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 Jaren 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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As a side note, you may know
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that Jaren is a staunch critic 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
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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
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in conversations nor in life.
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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 Jaren 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,
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will be 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 virtuality.
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And at this point,
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there have been multiple generations of younger people
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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 back in the day.
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In these days, it's called augmented reality,
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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,
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not because I think the forest needs augmentation,
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but when you look at the augmentation next to a real tree,
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the real tree just pops out as being astounding.
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It's interactive, it's changing slightly all the time
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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 to virtuality, all of a sudden you do.
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And even in practical applications,
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my favorite early application of virtuality,
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which we prototype 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,
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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,
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for training for all kinds of things,
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then to go to the real person,
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boy, it's really something like,
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surgeons really get woken up by that transition.
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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,
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people have different attitudes towards it.
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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,
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for you personally, still drawn to the physical world?
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Like they're clearly then as 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
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a certain kind of nerdy personality in people,
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or at least in me, which I'm not that fond of.
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And there are all kinds of things about software I don't like.
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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,
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I'm a little mystified when people ask me,
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well, 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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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.
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Whether it performs 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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or fancy, so fancy, in fact,
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that it may be beyond our cognitive capabilities
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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,
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then they're universal, 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
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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 is here.
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How difficult does 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 kind of 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 question's usually asked
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that I think is false,
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which is a suggestion that people have a fixed level
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of ability to perceive reality in a given way.
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And actually, people are always learning, evolving,
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forming themselves.
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We're also programmable, self programmable,
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changing, adapting, 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,
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I think so, that people viewed
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as being absolutely realistic and indistinguishable,
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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 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 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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Well, like unmasked,
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like large numbers of people.
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What I hope is, 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
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we have 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,
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in some sense, seems incoherent to me
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because we can program it.
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We have technology.
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It has, 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.
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But sorry to draw, 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 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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it's a way to help us understand reality.
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I 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 there's a whole world of variations on that.
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I wish they'd step back and think about their own motivations
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and exactly what they mean, you know what?
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And I think the danger with these things is,
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so if you say, is the universe some kind of computer broadly?
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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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as these ultimate cosmic questions
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is that it has a way of getting people to pretend
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they know more than they do.
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Can you maybe, this is a therapy session.
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Is that going to last me for a second?
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I really like 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 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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But I also am happy with the music that's playing
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and the mountains and carrying around a sword
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and just that, 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 meaning
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and patterns with other people.
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I think it's a good thing.
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You know, 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, you know, manipulative economy
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of social media 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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You know, and by the way, there's a thing about humans
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which is we're problematic, any kind of social interaction
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with other people is going to 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 this is like a backroom power
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deal kind of place 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 going to be a mix of things.
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I don't think the search for purity is going to get you
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anywhere, 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 becoming, where we're making ourselves crazy
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or cruel enough that we might not survive.
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And I think, you know, the social media criticism
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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 that every experience
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has both beauty and darkness 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 darkest man's search
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for meaning with Victor Franco and 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 and the darkest
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But there's always the dark parts, too.
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Well, I mean, our situation is structurally difficult.
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We are structurally different.
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We perceive socially.
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We depend on each other for our sense of place
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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 inevitably
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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, 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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OK, let's talk about one of the most challenging things.
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One of the things I, unfortunately,
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am very afraid of 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, 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 and in the formation
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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, The Denial of Death
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by Ernest Becker 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.
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And we also have a piano of such spectacular qualities.
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You wouldn't have freaked out.
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But anyway, we'll let all that go.
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So the context in which I remember that essay,
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sort of, this was from maybe the 90s or something.
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And I used to publish in a journal called
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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 different forms
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and the denial of death played into different
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philosophical approaches to consciousness.
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Because I think on the one hand, the sort of sentimental school
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of dualism, meaning the feeling that there's something
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apart from the physical brain, some kind of soul
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or something else, is obviously motivated,
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a hope that whatever that is will survive death and continue.
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And that's a very core aspect of a lot of the world
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religions, 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, no,
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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 going to figure it out in my lifetime
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and upload it, 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, in a funny way,
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it's the same thing.
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It's peculiar to notice that these people who would appear
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to be opposites in character and cultural references
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and their ideas actually are remarkably similar.
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And to an incredible degree, the sort of hardcore computationalist
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idea 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 eyes 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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So the Ernest Becker's idea that death, the fear of death
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is the warm of the core, which is like that's
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the core motivator of everything we see humans have created.
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The question is if that fear of mortality is somehow
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core is like a prerequisite to what you just moved
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across this vast cultural chasm that separates me
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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.
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OK, 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.
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Now, they're tools.
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They're not creatures.
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Now, this is something that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
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And don't I know it?
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When I was young, my main mentor was Marvin
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Minsky, 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 the AI culture
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with most of its tropes, I would say.
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Because a lot of the stuff 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, 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
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like people of his young adoptees,
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I think I was the one who argued with him about this stuff
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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.
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And I was going to the old house in Brookline,
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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.
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And so I said, but Marvin loves that.
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And so I showed up.
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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 because it's decades of stuff.
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The first thing to say is that nobody
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can claim 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, 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 as a thing called
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the circle of empathy in my old papers.
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And then it turned into a thing for the animal rights movement.
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So I noticed Peter Singer using it.
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I don't know if it was coincident or but anyway,
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there's this idea that you draw a circle around yourself
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and the stuff inside is more like you, might be conscious,
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might be deserving of your empathy, 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 I don't know.
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And that circle is fundamentally based on faith.
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Well, your faith and what isn't, 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, you suffer from incompetence.
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If you say, I don't want to kill a bacteria,
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I will not brush my teeth.
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I don't know, 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 that they are always
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ready to gang up on some designated group.
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And so there's always these people who are being trying.
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We're always trying to shove somebody out of the circle.
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And 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 the biggest questions are probably
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fetuses and animals lately, but AI is getting there.
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Now, with AI, I think, and I've had this discussion
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so many times, people say, but aren't you
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afraid if you exclude AI, 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 I really think we need to subordinate algorithms
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and be much more skeptical of them.
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Your intuition, you speak about this brilliantly
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with social media, how things can go wrong.
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Isn't it possible to design systems that show compassion,
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not to manipulate you, but give you control
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and make your life better if you so choose to?
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Grow together with systems.
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And the way we grow with dogs and cats with pets
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with significant others in that way,
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they grow to become better people.
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I don't understand why that's fundamentally not possible.
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You're saying oftentimes you get into trouble
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by thinking you know what's good for people.
link |
Well, look, there's this question of what
link |
frame 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,
link |
there can't be morality, because at some point
link |
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.
link |
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.
link |
But here we are on Earth.
link |
And I think in the same sense, I think
link |
this identification with a frame that's quite remote
link |
cannot be separated from a feeling
link |
of wanting to feel sort of separate from and superior
link |
to other people 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 to talk
link |
about these kinds of absolutes.
link |
OK, so I agree with you that a lot of technologies sort
link |
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 that
link |
does build systems that respect humanity, not just respect
link |
but admire humanity, that have empathy for common humans,
link |
So 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 or 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 in a classroom
link |
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 and then we
link |
think it must be smarter than us.
link |
And the thing about the Invisible Hand
link |
is absolutely everybody has some line they draw where they say,
link |
now, we're going to take control of this thing.
link |
They might have different lines, they
link |
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.
link |
And so if you really, people who really, really, really
link |
want to believe in the Invisible Hand as 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 can have a Chicago economic philosophy
link |
about your computer and say, no, no, no, my thing's 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.
link |
We seek love from each other.
link |
I think AI can help us connect deeper.
link |
This is what you criticize social media for.
link |
I think there's much better ways of doing social media that
link |
doesn't lead to manipulation, but instead
link |
leads to deeper connection between humans, leads
link |
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
link |
can have that are counter to how current social media operates
link |
that I think is subservient to humans or no, deeply respects
link |
human beings and 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 that's a technical discussion
link |
of whether they need to have something that looks like AI
link |
versus algorithms, something that has identity, something
link |
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 the biggest problem isn't necessarily
link |
that there's advertisements that social networks present you
link |
with advertisements 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 |
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 more ridiculous and stupider
link |
than that, but that's OK.
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, which I always thought was really boring,
link |
but we have no choice but to turn it to economists
link |
if we want to fix this problem, because it's
link |
all about incentives.
link |
But I've been around this thing since it started,
link |
and I've been in the meetings where the social media companies
link |
sell themselves 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 at getting people
link |
to buy something, because I think people have looked
link |
at their returns 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 |
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, but it used
link |
to be called Engaged Persuade.
link |
The Engaged Part works.
link |
The Persuade Part is iffy, but the thing
link |
is that once people are engaged, in order for you
link |
to exist as a business, in order for you to be known at all,
link |
you have to put money into it.
link |
Oh, no, that doesn't work, but they have to.
link |
But it's a giant cognitive access blackmail scheme
link |
at this point, because the science
link |
behind the Persuade Part, it's not entirely a failure,
link |
but 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, and annoying,
link |
and banal, and ridiculous, and take up a lot of our time
link |
with stupid stuff.
link |
Like, there's a lot of ways to criticize advertising
link |
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 before,
link |
social media, helped bring people into modernity in a way
link |
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 |
I mean, I'm not pretending to have this perfect, airtight
link |
worldview without some contradictions.
link |
I think there's a bit of a contradiction there.
link |
Well, looking at the long arc of history,
link |
advertisement has, in some parts, benefited society.
link |
Yeah, because it funded some efforts that perhaps
link |
benefited society.
link |
I mean, I think there's a thing where sometimes I think
link |
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, where they present you
link |
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
link |
catches 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, what are sometimes called
link |
the lizard brain circuits or whatever.
link |
These fast response, old, old, old evolutionary business
link |
circuits that we have that are helpful in survival
link |
once in a while, but are not us at our best.
link |
They're not who we want to 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 more
link |
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 is instantly transformed.
link |
But it does happen progressively,
link |
where people who get hooked kind of get drawn more and more
link |
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 and say,
link |
I am less happy with who I am now,
link |
or I'm not happy with why I'm now versus who I was 30 days ago?
link |
Are they able to self reflect when you take yourself
link |
outside of the lizard brain?
link |
I wrote a book about people suggesting
link |
people take a break from their social media
link |
to see what happens.
link |
And maybe even 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 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 |
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, I can't believe how bad it was.
link |
But the thing is, for me, a huge flood of mail
link |
would be an imperceptible trickle from the perspective
link |
of Facebook, right?
link |
And so I think it's rare for somebody
link |
to look at themselves and say, oh, boy,
link |
I just screwed myself over.
link |
It's a really hard thing to ask of somebody.
link |
None of us find that easy, right?
link |
Well, the reason I asked is, is it
link |
possible to design social media systems that
link |
optimize for some longer term metrics of you
link |
being happy with yourself?
link |
Well, see, I don't think you should try to engineer
link |
personal growth or happiness.
link |
I think what you should do is design a system that's
link |
just respectful of the people and subordinates itself
link |
to the people and doesn't have perverse incentives.
link |
And then at least there's a chance
link |
of something decent happening.
link |
You'll have to recommend stuff, right?
link |
So you're saying, be respectful.
link |
What does that actually mean engineering wise?
link |
Yeah, curation, 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 |
is 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 the 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 |
There's several truths here.
link |
So you're speaking to the way certain companies operate
link |
I don't think it's outside the realm of what's technically
link |
They're just not incentive like companies are not
link |
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 or from knowing who you
link |
or somebody else is and then going 15 or 20 hops?
link |
Have you ever done that and just let it go top video recommend
link |
and then just go 20 hops?
link |
I've done that many times now.
link |
I have because of how large YouTube is and how widely it's
link |
used, 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, the majority
link |
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, the algorithm
link |
rewards the most because of the feedback
link |
creepiness I was just talking about.
link |
So I'm not saying that the video never
link |
recommends something cool.
link |
I'm saying that its fundamental core
link |
is one that promotes a paranoid style, that promotes
link |
increasing irritability, that promotes xenophobia,
link |
that promotes fear, anger, promotes selfishness,
link |
promotes separation between people.
link |
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.
link |
So Jack Dorsey has spoken about doing healthy conversations
link |
on Twitter or optimizing for healthy conversations.
link |
What that requires within Twitter are most likely
link |
citizen experiments of what does healthy conversations
link |
actually look like and how do you incentivize
link |
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 to strive
link |
for healthy conversations, 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 of this,
link |
like have a large crowdsource.
link |
One that I've been really interested in is GitHub,
link |
because it could change, I'm not saying it'll always be,
link |
but for the most part, GitHub has had a relatively
link |
quite low poison quotient and I think there's a few things
link |
about GitHub 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 to not screw
link |
And I think that that's often missing,
link |
that there's no incentive for the person to really preserve
link |
something 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, but you
link |
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 back 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 to manipulate you
link |
because you want to preserve the stake.
link |
Right, well, 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 called
link |
The Future, and the basic idea of it
link |
is that, once again, this is a third 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 going to be Data Dignity.
link |
And I'm going to 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, we might burn down
link |
and I'll lose our houses 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, individual people who own property,
link |
take care of their property, that's all nice.
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 to make sure trees don't touch
link |
to transfer fire easily from lot to lot.
link |
They have this whole little web 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'd 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 faiths
link |
for those people under future one and future two.
link |
Future one, some weird kindergarten paint job van
link |
with all these cameras and weird things drives up,
link |
observes what the gardeners and groundskeepers are doing.
link |
A few years later, some amazing robots
link |
that can show me 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 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, well, they go on basic income,
link |
whatever 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 these unstable.
link |
I don't think people will feel good in it.
link |
I think it'll be a political disaster
link |
where the sequence of people
link |
seizing this central source 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 own a quarter of all the Bitcoin.
link |
The things that we think are decentralized
link |
are not decentralized.
link |
So let's go to future two.
link |
Future two, the gardener 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 gonna form a data union.
link |
And amazingly, California has a little baby data union.
link |
A law emerging in the books.
link |
That's interesting.
link |
And so they'll, and what they say,
link |
we're gonna form a data union and we're gonna,
link |
not only are we gonna sell our data to this place,
link |
but we're gonna make it better than it would have been
link |
if they were just grabbing it without our cooperation.
link |
And we're gonna improve it.
link |
We're gonna make the robots more effective.
link |
We're gonna make them better
link |
and we're gonna be proud of it.
link |
We're gonna become a new class of experts 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, but what the robots do changes.
link |
Instead of just like this functional,
link |
like we'll figure out how to keep the neighborhood 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 grounds keeping
link |
with spiral pumping, pumping patches and waves of cultural things.
link |
There'll be new ideas like,
link |
wow, I wonder if we could do something about climate change mitigation
link |
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, but.
link |
Future one and future two have the same robots
link |
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,
link |
I mean, the game theory here is on the humans.
link |
And then the technology is just the tools
link |
that enable, you know, I mean,
link |
I think you can believe in AI and be in future two.
link |
I just think it's a little harder.
link |
You have to do, you have to do more
link |
So in the case of social media,
link |
what is a data dignity look like?
link |
Is it people getting paid for their data?
link |
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 winter take all,
link |
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 |
there's enough people to pay for stuff they want
link |
this could happen too.
link |
It's just that this precedent started
link |
that moved in the wrong direction.
link |
And then what has to happen,
link |
the economy's 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,
link |
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,
link |
but not universal basic income.
link |
It has to be for the,
link |
because 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,
link |
I'm not gonna talk about AI,
link |
but I will say that I think there'll be
link |
more and more algorithms that are useful.
link |
And so I don't think everybody's gonna be supplying data
link |
to groundskeeping 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, many
link |
of those niches that start to evolve
link |
as they're more and more algorithms,
link |
more and more robots.
link |
And it's that large number
link |
that will create the economic potential
link |
for a very large part of society
link |
to become members of new creative classes.
link |
So 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 what I'm talking,
link |
how to get from where we are 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,
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, 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, it's not torturing.
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
link |
to create social media platforms
link |
that incentivize different things than the current.
link |
I think the current incentivization
link |
is around like the dumbest possible thing
link |
that was invented 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 |
I, if you give control to people
link |
to define 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
link |
where probably a lot of people would love
link |
to make their living doing TikTok dance videos,
link |
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
link |
So the future is like a cross between TikTok and GitHub
link |
and they get together and they have, they're,
link |
They're negotiating, they're negotiating for returns.
link |
They join different artist societies in order
link |
to soften the blow of the randomness
link |
of who gets the network effect benefit
link |
because nobody can know that.
link |
And they, 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 like these
link |
very hedge distributed portfolios
link |
of different data unions were 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 |
And, 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 and correctives
link |
and all of this into the algorithms
link |
and the robots of the future.
link |
And that is a way to resist the lizard brain based
link |
funding assist mechanism.
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, the money is made by supporting that instead of just
link |
grabbing people's attention 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, I just think that so, yeah, I'll tell you what,
link |
how I think the fake social media, there's a few things.
link |
There's a few things that I think are important.
link |
There's a few things, there's a few things.
link |
So one, I think people should have complete control over
link |
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, walk away
link |
with their data at any moment, easy.
link |
Like with a single click of a button, maybe two buttons.
link |
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, I mean, that's,
link |
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 and to control
link |
the kinds of thing they see.
link |
Now, let's walk away from the term AI, you're right.
link |
In this case, you have full control
link |
of the algorithms that help you if you want
link |
to use their help, but you can also say a few
link |
to those algorithms and just consume the raw,
link |
beautiful waterfall of the internet.
link |
I think that, to me, that's not only fix the 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 wholehearted agreement here.
link |
I do want to caution against one thing,
link |
which is making a future that benefits programmers versus,
link |
like 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 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 and gel 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
link |
that led to this huge data privacy
link |
and protection framework in Europe called the GDPR.
link |
And so therefore we've been able
link |
to have empirical feedback on how that goes.
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 and can go in
link |
and sort of have a feeling for how this stuff works.
link |
I kind of still want to come back to incentives.
link |
And so if the incentive for whoever's,
link |
if the commercial incentive is to help the creative people
link |
of the future make more money 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.
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
link |
that's compelling to everybody,
link |
to the creatives, to the public.
link |
I mean, there's a, 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 is a particular dollar
link |
you 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
link |
possible to the invisible hand is what he was saying,
link |
is that 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
link |
if you tried and just let the economic incentives
link |
solve for this whole thing and that in a sense,
link |
every transaction 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 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 about,
link |
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 think it is, I really think it is.
link |
I'm not gonna be able to unsee that idea
link |
of creatives on TikTok collaborating in the same way
link |
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, so.
link |
It's all about TikTok, right?
link |
So, you know, when people use TikTok,
link |
there's a lot of, it's kind of funny,
link |
I was gonna say cattyness,
link |
but I was just using the cat as this exemplar
link |
of what we're coming up with.
link |
I contradict myself, but anyway,
link |
there's all this cattyness where people are like,
link |
ee, ee, ee, ee, ee, ee, ee.
link |
And I just, what about people getting together
link |
and saying, okay, we're gonna work on this move,
link |
we're gonna get a better, can we get a better musician?
link |
And they do that, but that's the part
link |
that's kind of off the books right now.
link |
You know, 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 get period,
link |
the versioning is brilliant.
link |
And so some of the things you're talking about,
link |
technology, algorithms, tools can empower.
link |
And that's the thing, for humus 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 |
No, no, can we, can ask you to elaborate,
link |
because my intuition was that you would be a supporter
link |
of something 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 |
I wrote, I've been advocating
link |
some kind of digital currency for a long time.
link |
And when the, when the, when Bitcoin came out
link |
and the original paper on, on blockchain,
link |
my heart kind of sank, because I thought, oh my God,
link |
we're applying all of this fancy thought
link |
on all these very careful distributed security measures
link |
to recreate the gold standard.
link |
Like it's just so retro, 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 at a boundless scale
link |
as your form of security 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, oh my God,
link |
this thing scales, it's a carbon disaster, you know?
link |
And, and I, I just like, I'm just mystified,
link |
but that's a different question than when you asked.
link |
Can you have a cryptographic currency
link |
or at least some kind of digital currency
link |
that's of a benefit?
link |
And absolutely, like I'm,
link |
and there are people who are trying to be thoughtful
link |
about this, you should, if you haven't,
link |
you should interview Vitalik Buterin sometime.
link |
Yeah, I've interviewed him twice.
link |
Okay, 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 that one of the nice properties
link |
is that like government centralized, it's hard to control.
link |
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 you build stuff on top of Bitcoin,
link |
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 use this Bitcoin for like checking the security
link |
of those transactions.
link |
So Bitcoin's not new, it's been around for a while.
link |
I've been watching it closely.
link |
I've not seen one example of it 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 after a very small number of people
link |
in the US government decided to bomb in landmine,
link |
Southeast Asia, it's hard to come back
link |
and say, oh, government's a great thing.
link |
But then the problem is that this resistance to government
link |
is basically resistance to politics.
link |
It's a way of saying,
link |
if I can get rich, nobody should bother me.
link |
It's a way of not having obligations to others.
link |
And that ultimately is a very suspect motivation.
link |
But does that mean that the impulse,
link |
that the government should not overreach its power is flawed?
link |
Well, I mean, what I wanna 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
link |
form of freedom is perpetual annoyance.
link |
All right, so annoyance means
link |
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, then you have freedom.
link |
And that's politics.
link |
If you don't have perpetual annoyance,
link |
something's gone very wrong
link |
and you've suppressed those people
link |
that it's only temporary,
link |
it's gonna 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 perfection it 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 you, like if they become,
link |
they start, 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
link |
becoming 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,
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
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,
link |
some problems are bigger than others.
link |
So like some groups of people,
link |
like governments or gangs or companies lead
link |
to problems more than others.
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 |
And actually, yeah, my wife did too.
link |
So I have seen, you know.
link |
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 in 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 if you 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 Michael Malis,
link |
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 crypto currency folks argue
link |
is that one of the big ways
link |
that government can control the populace
link |
is centralize bank, 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
link |
to go around 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 the central.
link |
So let me ask you unbalance 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'm asking it as a real question.
link |
There's no way to know the answer.
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 on,
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's just this kind of circumstantial.
link |
And I think in general,
link |
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,
link |
that now more and more Bitcoin is being used
link |
for legitimate transactions.
link |
But that's a different,
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, I don't know,
link |
maybe some of these companies make it available
link |
for this and that by a Tesla with it or something.
link |
Investing in a startup, hard,
link |
it might have happened a little bit,
link |
but it's not an engine of productivity,
link |
creativity and economic growth.
link |
Whereas old fashioned currency still is.
link |
And anyway, I'm, look, I think something,
link |
I'm pro the idea of digital currencies.
link |
I am anti the idea of economics,
link |
wiping out politics as a result.
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 I think, and you know, the thing about cryptocurrency
link |
that's so interesting is how many of us
link |
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 |
You know, 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 don't, I sort of feel like
link |
I should respect some people's privacy,
link |
but some of the initial people who started Bitcoin,
link |
I remember having an argument about,
link |
like 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 and whatnot,
link |
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 |
like as it fluctuates,
link |
it's going to 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 going to lose.
link |
They have that moment of hope
link |
and they need to be able to experience that.
link |
And it's a very interesting argument.
link |
That's so heartbreaking because I've seen that way.
link |
I have that a little bit of a sense.
link |
I've talked to some young people 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, I apologize.
link |
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 |
You've just described the psychology of virality
link |
or the psychology of trying to base the civilization
link |
on semi random occurrences of network effect peaks.
link |
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 |
I was very, okay, if I can give a, not a critical,
link |
because they recently purchased Bethesda,
link |
so Elder Scrolls is in their hands.
link |
I'm watching you, Microsoft,
link |
not screw up my favorite game, so.
link |
Yeah, look, I'm not speaking for Microsoft.
link |
I have an explicit arrangement with them
link |
where I don't speak for them.
link |
Obviously, that should be very clear.
link |
I do not speak for them.
link |
I am not saying, I like them.
link |
I think Satcha's amazing.
link |
The term data dignity was coined by Satcha.
link |
Like, so we have, it's kind of extraordinary,
link |
but Microsoft's this giant thing.
link |
It's gonna screw up this or that.
link |
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 |
it's, I don't know.
link |
There's always like coordination problems.
link |
And there's always.
link |
There's human problems.
link |
And there's some good people, there's some bad people.
link |
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 |
Oh, Clippy, but Clippy promotes the myth of AI.
link |
Well, that's 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 |
Cortana, Cortana, would Cortana do it for you?
link |
No, Cortana is too corporate.
link |
There's a woman in Seattle
link |
who's like the model for Cortana.
link |
Did Cortana's voice and was that voice?
link |
No, the voice is great.
link |
We had her as a, she used to walk around
link |
and if you were wearing HoloLens for a bit,
link |
I don't think that's happening anymore.
link |
I think, I don't think you should
link |
turn a software into a creature.
link |
Get a cat, just get a cat.
link |
You and I, you and I, well, get a dog.
link |
You coauthored a paper.
link |
You mentioned Lee Smollin titled
link |
The Autodagdactic Universe,
link |
which describes our universe as one
link |
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
link |
that's not published that I'm quite excited about.
link |
So I have to kind of keep my frame
link |
in that, 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
link |
The part that was fresher is understanding those
link |
as a machine learning system,
link |
so that we could move fluidly
link |
between these different ways of describing systems.
link |
And the reason to wanna do that
link |
is just to have more tools and more options
link |
because, well, 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 wanna 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,
link |
gives a framework 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
link |
a typical way of thinking about physics
link |
is that there's some kind of starting condition
link |
and then there's some principle
link |
by which the starting condition evolves.
link |
And the question is like, why the starting condition?
link |
Like how the starting condition has to get kind of,
link |
there's this 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, what if we could push
link |
the storytelling about where the universe comes from
link |
much further back by starting with really simple things
link |
that evolve and then through that evolution,
link |
explain how things got to be,
link |
how they are 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, which, and it's an interesting,
link |
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 |
and 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 of time
link |
that's time like and sounds like metaphysics,
link |
but there's an ambiguity, you know, like,
link |
it has to start from something and it's kind of interesting.
link |
So there's this, a lot of the math can be thought of either way,
link |
which is kind of interesting.
link |
So pushes so far back that basically all the things
link |
we take for granted in physics start becoming
link |
and emergent, it's emergent.
link |
I really want to emphasize this is all super baby steps.
link |
I don't want to 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 of
link |
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 to
link |
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 of observations
link |
and turn them into an actionable framework
link |
where you can then start to do things
link |
with landscapes of 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
link |
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 spread this here on our heads and then we're,
link |
I don't know, we're sort of weird animal.
link |
That's the feature, not a bug, I think, the weirdness.
link |
I think if I'm just gonna answer you
link |
in terms of truth, the first thing I'd say
link |
is we're not in a privileged enough position,
link |
at least as yet, to really know much
link |
about who we are, how we are,
link |
what we're really like in the context of something larger,
link |
what that context is, like all that stuff,
link |
we might learn more in the future,
link |
our descendants might learn more,
link |
but we don't really know very much.
link |
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 |
Well, lately, but in terms of,
link |
there's another level at which I can think about it where
link |
I sometimes think that if you are just quiet
link |
and you do something that gets you in touch
link |
with the way reality happens,
link |
and for me, it's playing music,
link |
sometimes it seems like you can feel a bit
link |
of how the universe is,
link |
and it feels like there's a lot more going on in it,
link |
and there is a lot more life
link |
and a lot more stuff happening
link |
and a lot more stuff flowing through it.
link |
I'm not speaking as a scientist now,
link |
this is kind of a more, my artists side talking,
link |
and it's, I feel like I'm suddenly
link |
in multiple personalities with you, but.
link |
Well, Kerouac, Jack Kerouac said that music
link |
is the only truth.
link |
What do you, it sounds like you might be, at least in part.
link |
There's a passage in Kerouac's book, Dr. Sacks,
link |
where somebody tries to just explain the whole situation
link |
with reality and people in like a paragraph,
link |
and I couldn't reproduce it for you here,
link |
but it's like, yeah, like there are these boldest things
link |
that walk around and they make these sounds,
link |
you can sort of understand them,
link |
but only kind of, and then there's like this,
link |
and it's just like this amazing, like just really quick,
link |
like if some spirit being or something
link |
was gonna show up in our reality
link |
and hadn't you nothing about it,
link |
it's like a little basic intro of like,
link |
okay, here's what's going on here,
link |
an incredible passage.
link |
It's like a one or two sentence summary
link |
in H. Heiko's Guide to the Galaxy, right?
link |
But do you think there's truth to that,
link |
that music somehow connects to something
link |
that words cannot?
link |
Yeah, 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, I don't fully understand it
link |
because on one level it's simple.
link |
Like you can say, oh, it's,
link |
it's a thing people evolved to coordinate our brains
link |
on a pattern level or a, or something like that.
link |
There's all these things you can say about music,
link |
which are, you know, some of that's probably true.
link |
It's also, there's kind of like this,
link |
this is the mystery of meaning.
link |
Like there's a way that just instead
link |
of just being pure abstraction,
link |
music can have like this kind of
link |
substantiality 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
link |
when I hear the right song at the right time
link |
is not comparable to anything I can read
link |
Anything I can understand, read through in language.
link |
There's, the music does connect us to something.
link |
There's this thing there.
link |
Yeah, there's, there's,
link |
there's some kind of a thing in it.
link |
And I've never ever,
link |
I've read across a lot of explanations
link |
from all kinds of interesting people,
link |
like that it's some kind of a flow language
link |
between people or between people and how they perceive
link |
and that kind of thing.
link |
There's, and that sort of explanation is fine,
link |
but it's not, it's not quite it either.
link |
There's a, there's something about music
link |
that makes me believe that panpsychism could possibly be true,
link |
which is that everything in the universe is conscious.
link |
It makes me think,
link |
makes me be humble in how much or how little
link |
I understand about the functions of our universe
link |
that everything might be conscious.
link |
Most people interested in theoretical physics
link |
eventually land in panpsychism,
link |
but I, I'm not one of them.
link |
I, I still think there's this pragmatic imperative
link |
to treat people as special.
link |
So I will proudly be a dualist.
link |
Without people and cats.
link |
I'm not, I'm not, I'm not quite sure where to draw the line
link |
or why the lines there or anything like that,
link |
but I don't think I should be required to all the same
link |
questions or equally mysterious for no line.
link |
So I don't, I'm not, I don't feel disadvantaged by that.
link |
So I shall remain a dualist,
link |
but if you listen to anyone trying to explain
link |
where consciousness is in a dualistic sense,
link |
either believing in souls or some special thing
link |
in the brain or something,
link |
you pretty much say, screw this,
link |
I'm going to be panpsychist.
link |
Is there moments in your life that happened
link |
that were defining in the way that you hope others,
link |
your daughters might have thought about it?
link |
Well, listen, I gotta say,
link |
the moments that defined me were not the good ones.
link |
The moments that defined me were often horrible.
link |
I've had successes, you know,
link |
but if you ask what defined me,
link |
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
link |
about giving advice to young people
link |
that they have to learn their own lessons
link |
and lessons don't come easily.
link |
And a world which avoids hard lessons
link |
is will be a stupid world, you know,
link |
and I don't know what to do with it.
link |
That's a little bundle of truth
link |
that has a bit of a fatalistic quality to it,
link |
but I don't, this is like what I was saying
link |
that, you know, freedom equals eternal annoyance.
link |
Like you can't, like, there's a degree
link |
to which honest advice is not that pleasant to give.
link |
And I don't want young people to have to know
link |
I think I think...
link |
You don't wanna wish hardship on them.
link |
Yeah, I think they deserve to have
link |
a little grace period of naivety that's pleasant.
link |
I mean, I do, you know, if it's possible,
link |
These things are, this is like, this is tricky stuff.
link |
Okay, so let me try a little bit on this advice thing.
link |
I think one thing, any serious broad advice
link |
will have been given 1,000 times before for 1,000 years.
link |
So I'm not gonna, I'm not going to claim originality,
link |
but I think trying to find a way
link |
to really pay attention to what you're feeling fundamentally,
link |
what your sense of the world is,
link |
what your intuition is, if you feel like an intuitive person,
link |
Like to try to escape the constant sway
link |
of social perception or manipulation, whatever you wish,
link |
not to escape it entirely, that would be horrible,
link |
but to find, to find cover from it once in a while,
link |
to find a sense of being anchored in that,
link |
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,
link |
and instead of squirting the magic dust on the programs,
link |
I think experience is something real
link |
and something apart and something mystical and something...
link |
Your own personal experience that you just have,
link |
and then you're saying,
link |
silence the rest of the world enough to hear that,
link |
like whatever that magic dust is from that experience.
link |
Find what is there.
link |
And I think that's one thing.
link |
Another thing is to recognize that kindness requires genius,
link |
that it's actually really hard,
link |
that facile kindness is not kindness,
link |
and that it'll take you a while to have the skills
link |
to have kind impulses to want to be kind
link |
you can have right away.
link |
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.
link |
To the degree you get anywhere with it,
link |
it's the most rewarding thing ever.
link |
Let's see, what else would I say?
link |
I would say when you're young,
link |
you can be very overwhelmed
link |
by social and interpersonal emotions.
link |
You'll have broken hearts and jealousies.
link |
You'll feel socially down the ladder
link |
instead of up the ladder.
link |
It feels horrible when that happens.
link |
All of these things.
link |
And you have to remember what a fragile crust
link |
all that stuff is.
link |
And it's hard because right when it's happening,
link |
it's just so intense.
link |
And if I was actually giving this advice to my daughter,
link |
she'd already be out of the room.
link |
So this is for some hypothetical teenager
link |
that doesn't really exist,
link |
that really wants to sit and listen to my wisdom.
link |
Or for your daughter 10 years from now.
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.
link |
She was a young prodigy piano player in Vienna.
link |
And she survived the concentration camp
link |
and then died in a car accident here in the US.
link |
What music makes you think of her?
link |
Is there a song that connects you?
link |
Well, you know, she was in Vienna.
link |
So she had the whole Viennese music thing going,
link |
which is this incredible school of absolute skill
link |
and romance bundled together.
link |
And wonderful on the piano, especially.
link |
I learned to play some of the Beethoven sonatas for her.
link |
And I played them in this exaggerated, drippy way.
link |
I remember when I was a kid.
link |
And exaggerated, meaning too full of emotion?
link |
Yeah, it's not the only way to play Beethoven.
link |
I mean, I didn't know there's any other way.
link |
That's a reasonable question.
link |
I mean, the fashion these days is to be slightly
link |
Apollonian even with Beethoven.
link |
But one imagines that actual Beethoven playing
link |
might have been different.
link |
I've gotten to play a few instruments he played
link |
and try to see if I could feel anything
link |
about how it might have been for him.
link |
I don't know, really.
link |
I was always against the clinical precision
link |
of classical music.
link |
I thought a great piano player should be in pain.
link |
Emotionally, like, truly feel the music and make it messy.
link |
Maybe play classical music the way, I don't know, blues.
link |
Pianist plays blues.
link |
It seems like they actually got happier.
link |
And I'm not sure if Beethoven got happier.
link |
I think it's a different kind of concept
link |
of the place of music.
link |
I think the blues, the whole African American tradition
link |
was initially surviving awful, awful circumstances.
link |
You could say there were some of that in the concentration
link |
camps and all that, too.
link |
And it's not that Beethoven's circumstances were brilliant,
link |
but he kind of also, I don't know, this is hard.
link |
I mean, it would seem to be his misery
link |
was somewhat self imposed, maybe, through, I don't know.
link |
It's kind of interesting.
link |
I've known some people who loathed Beethoven.
link |
The late composer, Pauline Oliveiros,
link |
this wonderful modernist composer,
link |
I played in her band for a while.
link |
And she was like, oh, Beethoven, that's the worst music ever.
link |
It completely, it turns information into,
link |
I mean, it turns emotion into your enemy.
link |
And it's ultimately all about your own self importance,
link |
which has to be at the expense of others could,
link |
but what else could it be?
link |
And blah, blah, blah.
link |
So she had, I shouldn't say, I don't mean it to be dismissive.
link |
I'm just saying, like, her position on Beethoven
link |
was very negative and very unimpressed,
link |
which is really interesting for me.
link |
The manner of the music.
link |
I think, I don't know.
link |
I mean, she's not here to speak for herself,
link |
so it's a little hard for me to answer that question.
link |
But it was interesting, because I'd always thought of Beethoven.
link |
It's like, whoa, you know, this is like Beethoven.
link |
It's like, really, the dude, you know?
link |
And she's like, eh, you know, Beethoven, Schmidhoven,
link |
you know, it's like not really happening.
link |
Yeah, still, even though it's cliche,
link |
I like playing personally just for myself,
link |
Moonlight's amazing.
link |
You know, you're talking about comparing the blues
link |
in that sensibility from Europe.
link |
It's so different in so many ways.
link |
One of the musicians I play with is John Batiste,
link |
who has the band on Colbert's show.
link |
And he'll sit there playing jazz
link |
and suddenly go into Moonlight.
link |
He loves Moonlight.
link |
And what's kind of interesting is he's found a way
link |
And he, by the way, he can really do Beethoven.
link |
Like, he went through Juilliard and one time he was at my house
link |
and he's like, hey, do you have the book of Beethoven's Sonatas
link |
to say, yeah, I want to find one I haven't played.
link |
And then he sight read through the whole damn thing perfectly.
link |
And I'm like, oh, God, I just can't get out of here.
link |
I can't even deal with this.
link |
But anyway, he has this way of, with the same persona
link |
and the same philosophy, moving from the blues into Beethoven,
link |
that's really, really fascinating to me.
link |
It's like, I don't want to say he plays it as if it were jazz,
link |
but he kind of does.
link |
It's kind of really, and he talks,
link |
while he was sight reading, he talks like Beethoven's talking to him.
link |
Like, he's like, oh, yeah, here he's doing this.
link |
But it's like, it's really interesting.
link |
Like, it's very different.
link |
Like, for me, I was introduced to Beethoven
link |
as like almost like this godlike figure.
link |
And I presume Pauline was too.
link |
That was really kind of a press for an art to deal with.
link |
And for him, it's just like...
link |
It's a conversation he's having.
link |
He's playing James P. Johnson or something.
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It's like another musician who did something and they're talking.
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And it's very cool to be around.
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It's very kind of freeing to see someone have that relationship.
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I would love to hear him play Beethoven.
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That sounds amazing.
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We talked about Ernest Becker and how much value he puts on our mortality
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and our denial of our mortality.
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Do you think about your mortality?
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Do you think about your own death?
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You know, what's funny is I used to not be able to,
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but as you get older, you just know people who die
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and there's all these things that just becomes familiar
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and more of a more ordinary, which is what it is.
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But are you afraid?
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Sure, although less so.
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And it's not like I didn't have some kind of insight or revelation to become less afraid.
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I think I just, like I say, it's kind of familiarity.
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It's just knowing people who've died and I really believe in the future.
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I have this optimism that people or this whole thing of life on earth,
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this whole 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 value.
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And you can't both believe in the future and want to live forever.
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You have to make room for it.
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You know, like you have to, that optimism has to also come with its own like humility.
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You have to make yourself small to believe in the future.
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And so it actually in a funny way comforts me.
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Wow, that's so funny.
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Wow, that's powerful.
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And optimism requires you to kind of step down after time.
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Yeah, I mean, that said, life seems kind of short, but you know, whatever.
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Do you think there's, I've tried to find, I can't find the complaint department.
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You know, I really want to, I want to bring this up,
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but the customer service number never answers and like the email bounces one way.
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Do you think there's meaning to it, to life?
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Ah, well, see, meaning's a funny word.
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Like we say all these things as if we know what they mean,
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but meaning, we don't know what we mean when we say meaning.
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Like we obviously do not.
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And it's a funny little mystical thing.
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I think it ultimately connects to that sense of experience that dualists tend to believe in.
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Because there are why, like if you look up to the stars and you experience that awe inspiring,
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like joy, whatever, when you look up to the stars, I don't know why.
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For me, that kind of makes me feel joyful, maybe a little bit melancholy,
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just some weird soup of feelings.
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And ultimately 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 for yourself?
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My impulse is to feel like it's not quite the right question to ask,
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but I feel like going down that path is just too tedious for the moment.
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And I don't want to do it, but.
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The wrong question.
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Well, just because, you know, I don't know what meaning is.
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And I think I do know that sense of awe.
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I 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 weird luck also.
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One of our near neighbors was the head of optics research at White Sands.
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And when he was young, he discovered Pluto.
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His name was Clyde Tombow.
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And he taught me how to make telescopes as grinding mirrors and stuff.
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And my dad had also made telescopes when he was a kid.
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But Clyde had, like, backyard telescopes that would put to shame a lot.
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I mean, he really, he did his telescopes, you know?
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And so I remember he'd let me go and play with them and just like looking at a globular cluster.
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And you're seeing the actual photons.
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And with a good telescope, it's really like this object.
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Like, you can really tell this isn't coming through some intervening information structure.
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This is like the actual photons.
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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, I don't know.
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So I definitely, I was very, very fortunate to have a connection to this guy that way when I was a kid.
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To have had that experience, again, the emphasis on experience.
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It's kind of funny.
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Like, I feel like sometimes, like I've taken, when she was younger,
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I took my daughter and her friends to the telescope.
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There are a few around here that kids can go and use.
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And they would like look at Jupiter's moons or something.
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I think like Galilean moons.
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And I don't know if they quite had that because it's like too,
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it's been just too normalized.
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And I think maybe when I was growing up, screens weren't that common yet.
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And maybe it's like too confusable with the screen.
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You know, somebody brought up in conversation to me somewhere.
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I don't remember who, but they kind of posited this idea that if humans,
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early humans weren't able to see the stars, like if earth atmosphere or such, there was cloudy,
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that we would not develop human civilization.
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There's something about 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.
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That reminds me of that old Isaac Asimov story where there's this planet where they finally get
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to see what's in the sky once in a while.
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And it turns out there in the middle of a globular cluster.
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I forget what happens exactly.
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God, that's from when I was the same age as a kid.
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I don't really remember.
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But yeah, I don't know.
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It might be right.
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I'm just thinking of all the civilizations that grew up under clouds.
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I mean, the Vikings needed a special diffracting piece of Micah to navigate
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because they could never see the sun.
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They had this thing called a sunstone that they found from this one cave.
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Do you know about that?
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So they were trying to navigate boats in the North Atlantic without being able to see the sun
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because it was cloudy.
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And so they used a chunk of Micah to diffract it in order to be able to align where the sun
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really was because they couldn't tell by eye and navigate.
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So 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.
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The Amazonians invented our agriculture and they were probably under clouds a lot.
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To me personally, the question of the meaning of life becomes most vibrant, most apparent
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when you look up at the stars because it makes me feel very small.
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But then you ask, it still feels that we're special.
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And then the natural question is like, well, if we are special as I think we are,
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why the heck are we here in this vast universe?
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That ultimately is the question of the meaning of life.
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I mean, look, there's a confusion sometimes in trying to use, to set up a question or a
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thought experiment or something that's defined in terms of a context to explain something
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where there is no larger context.
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And that's a category error.
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If we want to do it in physics or in computer science, it's hard to talk about the universe
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as a Turing machine because a Turing machine has an external clock and an observer and
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an input and output.
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There's a larger context implied in order for it to be defined at all.
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And so if you're talking about the universe, you can't talk about it coherently as a Turing
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Quantum mechanics is like that.
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Quantum mechanics has an external clock and has some kind of external context,
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depending on your interpretation, that's either the observer or whatever.
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And they're similar that way.
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So maybe Turing machines and quantum mechanics can be better friends or something because
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they have a similar setup.
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But the thing is, if you have something that's defined in terms of an outer context,
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you can't talk about ultimates with it because obviously it's not suited for that.
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So there's some ideas that are their own context.
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General relativity is its own context.
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It's why it's hard to unify.
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And I think the same thing is true when we talk about these types of questions.
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Like meaning is in a context and to talk about ultimate meaning, is there a four category
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or it's not a resolvable way of thinking?
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It might be a way of thinking that is experientially or aesthetically valuable
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because it is awesome in the sense of awe inspiring.
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But to try to treat it analytically is not sensible.
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Maybe that's what music and poetry are for.
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I think music actually does escape any particular context.
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That's how it feels to me, but I'm not sure about that.
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That's once again, crazy artists talking, not scientists.
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Well, you do both masterfully.
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Jared, like I said, I'm a big fan of everything you've done, of you as a human being.
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I appreciate the fun argument we had today that will, I'm sure, continue for 30 years.
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As it did with Martin Minsky.
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Honestly, I deeply appreciate that you spend your really valuable time with me today.
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It was a really great conversation.
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Thank you so much.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jared 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 Jared Lanier himself.
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A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.