about something that starts and continues.
link |
And I'm like, well, what if there's some other kind
link |
of time that's time like, and it sounds like metaphysics,
link |
but there's an ambiguity, you know, like,
link |
it has to start from something
link |
and it's kind of interesting.
link |
So there's this, a lot of the math
link |
can be thought of either way, which is kind of interesting.
link |
So push this so far back that basically
link |
all the things that we take for granted in physics
link |
start becoming emergent, it's emergent.
link |
I really wanna emphasize this is all super baby steps.
link |
I don't wanna over claim.
link |
It's like, I think a lot of the things we're doing,
link |
we're approaching some old problems
link |
in a pretty fresh way, informed.
link |
There's been a zillion papers about how you can think
link |
of the universe as a big neural net
link |
or how you can think of different ideas in physics
link |
as being quite similar to, or even equivalent
link |
to some of the ideas in machine learning.
link |
And that actually works out crazy well.
link |
Like, I mean, that is actually kind of eerie
link |
when you look at it, like there's probably
link |
two or three dozen papers that have this quality
link |
and some of them are just crazy good.
link |
And it's very interesting.
link |
What we're trying to do is take those kinds
link |
of observations and turn them into an actionable framework
link |
where you can then start to do things
link |
with landscapes or theories that you couldn't do before
link |
and that sort of thing.
link |
So in that context, or maybe beyond,
link |
how do you explain us humans?
link |
How unlikely are we, this intelligent civilization
link |
or is there a lot of others or are we alone in this universe?
link |
You seem to appreciate humans very much.
link |
I've grown fond of us.
link |
We have our nice qualities.
link |
I mean, we're kind of weird.
link |
We sprout this hair on our heads and then we're,
link |
I don't know, we're sort of weird animals.
link |
That's the feature, not a bug, I think.
link |
I think if I'm just going to answer you in terms of truth,
link |
the first thing I'd say is we're not in a privileged enough
link |
position, at least as yet, to really know much about who we
link |
are, how we are, what we're really like in the context
link |
of something larger, what that context is,
link |
like all that stuff.
link |
We might learn more in the future.
link |
Our descendants might learn more, but we don't really know
link |
very much, which you can either view as frustrating or charming
link |
like that first year of TikTok or something.
link |
All roads lead back to TikTok.
link |
But in terms of, there's another level at which I can think
link |
about it where I sometimes think that if you are just quiet
link |
and you do something that gets you in touch with the way
link |
reality happens, and for me it's playing music, sometimes it
link |
seems like you can feel a bit of how the universe is.
link |
And it feels like there's a lot more going on in it and there
link |
is a lot more life and a lot more stuff happening and a lot
link |
more stuff flowing through it.
link |
I'm not speaking as a scientist now.
link |
This is kind of a more my artist side talking and I feel like
link |
I'm suddenly in multiple personalities with you.
link |
Jack Kerouac said that music is the only truth.
link |
It sounds like you might be at least in part.
link |
There's a passage in Kerouac's book, Dr.
link |
Sacks, where somebody tries to just explain the whole
link |
situation with reality and people in like a paragraph.
link |
And I couldn't reproduce it for you here, but it's like, yeah,
link |
like there are these bulbous things that walk around and
link |
they make these sounds, you can sort of understand them, but
link |
only kind of, and then there's like this, and it's just like
link |
this amazing, like just really quick, like if some spirit
link |
being or something was going to show up in our reality and
link |
hadn't knew nothing about it, it's like a little basic intro
link |
of like, okay, here's what's going on here.
link |
It's an incredible passage.
link |
It's like a one or two sentence summary in H.
link |
Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, right?
link |
Do you think there's truth to that, that music somehow
link |
connects to something that words cannot?
link |
Music is something that just towers above me.
link |
I don't feel like I have an overview of it.
link |
It's just the reverse.
link |
I don't fully understand it because on one level it's simple.
link |
Like you can say, oh, it's a thing people evolved to
link |
coordinate our brains on a pattern level or something like that.
link |
There's all these things you can say about music, which are,
link |
you know, some of that's probably true.
link |
It's also, there's kind of like this, this is the mystery of
link |
Like there's a way that just instead of just being pure
link |
abstraction, music can have like this kind of substantiality
link |
to it that is philosophically impossible.
link |
I don't know what to do with it.
link |
The amount of understanding I feel I have when I hear the
link |
right song at the right time is not comparable to anything I
link |
can read on Wikipedia.
link |
Anything I can understand, read through in language.
link |
The music does connect us to something.
link |
There's this thing there.
link |
Yeah, there's some kind of a thing in it.
link |
And I've never ever, I've read across a lot of explanations
link |
from all kinds of interesting people like that it's some kind
link |
of a flow language between people or between people and how
link |
they perceive and that kind of thing.
link |
And that sort of explanation is fine, but it's not quite it
link |
There's something about music that makes me believe that
link |
panpsychism could possibly be true, which is that everything
link |
in the universe is conscious.
link |
It makes me think, makes me be humble in how much or how
link |
little I understand about the functions of our universe that
link |
everything might be conscious.
link |
Most people interested in theoretical physics eventually
link |
land in panpsychism, but I'm not one of them.
link |
I still think there's this pragmatic imperative to treat
link |
people as special.
link |
So I will proudly be a dualist without people and cats.
link |
Yeah, I'm not quite sure where to draw the line or why the
link |
line's there or anything like that.
link |
But I don't think I should be required to all the same
link |
questions are equally mysterious for no line.
link |
So I don't feel disadvantaged by that.
link |
So I shall remain a dualist.
link |
But if you listen to anyone trying to explain where
link |
consciousness is in a dualistic sense, either believing in
link |
souls or some special thing in the brain or something, you
link |
pretty much say, screw this.
link |
I'm going to be a panpsychist.
link |
Is there moments in your life that happened that we're
link |
defining in the way that you hope others your daughter?
link |
Well, listen, I got to say the moments that defined me were
link |
not the good ones.
link |
The moments that defined me were often horrible.
link |
I've had successes, you know, but if you ask what defined
link |
me, my mother's death, being under the World Trade Center
link |
and the attack, the things that have had an effect on me
link |
were the most were sort of real world, terrible things,
link |
which I don't wish on young people at all.
link |
And this is the thing that's hard about giving advice to
link |
young people that they have to learn their own lessons.
link |
And lessons don't come easily.
link |
And a world which avoids hard lessons will be a stupid
link |
world, you know, and I don't know what to do with it.
link |
That's a little bundle of truth that has a bit of a fatalistic
link |
quality to it, but I don't—this is like when I'm saying
link |
that, you know, freedom equals eternal annoyance.
link |
Like, you can't—like, there's a degree to which honest
link |
advice is not that pleasant to give.
link |
And I don't want young people to have to know about
link |
You don't want to wish hardship on them.
link |
Yeah, I think they deserve to have a little grace period
link |
of naiveté that's pleasant.
link |
I mean, I do, you know, if it's possible, if it's—these
link |
things are—this is like—this is tricky stuff.
link |
I mean, if you—okay, so let me try a little bit on this
link |
I think one thing—and any serious, broad advice will
link |
have been given a thousand times before for a thousand
link |
years, so I'm not going to claim originality, but I think
link |
trying to find a way to really pay attention to what you're
link |
feeling fundamentally, what your sense of the world is, what
link |
your intuition is, if you feel like an intuitive person, what
link |
you're—like, to try to escape the constant sway of social
link |
perception or manipulation, whatever you wish—not to
link |
escape it entirely, that would be horrible, but to find cover
link |
from it once in a while, to find a sense of being anchored
link |
in that, to believe in experience as a real thing.
link |
Believing in experience as a real thing is very dualistic.
link |
That goes with my philosophy of dualism.
link |
I believe there's something magical, and instead of squirting
link |
the magic dust on the programs, I think experience is something
link |
real and something apart, something mystical and something—
link |
Your own personal experience that you just have, and then
link |
you're saying silence the rest of the world enough to hear
link |
that—like, whatever that magic dust is in that experience.
link |
Find what is there, and I think that's one thing.
link |
Another thing is to recognize that kindness requires genius,
link |
that it's actually really hard, that facile kindness is not
link |
kindness, and that it'll take you a while to have the skills
link |
to have kind impulses to want to be kind you can have right
link |
away. To be effectively kind is hard.
link |
To be effectively kind, yeah.
link |
It takes skill. It takes hard lessons.
link |
You'll never be perfect at it. To the degree you get anywhere
link |
with it, it's the most rewarding thing ever.
link |
Let's see, what else would I say?
link |
I would say when you're young, you can be very overwhelmed
link |
by social and interpersonal emotions. You'll have broken hearts and
link |
jealousies. You'll feel socially down the ladder instead of up the
link |
ladder. It feels horrible when that happens. All of these things.
link |
And you have to remember what a fragile crust all that stuff is,
link |
and it's hard because right when it's happening, it's just so intense.
link |
If I was actually giving this advice to my daughter, she'd already
link |
be out of the room. This is for some hypothetical teenager that
link |
doesn't really exist that really wants to sit and listen to my
link |
voice for your daughter 10 years from now. Maybe.
link |
Can I ask you a difficult question?
link |
You talked about losing your mom.
link |
Yeah, I mean, I still connected her through music. She was a
link |
a young prodigy piano player in Vienna, and she survived the
link |
concentration camp and then died in a car accident here in the US.
link |
What music makes you think of her? Is there a song that connects?
link |
Well, she was in Vienna, so she had the whole Viennese music thing
link |
going, which is this incredible school of absolute skill and
link |
romance bundled together and wonderful on the piano, especially.
link |
I learned to play some of the Beethoven sonatas for her, and I
link |
played them in this exaggerated, drippy way I remember when I was
link |
Exaggerated meaning too full of emotion?
link |
Yeah, just like...
link |
Isn't that the only way to play Beethoven? I mean, I didn't know
link |
there's any other way.
link |
That's a reasonable question. I mean, the fashion these days is to
link |
be slightly Apollonian even with Beethoven, but one imagines that
link |
actual Beethoven playing might have been different. I don't
link |
know. I've gotten to play a few instruments he played and tried
link |
to see if I could feel anything about how it might have been for
link |
him. I don't know, really.
link |
I was always against the clinical precision of classical music.
link |
I thought a great piano player should be, like, in pain, like,
link |
you know, emotionally, like, truly feel the music and make it
link |
messy, sort of maybe play classical music the way, I don't
link |
know, blues pianist plays blues.
link |
It seems like they actually got happier, and I'm not sure if
link |
Beethoven got happier. I think it's a different kind of concept
link |
of the place of music. I think the blues, the whole African
link |
American tradition was initially surviving awful, awful
link |
circumstances. So you could say, you know, there was some of
link |
that in the concentration camps and all that too. And it's not
link |
that Beethoven's circumstances were brilliant, but he kind of
link |
also, I don't know, this is hard. Like, I mean, it would
link |
seem to be his misery was somewhat self imposed, maybe
link |
through, I don't know. It's kind of interesting, like, I've
link |
known some people who loathed Beethoven, like the composer,
link |
late composer, Pauline Oliveros, this wonderful modernist
link |
composer. I played in her band for a while, and she was like,
link |
oh, Beethoven, like, that's the worst music ever. It's like,
link |
all ego. It completely, it turns information, I mean, it
link |
turns emotion into your enemy. And it's ultimately all about
link |
your own self importance, which has to be at the expense of
link |
others. What else could it be? And blah, blah, blah. So she
link |
had, I shouldn't say, I don't mean to be dismissive, but I'm
link |
just saying, like, her position on Beethoven was very negative
link |
and very unimpressed, which is really interesting because
link |
the manner of the music. I think, I don't know. I mean,
link |
she's not here to speak for herself. So it's a little hard
link |
for me to answer that question. But it was interesting because
link |
I'd always thought of Beethoven as like, whoa, you know, this
link |
is like Beethoven is like really the dude, you know, and it's
link |
just like, Beethoven, Schmadovan, you know, it's like
link |
not really happening. Yeah, I still, even though it's cliche,
link |
I like playing personally, just for myself, Moonlight Sonata.
link |
I mean, I just, Moonlight's amazing. I mean, it's like,
link |
Moonlight's amazing. You know, I, you know, you're talking
link |
about comparing the blues and that sensibility from Europe
link |
is so different in so many ways. One of the musicians I
link |
play with is John Batiste, who has the band on Colbert Show,
link |
and he'll sit there playing jazz and suddenly go into
link |
Moonlight. He loves Moonlight. And what's kind of interesting
link |
is he's found a way to do Beethoven. And he, by the way,
link |
he can really do Beethoven. Like, he went through Juilliard
link |
and one time he was at my house, he's saying, hey, do you
link |
have the book of Beethoven's Sonatas? I say, yeah, I want to
link |
find one I haven't played. And then he sight read through the
link |
whole damn thing perfectly. And I'm like, oh, God, I just
link |
get out of here. I can't even deal with this. But anyway,
link |
but anyway, the thing is he has this way of with the same
link |
persona and the same philosophy moving from the blues into
link |
Beethoven that's really, really fascinating to me. It's like,
link |
I don't want to say he plays it as if it were jazz, but he
link |
kind of does. It's kind of really, and he talks, well, he
link |
was sight reading, he talks like Beethoven's talking to him.
link |
Like he's like, oh yeah, here, he's doing this. I can't do
link |
John, but you know, it's like, it's really interesting. Like
link |
it's very different. Like for me, I was introduced to
link |
Beethoven as like almost like this godlike figure, and I
link |
presume Pauline was too, that was really kind of a press
link |
for an art to deal with. And for him, it's just like the
link |
conversation. He's playing James P. Johnson or something. It's
link |
like another musician who did something and they're talking
link |
and it's very cool to be around. It's very kind of freeing
link |
to see someone have that relationship. I would love to
link |
hear him play Beethoven. That sounds amazing. He's great. We
link |
talked about Ernest Becker and how much value he puts on our
link |
mortality and our denial of our mortality. Do you think about
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your mortality? Do you think about your own death? You know
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what's funny is I used to not be able to, but as you get older,
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you just know people who die and there's all these things
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that just becomes familiar and and more of a more ordinary,
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which is what it is. But are you afraid? Sure, although less
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so. And it's not like I didn't have some kind of insight or
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revelation to become less afraid. I think I just, like I
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say, it's kind of familiarity. It's just knowing people who've
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died and I really believe in the future. I have this optimism
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that people or this whole thing of life on Earth, this whole
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thing we're part of, I don't know where to draw that circle,
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but this thing is going somewhere and has some kind of
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value and you can't both believe in the future and want
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to live forever. You have to make room for it. You know, like
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you have to, that optimism has to also come with its own like
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humility. You have to make yourself small to believe in
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the future and so it actually in a funny way comforts me.
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Wow, that's powerful. And optimism requires you to kind
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of step down after a time. Yeah, I mean, that said, life
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seems kind of short, but you know, whatever. Do you think
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there's I've tried to find I can't find the complaint
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department. You know, I really want to I want to bring this
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up, but the customer service number never answers and like
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the email bounces one way. So yeah, do you think there's
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meaning to it to life? We'll see. Meaning is a funny word
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like we say all these things as if we know what they mean, but
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meaning we don't know what we mean when we say meaning like
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we obviously do not and it's a it's it's a funny little
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mystical thing. I think it ultimately connects to that
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sense of experience that dualists tend to believe in.
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I guess there are why like if you look up to the stars and
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you experience that awe inspiring like joy at whatever
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when you look up to the stars that I don't know why for me
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that's kind of makes me feel joyful, maybe a little bit
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melancholy, just some weird soup of feelings and ultimately
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the question is like why are we here in this vast universe?
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That question why?
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Have you been able in some way maybe through music answer it
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My impulse is to feel like it's not quite the right question
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to ask, but I feel like going down that path is just too
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tedious for the moment and I don't want to do it, but
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the wrong question. Well, just because you know, I don't know
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what meaning is and I think I do know that sense of awe. I
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grew up in southern New Mexico and the stars were so vivid.
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I've had some weird misfortunes, but I've had some
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weird luck also. One of our near neighbors was the head of
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optics research at White Sands and when he was young he
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discovered Pluto. His name was Clyde Tombaugh and he taught me
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how to make telescopes, grinding mirrors and stuff. My dad
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had also made telescopes when he was a kid, but Clyde had like
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backyard telescopes that would put to shame a lot of like
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I mean he really he did his telescopes you know and so
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I remember he'd let me go and play with him and just like looking at a
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globular cluster and you're seeing the actual photons and with a good
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telescope it's really like this object like you can really tell
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this isn't coming through some intervening information structure this
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is like the actual photons and it's really a three dimensional object
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and you have even a feeling for the vastness of it
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and it's it's it's I don't know I so I definitely I was
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very very fortunate to have a connection to the sky that way
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when I was a kid. To have had that experience
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again the emphasis on experience.
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It's kind of funny like I feel like sometimes
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like I've taken when she was younger I took my daughter and her friends to
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to like a telescope there are a few around here that are
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kids can go and use and they would like look at Jupiter's moons or something
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I think like Galilean moons and I don't know if they quite
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had that because it's like too
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it's been just too normalized and I think maybe
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when I was growing up screens weren't that common yet and maybe it's like too
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confusable with the screen I don't know you know somebody uh
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brought up in conversation to me somewhere I don't remember who
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but they they kind of posited this idea that
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if humans early humans weren't able to see the stars like if
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earth atmosphere was such there was cloudy
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that we would not develop human civilization there's something about
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being able to look up and see a vast universe is like
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that's fundamental to the development of human civilization
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I thought that was a curious kind of thought that reminds me of that
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old Isaac Asimov story where the you know there's this planet where they
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finally get to see what's in the sky once in a while and it turns out they're in
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the middle of a globular cluster and they're all these stars and
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I forget what happens exactly god that's that's from when I was the same age as a
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kid I don't really remember yeah uh but um yeah I don't know it's uh
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it's it might be right I'm just thinking of all the
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civilizations that grew up under clouds I mean like
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the the vikings needed a special uh diffracting piece of mica to navigate
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because they could never see the sun they had this thing called a sunstone
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that they found from this this one cave you know about that
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so they were in this like uh they were trying to navigate
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boats you know in the north atlantic with without being able to see the sun
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because it was cloudy and so they they used uh of a uh
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a chunk of mica to diffract it in order to be able to align where the sun really
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was because they couldn't tell by eye and navigate so
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I'm just saying there are a lot of civilizations that are pretty impressive
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that had to deal with a lot of clouds uh
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the amazonians invented our agriculture and they they were probably under
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clouds a lot I don't know I don't know to me personally the the question of the
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meaning of life becomes most um
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vibrant most apparent when you look up at the stars
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because it makes me feel very small uh that we're not small
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but then you ask it it still feels that we're special and then the natural
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question is like well if we are special as I think we
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are why the heck are we here in this vast
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universe that ultimately is the question of um
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right well the meaning of life I mean look
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there's a confusion sometimes in trying to use uh
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to set up a question or a thought experiment or something
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that's defined in terms of a context to explain something
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where there is no larger context and that's a category error
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um if we want to do it in physics um or well or in computer science um
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it's hard to talk about the universe as a Turing machine because a Turing
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machine has an external clock and an observer and a
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input and output there's a larger context implied in order for it to be
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defined at all and so if you're talking about the
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universe you can't talk about it coherently as a Turing machine uh
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quantum mechanics is like that quantum mechanics has an external clock and has
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some kind of external context depending on your interpretation
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um that's either you know the observer or whatever
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uh and there's a they're they're similar that way so maybe
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maybe Turing machines and quantum mechanics can be
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better friends or something because they have a similar setup but the thing is if
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you have something that's defined in terms of an outer context you can't
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talk about ultimates with it because obviously it doesn't
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it's not suited for that so there's some ideas that
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are their own context general relativity is its own context
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it's different that's why it's hard to unify and
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um i think the same thing is true when we talk about
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these types of questions like uh meaning is in a context and
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to talk about ultimate meaning is therefore a category error it's not
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it's not a um it's not a resolvable way of thinking
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it might be a way of thinking that is experientially
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um or aesthetically valuable because it is awesome in the sense of
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you know awe inspiring um but to try to treat it analytically is not
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sensible maybe that's what music can poetry for
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yeah maybe i think so i think music actually does
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escape any particular context that's how it feels to me but i'm not sure about
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that that's once again crazy artist talking not scientist
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well you did uh you do both masterfully uh jaron i'm like i said i'm a big fan
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of everything you've done of you as a human being
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um i appreciate the the fun argument we had today that will i'm sure
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continue for 30 years as it did with mark mitski um honestly
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i i deeply appreciate that you spend your really valuable time with me today
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it was a really great conversation thank you so much
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thanks for listening to this conversation with jaron lanier
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to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description
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and now let me leave you with some words from jaron lanier himself
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a real friendship ought to introduce each person
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to unexpected weirdness in the other thank you for listening i hope to see