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Joscha Bach Λ John Vervaeke on Mind, Idealism, Consciousness, and Computation [Theolocution]
January 18, 2022
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This is just an editor's note I just finished editing and had to add this. There's a fascinating discussion on ontology and how it's related to epistemology, which occurs around the one hour mark. If you're interested in philosophy and consciousness, which you most likely are, given that you're on this channel, then make sure you at least watch that part, as ordinarily these two divisions aren't brought together, and it was great to hear about their interrelatedness.
Recall that there are timestamps in the description for all of the videos. Secondly, the conversation toward the end regarding software as akin to physical law is one that I also haven't heard before, and whether or not I agree with it is another matter. It's at minimum thought-provoking. Enjoy this legendary Theolocution between Yoshabok and John Vervecky.
Yoshabok is a cognitive scientist recognized in the field of artificial intelligence as being one of the most unexampled and inventive minds. John Vervecky is a professor of cognitive science at the University of Toronto, who's one of the few scholars taking an extensive and meticulous cognitive scientific approach to the topics of wisdom, Buddhism, and consciousness. Now it's that latter topic, consciousness, that in more ways than one,
finds us here today. Click on the timestamps in the description if you'd like to skip this intro. My name's Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a Torontonian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics dedicated to the explication of the variegated terrain of theories of everything from a theoretical physics perspective, but as well as delineating the possible connection consciousness has to the fundamental laws of nature
if those laws exist at all and are knowable to us. If you enjoy witnessing and engaging with others on the topic of psychology, consciousness, physics, etc., then check the description for a link to the Theories of Everything Discord as well as subreddit. There's also a link to the Patreon, that is patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal if you'd like to contribute as the patrons and the sponsors are the only reasons that I can do podcasts with this level of quality and depth
As now, this is what I do full-time thanks to their support. With regard to sponsors, there are three. The first is joining us for the first time, and that's the Anagogy podcast. That is A-N-A-G-O-G podcast. It's a podcast dedicated to philosophy, psychology, and consciousness. Thus, if you like the conversations,
In the latest episode of their podcast, they talk about the foundations of science and the role irrationality has to play in science.
They've also spoken to Greg Henrichs who has what's akin to a psychological theory of everything called the Unified Theory of Knowledge. Anagogy podcast is available on all podcast platforms and it's spelt A-N-A-G-O-G podcast. The second sponsor is Brilliant. During the break I decided to brush up on some fundamentals in physics so I committed myself to learning one lesson per day on Brilliant.
Some point soon I'd like to speak to Chiara Marletto on constructor theory, which is predicated heavily in information theory, so I took a course on random variable distributions and knowledge and uncertainty. Despite previously knowing the formula for entropy as it's hammered into you as an undergrad, it was extremely edifying to see a different explanation of the formula for entropy that doesn't seem like one that's been handed down arbitrarily from God.
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I did watch Yoshua's three videos you sent to me and there's stuff in there that I'd like to sort of pick up on. Great, great. Okay, well, I will get started on going live. Last time there was this thing you always forgot to do and then you remembered to do it.
Entangling with the Weltgeist. So strange. Sometimes when this happens, it's because I'm not awake yet and it's just a lucid dream. So you're supposed to start flying, right? Do you have a method to keep yourself lucid dreaming?
I used to be able to do it quite readily in my 20s, but as I've gotten older, it's not as easy for me. Okay, so if you can see this, type in Ned's Newt. Type Ned's Newt. Okay, we're seeing... There's usually a 20-second delay between when it actually goes live and when people see it. Ned's Newt. Okay, great. We're live.
Welcome. So, Yoshua, why don't we start with what you find most interesting about John's work and then John, you'll talk about what you find interesting about Yoshua's and then we'll get into definitions. Okay.
I find it fascinating that John is a broad thinker that connects many different angles on cognitive science and connects this also directly with the way in which he relates to the world. So for him, science is not just the application of methods in a certain circumscribed area, but it relates to the way in which he connects to others and to himself and to his existence in the world in a way. And this means that in some sense, you can count hold him accountable for his ideas, because they
Great, and John?
So I like that Yoshua is also a big picture cognitive scientist and I enjoy the fact that he is willing to tackle philosophically challenging topics in his cognitive science and for me I think that's much more of that is needed in cognitive science today.
Now, he has a very sophisticated model of consciousness and selfhood, and there are many points of it that I would like to talk to him about. There's some things that are interesting. He talked about, just to connect to something he said about my work, in his Mind Matters talk, he talked about the feeling of what it's like as a primary sense of relevance, and that, of course, tweaked my ears.
And then he put quite a bit of importance on attention, as I do, and trying to understand cognition. And also within his discussion of the self, he incorporates aspects of narrative. And that's something I'd very much like to talk about with him. So there's a lot that I find very interesting in his work. But like I said, I commend him for the kind of big picture cognitive science
Yoshua, from your overview of John's work, what do you see as the disagreements?
I am not as familiar as I would need to be to point out all the disagreements. Also, I don't know how much John's views have changed over the last few years and decades. Typically, when you are thinking about these questions, there is always a lot of movement in your own mind, I think, and you update on ideas. And so I'm not quite sure what the current disagreements would be, but I'm sure that there are many
Just because of the multitude of things that have to be discussed and the angles that you can take on them. Let's talk about what the definition of consciousness is and sentience and mind. So those are consciousness, sentience and mind. Joscha, why don't you start with your definitions of them, then we'll hear John's, because obviously we have to employ the definitions. Yeah, sure. The definitions, I don't think that are necessarily contentious points. We just need to
anchor them somehow. So we agree on what things we are talking about and what we're not talking about, I think. So to me, mind is basically the vehicle in which everything plays out. It's basically the mechanism and substrate that is emergent over mostly the activity of the brain, I think. And inside of the mind there happens a model of the world and the self and the mind also facilitates motivation at some level.
And then the next term that we wanted to talk about is sentience. Sentience is the ability of a system to relate to its environment and to discover itself in the environment and establish this kind of relationship. And in this way, learn what it's doing. And I don't think that sentience is the same thing as consciousness, because for instance, it doesn't have to happen in real time. That doesn't need to be an immediate reflexive awareness of this process itself that is becoming aware.
In the sense, I think, for instance, that corporations are usually not conscious, I think, but many corporations are sentient in the sense that they understand what a corporation is, how this corporation relates to the world and how it interacts with the world and plans for it. And of course, the sentience of the corporation is facilitated by the people that work for the corporation in this planning role. But sentience is a functional property that many intelligent systems develop. And consciousness is
Colloquially speaking, the feeling of what it's like as a particular phenomenology, it looks like something to the system that is conscious. And I think that functionally consciousness is largely a control model of the attention of the system. And when we say that a system is conscious, for instance, a cat or a human being, what we mean is that this system is able to act on a model of its own awareness, which means it knows
that it is aware of things and uses that to drive its own behavior in the moment. Is that distinct from self-consciousness, that it's aware that it's aware? Self is slightly different because you can be conscious without having a self. For instance, in dreams, you will very often notice that you are conscious, but there is no eye. And also in meditative states, you don't need to focus on the eye.
What typically happens though in the type of consciousness that we have is that we know that something is conscious. So we are aware of the awareness, but that doesn't need to have a first person perspective and consciousness. So I would say that first person perspective and consciousness, even though in our normal daytime, vague full state are largely related, actually orthogonal, you can have them independently of each other in a way. Okay, john, so what are your definitions? Or what do you agree with disagree with?
Well, first of all, about the reference before the sense. Yeah, I take it to my mind to refer to, although whether or not it forms a unified entity is perhaps part of the question. But when we're referring to mine refer referring to some unity, some system by which we are intelligent and conscious. And I take intelligence to be the capacity to be a general problem solver. And
I'm not sure what the problem I have with this in cognitive science is the term mind is equivocal. People use it in different ways, make different identity claims, a neuroscientist perhaps saying it's brain function. The AI person may say it's a particular kind of learning algorithm. The psychologist will say it's, you know, that which generates behavior. And the point about this is it's not just a termological difference.
They use different methods of gathering evidence, they make different kinds of arguments, they have different kinds of theoretical entities. The psychologist may talk about working memory, right? The AI person may talk about certain aspects of machine learning, of course, the neuroscientist may talk about neural networks, various neural networks in the biological sense. So I take it that what I'm trying to do as a cognitive scientist is find out if all of those different definitions of mind can
work together to get back to the coherent unity that we traditionally met by the word mind. So that's part of the problem. But it's part of the fun of trying to do cognitive scientists. It's often very hard to get the anthropologist, the linguist, the psychologist, the neuroscientist and the AI person to all agree, and you put them in the room. And then usually you throw in philosophers who are supposed to help get all that discourse running smoothly. And they often make things more challenging, which is makes it especially fun.
So I largely agree with what Yoshua said, although I want to problematize it. And specifically, it's something that cognitive science is asking the question, what is mind, is not a clear question anymore. And I think getting clear about what that question is, is one of the tasks of cognitive science. So sentience and awareness. And I tend to have, I tend to bind sentience to Mateson's notion of sentience
which is aware, I think it might overlap with what notion means by awareness, but a sentient system is one that can in some sense size up its situation. It's aware of it, but not in just sort of the negative sense, right? It can foreground and background information, things like that. So perhaps I think a little bit of a tighter connection between sentience and perceptual awareness.
Consciousness is usually sort of two aspects. And of course, everything I'm saying here is fraught. People talk about two aspects of consciousness. There's one aspect that's often called access consciousness.
This is part of what consciousness means is I can ready things. I can make things ready for reason. I can make them ready for problem solving. And I can bring aspects of my skills and my perception and my understanding together. And then there's what's called the phenomenal. Some people say phenomenological. There's a bit of confusion around that.
But anyways, as Yoshua said, this is the feeling of what it's like, what it's like to be me here now in this situation. It can mean that, it can mean something very primitive, like what is it like to experience green? And this is the so-called problem of qualia. And so one way people think of consciousness is the place where qualia exists. For me, there's two central questions we are asking.
And part of what I would argue is we need to integrate them together. And one of the strengths I see of Yoshis work is I do see him attempting and I don't mean attempting as a as an insult. We're all attempting here attempting to integrate these two questions together. One is the function question, which is basically what the hell does consciousness do given that so much
So much of our intelligent behavior happens unconsciously. What is consciousness for? Some people are willing to say it's not for anything. It's just an epiphenomenon. It doesn't do anything. It has no function. Yoshua doesn't say that. I'm not saying he does.
The other question is the nature problem. How is it that something like consciousness exists in this physical world, which amongst all these objects that don't seem to have any of these subjective properties, qualia, things like that. At least since the scientific revolution, we separated all of those out from the physical universe and we put them in this place. Now, I happen to think that you should try and answer those questions together and in an integrated fashion.
One of the criticisms I have of some of the central theories is they tend to answer one question while neglecting the other and vice versa. So I think that's my best. I had to say a little bit more because he went first. So I had to sort of take into what he said. But that's trying to answer any good definition of consciousness should try and answer the function and the nature questions in an integrated fashion.
John, you said that some people say that consciousness is where qualia exists. What do you mean? So one way, I mean, this goes back largely to Descartes and it's picked up by Locke. So Galileo made a distinction between primary qualities, right, or qualia.
And secondary, primary qualities are ones that are mathematically measurable in some sense, like the length of an object, its mass, things like that. And Galileo proposed that those were real. They were in the objective world. And then there are all the qualia that are not mathematically measurable, like the experience.
not the reflectance pattern, but the experience of greenness, the experience of sweetness, the experience of beauty, perhaps. And so for for Descartes following up on Galileo, those things did not exist in the world. They existed only in the mind. They were therefore only in the subject. They were subjective. And that's qualia. Now, the idea is there's lots of your there's lots of stuff happening in the mind unconsciously that doesn't seem to be generating any of that qualitative experience.
It only seems to be the case, or it seems to be the case that, not only seems to be, it seems to be the case that those qualia only exist when I'm awake, alert, and aware in some fashion. And so they seem to be in consciousness. Now, that in is at best metaphorical, but that's how many people take that to be the central phenomena of consciousness.
and that the problem of consciousness is largely the problem of answering that. Other people think other aspects of consciousness are essential, like intentionality, that consciousness seems to be about things, directed at things. Yoshida, do you have any comments on any of what John said?
So personally, I don't think that the aboutness is so much the problem, but we can go into what we personally find puzzling about the entire affair. With respect to qualia, I think that there are two aspects that should be kept separate. One is what is the difference between these elements and features of experience and a measurement? And the other one is what makes them experiential? What is experience itself? Hear that sound?
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The first question is something that became, I think, quite apparent in early work that I participated in robotics. We taught little Sony ivory robots to play soccer. And in the course of this task, they had to watch balls moving over a field and we had to segment out the balls. And when the task was set up by the people who developed this game,
We already made this task as easy as possible. At least we thought we made the field extremely and homogeneously green. There were some white lines on the field, but still. And the ball was very orange. And unfortunately the ball was a little bit reflecting and the field was also taking up some of these reflections. And we thought we could solve the problem basically with the lookup table where we just would match certain color values from the RGB sensors of the camera of the robot.
to whether it's ball or field and this didn't work. We found that the pixels below the ball were more orange than the pixels at the bottom of the ball were not green. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover.
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It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything.
If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g dot com slash everything and use the code everything. So in some sense, if you just did color tables, the colors were in the area where the ball touched the field were inverted.
And so we needed to be more intelligent. We needed to figure out ultimately of whether pixels that we see in a certain region of the field are probably part of the ball and are probably part of the field. And depending on this context, we would have to reinterpret them. And so I noticed that a color is not just a certain wavelengths or a certain RGB value that you take from your camera sensor.
It's an interpretation that is qualitatively bound to the context in which it's being measured. So the property of redness is not just a certain RGB value. It is given in the context of a red object, the interpretation of the surface properties in a stationary way of that object. So it's a property that attaches to an object in a certain context. Redness is the property that is shared by all the red objects.
And you cannot separate redness from this in the processing if you have changing lighting and real world lighting. So there needs to be some kind of feature processing that turns a measurement into a context dependent feature that is in multiple dimensions qualitative. So I think it's a happy accident that this rhymes to qualia. It's not actually the reason, but this answers, I think to some degree, the first question. Why is
The elements of the experience are different from measurements and what distinguishes them from measurements. But it doesn't answer the second question. What is it to experience? Why is this thing part of my inner reality? And this has to be explained in a different way. It has to be explained by a certain kind of architecture. And this is what some people find very passing.
Doesn't look that puzzling to me and we can look into the details of what it looks like. But for instance, one important aspect is that we can learn to deconstruct the qualitative experience of the things that we're looking at. So when we look, for instance, at a face, what we typically see is an expression in the face.
It's not just a geometrical arrangement of features, but we can stare for a face for long enough until the faceness of the face disappears. And the only thing that's left is a geometrical arrangement. And we can go further and let the geometry disappear. And we just see colored blobs and flickering and so on. And in this way, we can start deconstructing the elements of our experience. And once we see how they are deconstructed, we can also get a glimpse on how they are constructed in the first place.
One of my students once told me, you know, there's a very weird thing. I can see faces in power plugs and vault sockets. Sorry, faces where? In vault sockets, right? If you look at a power socket in a vault, you can, people can see a face in it. I said, yeah, most people can do that, right? It's called a parallel layer. It's basically this ability to see faces and other things in patterns in our environment.
And so on, and she said, but you know, there are no faces in power sockets. And I told her, yeah, the dark secret is there are also no faces on people. You just project them there, right? It's there intrinsically, there's just geometry.
It's this thing that there is something that you look at, another one that looks at you, that looks out of their eyes and is interpreting the world in a particular way and you see that in their face. You see in their face what they feel and so on, how they relate to you. This is just a projection that your mind is making. It's not actually a visual feature. It's a high level interpretation of things like the emotional state and so on that are all mixed into your interpretation of reality.
I guess I don't have any disagreement with that, at least right now. I'm in agreement with this idea that when we're talking about perception, we're talking about doing things in terms of a context dependence, and then the sensitivity to that, the sensitivity to context and conduct
context dependence I think is really, really crucial. I see that sensitivity as bound up with the capacity for interpretation. Interpretation means being able to in some way direct your attention or your awareness to some features rather than others, because you can of course take in all possible features of the object or the environment, etc.
So I guess I see those two processes as a little bit more closely related. And I do think that part of what it's like to experience a face is to find it relevant in a particular fashion, to find it as fitted to that context and fitted to your task within that context. And I think that also, as Yoshua said, I think that goes into the perception of it. So I see, I guess, perhaps a deeper interpenetration between
the perception and the interpretation. This goes around ideas like I've been talking about, about relevance realization. Now, there was an interesting movement there, and I don't know how fast we want to go ontological, where there was, you know, the face isn't really there, and it's just a projection.
And so I'm not quite sure what that means. Maybe Yoshi can because I take it, for example, that that would generalize to everything in my experience that I find meaningful. And like, do I want to say that the various, you know, gauges I'm using in science are just projections?
Do I want to say that the other people that are debating with me are just projections? Sometimes you do. Yeah. But the problem is there's an implicit normativity of realness there that I guess I want to unpack a little bit. Because like I said, I think the point that Yoshime just generalizes to everything
And then I have sort of epistemological and ontological concerns about that, because it might, I'm not saying it does, I'm saying it might sort of lead me into kind of a solipsistic skepticism, which makes the very attempt to do science itself kind of implausible. So what is it? Surely there must, surely, maybe not surely, there must be
Perception that counts as observation of the environment, I take it. And why is it not just a projection? I guess is my question. Yes, so this particular point relates to the question of whether faces are part of res extensa. And you have to sort out what we mean by res extensa. The typical way in which Descartes is interpreted is that there are two
substances out in physics in a way, ontologically at the level at which the universe exists. And one of these substances is stuff in space, the extended things, the objects in the world. And then we have res cogitans, which is the space of ideas in which the mind exists and somehow they interact with each other. So basically the mind exists in a different dimension of the universe and remote controls the physical body via the pineal gland or
I think this is a misunderstanding that ultimately can be mapped to faulty epistemology.
a weird perspective on what we think is and in the way in which it is constituted. It's also reflected in the Christian interpretation of Genesis. And maybe this is not unrelated because it's part of the same cultural tradition, this interpretation of Genesis and the interpretation of Descartes. And in Genesis, we have the creation of a physical universe by a supernatural being in the common interpretation.
And it starts out with the creation of light and darkness which are separated from each other and then the creation of sky and ground and then the plants and the animals eventually and then they all get their name. But we do know that sky and ground are not physical entities.
And colors are not in physics. There are constructions that only happen in our mind. And when we look at foundational physics, we see a weird quantum graph that has very complicated properties among them, apparently the property to throw regular patterns at our systemic interface so our brain can find regularity in them. And part of these regularities that our mind is discovering in quite reliable ways is
darkness and brightness and sky and ground and plants and animals and giving them all their names, which is cognitive development. So the universe that you and me are interacting with experimentally and also intersubjectively is not a physical universe. You're not talking about entities in physics and we talk about the universe to each other. We largely talk about entities in our experience. And now it turns out that this experience that our brain is constructing for us to relate to
which is a core screening of the patterns that the physical universe throws at us contain two types of entities. And one group of entities is what we could call stuff in space. It's like a physics engine in a computer game. So we have
three-dimensional basically Euclidean space in which we have extended objects that occupy volumes and these objects can be solid or liquid or gaseous and they displace each other and they have all these properties that we would call res extensa but this res extensa is geometric it's mechanical it doesn't want something it's just moving in a mechanical way and so when the student said that there are no faces
in power sockets what she meant is that the physical thing, the res extensor thing, the geometrical thing, the face, is not really on the power plug. And I pointed to her out that the face itself is not a geometrical thing. So when you see a face, what you see is not actually a geometry. It's not part of something that you would construct with a 3D program.
What you have to construct is a certain part of res cogitans. It's a certain interpretation of a high level feature that is already a mental feature, that we see this intentional entity in the world expressed by its interface to the world. And so I think this way we can, John and me, probably agree on a way in which we disassemble the category or at least make the next step.
And so I would agree that, of course, every entity that we make out in the universe ultimately is an imposition that our mind is making. This imposition is not necessarily an arbitrary one because the universe cannot be efficiently encoded in every possible way. There are certain ways in which the encoding makes sense and others where it doesn't help you to interpret the world.
So the way in which we draw the boundaries between objects is not arbitrary but the boundaries are drawn by our mind. Think Verizon the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single
Bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Ranking is based on root metric true square report dated 1H2025. Your results may vary. You must provide a post-paid consumer mobile bill dated within the past 45 days. The bill must be in the same name as the person who made the deal. Additional terms apply. Okay, so of course you're aware of the... I mean, first of all, a comment. I do think there's a deep connection between the Christian model, which is sort of a two-worlds mythology,
and Descartes' dualism of mind and body. So I think that's an accurate historical observation. I talk a bit about that connection in my Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series. In fact, I often talk about Christian Cartesianism as the link between those. So I think that's a good historical observation. Of course, the deep problem with finding that division of res extensia and res cardicons
to be the sort of final note on your ontology is the problem that beset Descartes, which is the problem that Spinoza immediately recognized is that there's no possible causal interaction between these domains and you get the separation of, right, reasons from causes and you get all of these kinds of problems. And so I take it that there is something fundamentally wrong with the ontology
If I if.
If I presume that kind of dualism, then of course, I can't also pick up on your mental states, because all I get is your bodily behavior, etc. And if there is no causal relationship between your mental states and your bodily behavior, then of course, I can't pick up on other minds. And so, I mean, I know you know this, because you've mentioned it in one of the talks. I mean, that ontology is deeply problematic, because it generates these really, really
I think that the solution is relatively simple. Res extensa and res cogitans both exist in the mind. They are just different domains in which you make sense of the world. One is this mechanical level of geometric perception and the other one is hidden states.
of intentional systems that animate part of this world. And when a meditator believes that res cognitance is separate from res extensa and res extensa is out there in the physical world and experiencing the physical world,
And they managed to go to the state of reality construction where this boundary between self and world is obliterated and they suddenly notice this unity of the system and oh my god everything is consciousness. They became panpsychists.
Right. It's a fundamental confusion that results from this error in the ontology. And when I was young, I stumbled on the same issue as you just mentioned. If you are a dualist, how does this interface between the causally closed physical universe and the mind work?
There are some solutions to this, like for instance, occasionalism, which means they just happen to be synchronous, but there is no direct connection between them. And ultimately, this is a form of epiphenomenalism. So it would not be a violation of the causal closure of physics if your ontologically separate mind would be reading it, but wouldn't have right access, right? So you could have
this physical universe mechanically clicking by itself, but you could have the mind look at it from the outside. But as soon as the mind writes, you should be able sometimes to see certain violations of the conservation of energy or the conservation of information in the lab. And apparently you don't. And Popper and Eccles hope that it's possible to basically hide this in the randomness of quantum events, but still would need to be a systematic violation. So I don't think that this would work.
And the attempts to solve this problem, I think that they don't work out.
So I thought there is two possibilities. One is either we are in an entirely mechanical universe and there is no conspiracy going on. Of course, it's also possible that the mechanical universe is in some kind of simulation, right? So we could be running in some kind of nerds computer that is stationed in the next level universe. And of course, this nerd could also interact with our world. And in a sense, dualism in some sense might be possible. It could also be that our minds indeed run on a separate machine.
and interact with it. But in this sense every supernatural thing would have to have a natural cause at some level in one of the parent universes. Just unfortunately this intermediate level could be a symbolic one.
And the symbolic universe is a magical universe, right? If you have a magical interaction that, for instance, in Minecraft, you can open up a shell and you can say times a day in the sun rises. And there is no process within the cellular automaton of Minecraft that explains this mechanical. You would have to go a level behind that and understand the way in which the Minecraft universe is constituted as some kind of simulation and simulacrum in part running on a computer and a parent universe that allows you to do magic.
But a step back, the alternative to the mechanical universe of physics and physicalism is the idea that there is a mechanical universe happening in base reality and we are directly emergent over that base universe, so we don't live in some kind of simulation. That is physicalism. And the alternative is we live in a dream.
And in a dream magic is possible. In a dream it's possible that you can break the laws of physics. It's possible that you can have telepathy in a way that violates the standard model and you can have ghosts and you can have all sorts of weird things for which you cannot possibly have a physical explanation.
Maybe for some of them there are physical explanations, but by and large this is the main boundary. And when you look at the philosophies that exist, there are basically these two types of big philosophical approaches that exist in the history of humanity that either are fully monistically idealist and say we do live in a dream,
And the idealists have to explain why this dream looks in many parts so damn regular and mechanical. And the other group says the universe is entirely mechanical and this group has to explain why so many magic things seem to be happening. And then we have to find an agreement which of the things are mechanical and which of the things are magical and why.
At some point it became apparent to me that we obviously do live in a dream, but that this dream would have to be dreamt by some kind of mind in a higher plane of existence, probably in some kind of mechanical fashion, because you need functionality that facilitates the interaction of the elements in your dream, because it's not random.
This is also apparent when you have a lucid dream. Once you observe a number of your lucid dreams, you notice how they are composed. You notice some of the mechanisms of lucid dreaming. You notice some of the limitations of how many elements can be stable for how long in your lucid dream and so on, the ways in which you interact with them. And so the lucid dream itself becomes apparent as something that is facilitated by mechanisms.
And so what would be the properties of that higher plane of existence? And I think this higher plane of existence is physics. At physical systems cannot be conscious. Only simulated things can be conscious. Consciousness is a virtual property. It's simulated. It exists in the dream.
And the system that dreams us according to our best theories right now is the brain in physics. And the confusion that we have about this when we think about this arises through the notion that what we experience when we look at brains are brains.
But we don't. These squishy pink things are elements of our dream that are generated in non-random fashion in the parent reality. And the parent reality is something that we can never have access to. We cannot experience physics. There is no way in which the physical world can be experienced from inside of a brain. So wouldn't that mean then that there's no knowledge of the physics possible then?
No, that's what it means. We can have knowledge from first principles, which means we can understand the way in which thinking could possibly happen, which means understanding the realm of all languages in the way in which something could mean something. That's one aspect. So we have a priori knowledge, which is a category of ideas that we get by understanding how systems can be about other things. We can understand how languages work.
And the other thing is that we can make observations and we can identify regularities in the observations and then using our understanding of first principles to get a notion of what the significance of these observables is.
And so I think it's a good simplification to say that we find regular patterns at our systemic interface. And in these regular patterns, we find non-random ways to disassemble them and build them into hierarchies of features and objects. I don't know if I don't know
I made myself clear. What I was trying to get at, maybe I should ask a question first. Are you proposing that you can do physics a priori? Because that doesn't seem to be the case. We tried to do physics a priori. That's Descartes' project and it collapses. You can't do physics a priori. And then you said we can observe regularities, which I think is what physics does. But that means you're saying that regularities are really there. And then I guess the
problem becomes what privileges those experiences of, I mean I can have, to use your analogy, I can have regularities in my dream and I don't take them to have given me an account of how the world really is. But if I do say that regularities work, what is it about them that gets me outside of
simulation. I'm worried about a problem of skepticism here. I'm worried about a problem of, right, because this is what, you know, this is what Hume does. He says, well, you know, you've got all these regularities, but those regularities are themselves only projected by the mind. Their causation is just association between ideas and experiences, and therefore, I really can't know the world, and Kant, etc. And so I guess, I'm wondering, there seems to be a, I mean,
To say things are a projection is to say that other things are real, because it's a contrast term. To say that everything is an illusion, for example, doesn't make any sense. It's like saying everything's tall, right? So I'm trying to get at what is like, what surely we must have experiences that count as access to the real, or else we are just locked inside an internal self referential system. That's what I'm that's what I'm asking. Did that make sense?
Yes, but let's start out with one of these aspects. There are several points that we, I think, would need to address and some of them are veritable rabbit holes. So let's start out with the problem of skepticism. Personally, I don't see skepticism as a problem because I think that when I am observing the trajectories that my mind can take,
There is not usually many points where I open a door and go through and I cannot go back. It's not that I, in the course of intellectual exploration, go through one way doors.
that I can see before and I say, I cannot come back. This might exist in some religions. So here is a wonderful, delicious brain worm. You take it on and you can give it back in three weeks from now. And ideologies usually work in such a way that they warp your mind in such a way that you get cut off from the rest of human thought space and you cannot come back.
And I think that in a rational world this cannot happen. So when you think rationally, everything that you think is conditional on something else. And so everything that is not impossible is possible. And the confidence among the possible things has to be disputed, distributed according to the evidence that is available.
So the possibility that nothing exists in the way in which I perceive it and I don't exist and other people don't exist or only I exist and only other people exist is always a possibility and there is nothing scary about it and they don't need to be worried about it. There are no assumptions that they need to make to avoid this so I never fall into this trap and never come back. Oh my God. No, it's not not a problem. The possibility that there are no other people should be considered.
And I should see what observations suggest that this is the case and which observations speak against it. And if I ever find out that there never been other people, why should I be surprised? I should consider this. I should see how deep the rabbit hole goes. There's nothing scary about it. It's not infinitely deep. There are not infinitely many conclusions that I will draw from this. This will not lock me in an inhospitable place of the intellectual universe if I consider this path.
So I would suggest basically consider the entire space of possibilities and the idea that there are other minds in the world that are constituted in a quite similar way to mine but have a larger diversity than some people might be willing to acknowledge at first glance and so on. This seems to be a good theory. There seem to be other objects that look a lot like me in this mind and they seem to be like me the side effect of the regulation needs of the hairless monkey in the present universe and
This is a good theory. It gives good predictions. It's a useful encoding of the patterns that are thrown at my systemic boundary. And there's another aspect to solipsism, which is more an experiential one. This is if you cannot perceive other minds as minds based on the prayers that you have. Most people don't learn a lot of wisdom in their life.
And that the wisdom they have is largely a structure that is innate to them. They are lucky to be born wise. And they just converge in the observation of the world to more details in this structure and so on. And people that are born unwise have difficulty to ever get to wisdom. So we do learn new structure, but largely the architecture that we use to interpret the world seems to be something that is
to a large degree innate that is mapped to the circumstances that our ancestors found themselves in in the world. And what we notice, for instance, many Europeans that live in the US have all these weird quirks in which they relate to the world that are the remnant of non-existent European societies that they brought within their own minds and the structure
that is built into their soul over many generations. And now they try this in this very brutish and weird pioneer society that is the US. And many of these patterns don't make sense. And this is not just the case for Europeans. It's just for Europeans, I can notice and interpret these patterns better than for other cultures that are part of this hodgepodge of the US.
It's very interesting to see that solipsism might be a property of some people. I sometimes think that our previous president has been a solipsist, not in the sense that he is an evil person. I think it's psychologically interesting that when he talks to other people, his important criterion was always
can say whatever he wants as long as he gets away with it. And communication is a tool to get what he wants. And this seems to be somewhat invariant in politics, but he be lines for it, right? He is able to think outside of a box because he never acknowledged the existence of this box. There is a certain prior that there are other minds that he need to share truth with that is absent. He can just say whatever he wants. He's free to do this because there are no other people.
There's only something like an almost faceless audience that relates to him in a particular way and that he relates to in a particular way that makes him fit for this particular role. It was probably unwise to make this tangent because I don't want to make a normative statement one way or the other about Trump. I just think that he happens to be somebody that we all know and who is psychologically interesting because I think he might be a solipsist in an experiential, functional, not necessarily philosophical sense.
So don't worry, Yosh. I'm not going to draw you into any kind of political debate around Trump. So that would be unfair to you and unfair to the spirit in which you offered the example. I'm trying to think of how to reply because you said about 7,000 really interesting things in that last thing. But one thing I seem to pick up on was that
you know, reality seems to be determined by rational processes of making sense, which, I mean, and that's a classical kind of idealism, that's sort of like Hegelian idealism, that ultimately the real is dependent on the capacity for rationality. And so rationality has to be as real as anything else, because of that dependency relationship. Now, the thing about that is rationality seems to be
a quintessential mental property too. And does that mean that we don't have, I mean, you know, you know, you know this too. I know, you know, again, I've seen your talks.
you know, the problems of deep time that idealism faces, right, the problem with deep time, you know, there seems to be a significant difference between Darwin discovering the theory of evolution in 1859, process of rational reflection, gathering the evidence, and the process of evolution that actually led to Darwin's existence, right, they have different, they have different temporal, spatial extensions, etc. And so the problem, I guess I'm trying to get at is
When I'm talking about it that way, doesn't that mean that I have to take it that that rationality really exists, since my ability to determine what is real is dependent on my rational processes, like you said, better theories, worth theories, making better sense, etc, etc. And then that seems to indicate a very high level of organization at which things can be real, rather than just
what is typically taken to be the physical. I take it that at least traditionally, at least currently, rationality is not part of the ontology of physics. It's presupposed in the practice of physics, but it's not part of the ontology. And so that means, it sounds to me, either like you have a kind of strong idealism or, because you brought this up as another possibility,
You see rationality as emerging, perhaps out of intelligence and intelligence emerging out of the behavior of the brain. But it wouldn't be an epiphone. It could not be given this argument epiphenomenal emergence, rationality would have to be a real thing that really exists and really directs people's behavior in some fashion. How does that land with you? Or have I misinterpreted you?
So we probably have to agree on what we mean by rationality to be able to disassemble this term a little bit further. Typically, it's the ability to reach a certain goal in which you have reason to believe that these tools that you use are suitable to get to that goal. I would add, in addition to the instrumentality aspect of rationality, that rationality includes a capacity for self-correction.
So the system has to be able to correct itself as it's pursuing these goals and be able to seek out more reliable means of achieving those goals. So the system is inherently self-correcting, which means in a very important way, the system has to be self-transcending in some fashion. It has to be able to exceed itself. It has to be able to grow. It has to be able to develop.
I just wanted to point out that that's often not explicated
But I don't think that rationality in this sense is necessarily a thing that exists as an object, but it exists as an archetype.
It exists as a strategy that I can specify from some basic desirables for any kind of system that is strategizing on solving a control problem in a complex world. So basically if you have a system that has the ability to error-correct on a deep level and that is able to discover enough regularities in the world to notice its own existence in the world.
Then the system, as soon as it's able to evaluate strategies that it applies to make sense of the world, will discover rationality as an option. And there are not that many alternatives to it. And when you think about how to be a rational idealist, if you are a deep idealist, can you afford to be rational?
In some sense, two possibilities in which you are an idealist. One is an idealist that is willing to deal with the French problem of idealism, like why is there regularity in there and where does the dream come from? And the alternative is Mysterionism. And Mysterionism is a position in cognitive science that is held by several people. Mysterionism basically says that something cannot be understood if it cannot be understood by Noam Chomsky.
And not surprisingly, Chomsky himself is a mysterious about consciousness. Yeah, and I think, yeah, I think Begin does similar things. Yeah. For me, before we, I don't want to get too far afield about this. I think there's equivocation around mysteriousism. It invokes, I think, a non-controversial notion of epistemic boundedness.
like every other organism, it's highly probable we are epistemically bounded. And then it claims we're epistemically bounded with respect to to the mind, like having a mind doesn't mean that the mind is capable of explaining itself. And that, of course, I don't think chimps will ever generate a theory explaining their own cognition, etc. I think that's non controversial. The problem
is the specific argument saying that that is actually occurring in our attempts to solve consciousness or intelligence etc.
Well, I agree about the egocentrism of some of the arguments that you've pointed to. I think there's also a deep equivocation there between different senses of epistemic boundedness that hasn't been sort of properly worked out very carefully. Of course, I think, like I said, in one sense, it's got to be non-controversial, I think, that we're epistemically bounded. Even younger versions of myself were epistemically bounded with respect to these
The idea is, how do I distinguish between epistemic boundedness that is sort of hardwired into me, cultural epistemic boundedness, historical epistemic boundedness, developmental epistemic boundedness? And so I find that whole argument sort of deeply confused because there's a lot of equivocation going on. So I take it that you don't like it either.
Well, I think it's maybe an unhelpful notion, because in the way in which the term is constructed, it suggests that there is indeed a heart bound. And the question is, is this a useful way to think about the way in which my experience works? So maybe chimpanzees are just stupid people, because they have a very short childhood, so before their brain loses neuroplasticity at all the respective levels where they would be able to form concepts,
It already solidifies and they're not able to make sense of the world beyond a certain depth because it's for them difficult to focus on these ideas for long enough and to build suitable representations about them. And a similar thing happens with people. Most people are unable to focus on an idea for more than 20 minutes if it's not related to their social or erotic success.
And so you need very weird people that are able to focus on certain ideas for very, very long. And then we already die after a few decades. Does this imply that there is a heart epistemic bound? Probably not. And there could be a heart epistemic bound. That is, we can figure out by the timing characteristics how many layers our brain effectively has. Our brain is not organized in need layers. It's recurrent and so on. But still,
It seems to be difficult for us to hold thoughts beyond a certain length or construct thoughts beyond a certain length. For most people, very difficult to hold a thought in their mind stable that is longer than a few tens of seconds. And some people are able to hold the thoughts stable in their mind that takes a few hours. But this means uninterrupted focus on this thought. And so if you think about how many oscillations can you fit into such a thought,
is the level of complexity that this model has sufficient to understand foundational physics, for instance. And it could be that foundational physics poses a few questions that are close to the boundary of what we can integrate all at once and that we need machines to extend our mind.
to keep the thought stable and detailed for long enough. I think it is unfair to expect from Descartes that he is able to solve foundational physics because there were many fundamental insights that were not available to him, that were not part of what he had time to figure out by himself and that were not available to him in books and ideas around him. He largely still lived in a Euclidean universe in which the objects were very large.
and in which it was not apparent how to build more simple automata over which the complexity of the approximately three-dimensional Euclidean world or space-time later on would emerge. So in this time there was no way to go to understand the emergence of physics from something that is more simple and closer to first principles and I think this is only just now happening. I think
That's what I was trying to say. Issues of epistemic boundedness are mixing up and confusing together biological issues, cultural issues, historical issues. Yes. So maybe epistemic boundness is not a thing. So that was my point. So it might exist approximately. But if you treat it as that, oh, my God, there's this boundary. There it is. There is the wall that separates us from
from the next country and we will never be able to cross it because this is for some natural law the reason in which human minds have to be constructed. I am not sure if you can actually make that claim, if you can prove that there is a boundary that we need to run against. Well this is Hegel's argument and maybe I can use that to circle back because Hegel's argument is you can actually only talk about a limit if you have the capacity to exceed it. It doesn't make any sense to say from just this side that there's a limit.
So there are boundaries. One is Lyb's theorem, which says that a system basically cannot make statements about something outside of itself. Also the way in which Gödel, for instance, talks about the whole of mathematics and these properties of mathematics works by building an automaton that reconstructs the whole of mathematics that he wants to talk about from first principles.
So it talks about something that is contained in the system. If I want to talk about the whole of mathematics, I have to talk about it by reconstructing it from first principles. If I cannot make such a definition, I don't know what I'm talking about. And so the world that I am talking about is one that I need to construct in the first place. And I'm not able to talk about something that exists outside of these constructions, unless I can prove that I have constructed things in the only possible way.
which means I have to make statements about the possible nature of language itself. So this is one of the boundaries that I can run into. And the other one is has to do with the problem of the access to of the universe itself. And this is much more
Obvious to people than Loeb's theory, even though it's related, you cannot exclude the possibility that for instance that you could be a brain in the vet. Some philosophers have tried to do this, but they are a slate of hands and wishful thinking.
There is no way that you and me cannot know beforehand of whether we are currently in some kind of weird dream from which we wake up in the next moment and realize, oh my God, this actually didn't happen. It was a fake memory. This was not true. This is not a description of the physical universe. This was just a weird illusion that I had in a night dream. There is no way in which we can, in principle, exclude this possibility.
There is only ways in which we can deal with the probabilities based on our past experiences. But if we have never experienced a certain thing before in this fundamental way, for instance, after I had long surgery for eight hours, I had extremely lucid dreams that were so intense that I could not in the intensity distinguish them from daytime experiences. And it was because of the narcotics that were still my bloodstream. And I never had experiences like that before.
Of course, these experiences were just brain states. They had nothing prophetic about this. This was not an alternate universe that it was dropping in. But the experiential qualities were very similar. And so my argument is that you can not possibly make such a distinction beforehand. And that's why you can also not exclude the possibility of skepticism. And this is one of the boundaries of what we can be achieving as a mind. We cannot rely on our own coherence in a fundamental sense.
We always have to hope and pray that the world remains as coherent as it appears to me right now in the next thought. So that gets me back to the point that realness seems to be bound to some normative notion of rationality. You've invoked a priori a couple of times.
The problem with our priori is, again, that hasn't been stable. What Kant thought was our priori, and he famously posited the our priori as central, many people don't agree with his set of our priori that logic is Aristotelian logic. There's many logicians that say, no, that's not the only possible logic.
Euclidean geometry is the only geometry. That's not true, et cetera. And so, again, it seems that even the a priori is dependent on these more basic processes of how we think everything hangs together, how everything is intelligible, how it all makes sense to us. And for me, that's the thing I really want to understand. I really want to understand
how and why we find the universe intelligible, and if we're justified in doing so, and then how does that relate to intelligence and consciousness? That's the issue. And I take it that there are sort of certain central problems that go back to this fundamental act of interpretation.
which is what are you going to pay attention to, how long are you going to pay attention to it, how much importance are you going to give to it, how are you going to prioritize one thing over another, etc. And interestingly enough, these are kind of a lot of the contending candidates for theories of what attention is. And I know you put a lot of centrality on attention in your mental, in your model of consciousness. And so
I'm very interested about this process by which we attend to things in the right way so that we are capable of making intelligible sense of our experience in a way that gives us some good reason, I'm not saying demonstratively certain, but some good reason, it could be probabilistic if you want, for saying X is real and Y is not because
If we can't do that, if we can't make those basic kinds of distinctions, we can't do science itself. And then a lot of the data that we're using to make our arguments fall through the bottom, because we have no ontological ground for science itself. So I'm very interested in exactly those kinds of fundamental issues. So for me, the problem of consciousness ultimately is bound up with
the problem of intelligence, the problem of making sense. But those are not just psychological problems, they are ultimately epistemological ontological problems. And answering them together, I think is something well, that's what I'm trying to do with you here. Now I'm trying to get how it is that
I'm trying to get your model of ontology and where, because you have to rely on judgments, like you went back. It's only a projection. There's not really a face there. That's a positing of what's real versus not real. And I'm trying to get at, is your account of rationality bound up with your account of consciousness and intelligence?
It seems like it is. And doesn't that mean therefore that we have to posit a certain kind of realness to intelligence and consciousness the way we have to for rationality, because rationality is how we determine
What's real in the world? Again, I acknowledge with you, I'm not saying that I can do that, you know, with any kind of certainty, but nevertheless, I have to be able to do it in some kind of fashion. I have to be able to make judgments about real versus not real in order to be generating the kind of data we're both using when we're talking here right now. So here's the argument in a nutshell. It seems that what's real depends on what's rational and being rational seems to involve
requires some kind of self-awareness, some kind of consciousness, and rational seems to also require some kind of basic ability to be intelligent, to find certain things relevant rather than others, to pay attention to hear, to see the relevance of certain acts to goals, etc. And doesn't that mean therefore that consciousness and intelligence
The question is what is real? It's a tricky question. It's a good question.
The property of being experientially real requires I think that it needs to be in our mind. So there is no way in which you can wake up from the dream in your mind and still exist because out there in physics you are not conscious. Neurons are not conscious, brains are not conscious, physical apparatus are not conscious. You need to be inside of that dream. So if you ever transcend the dream, you will not be there. The experience of waking up is something that you dream. You can only
experience making up value are still in a dream. And so you're not going to wake up in some any kind of reality. And there is this big question why there is something rather than nothing, it seems to be hard to deny that something exists. And it's difficult to figure out how it's possible that there is something rather than nothing.
And the easiest explanation that the foundational physicists that I've so far been talked to have come up with is always the same. So and rather than positing that for some funny reason, something exists and all the other things do not exist, maybe existence is the default.
So for some funny reason, the universe is not set up as our intuition says that basically nothing exists by itself by default. And then something needs to be brought into existence somehow from first principles. The easier explanation is to reduce the steps to say that well, just everything exists and we have to now explain why something don't seem to be the case.
And so what would it mean for something to exist? In my understanding for something to exist, it needs to be implemented. And I would say that many things only exist to an approximate degree.
So, for instance, this cup here exists to a very good approximate degree, right? It's a certain idea that I can project consistently in the universe that gives me certain affordances and it's stable for a pretty long time and there are well-defined conditions for the most part for when this model falls apart and I can no longer treat this as a cup.
And for instance, when it breaks or when my ability to interact with it breaks or when the local physical continuum breaks in such a way that the parts no longer neatly assemble into a cup and so on. Right. So there are certain boundary conditions where the cupness would no longer hold, but for the most part, the cup is very stable. If I take rationality as an object becomes slightly more fishy. Or if I take my own personal identity as an object, my own existence, it becomes super fishy.
Because to which degree do I really stably exist, and to which degree is this a fiction that I conveniently maintain to be able to reason about myself over extended time spans? I think that I probably don't exist to the same degree of solidity as the cup exists. I'm much more approximate. I'm much more like a voice in the wind blowing through the mountains. My existence is much more virtual and vague and approximate than the existence of the cup itself.
If I go back to this notion of why there is something rather than nothing and all these things that can be implemented exist, the cup is implemented in physics to a tighter degree than I am implemented in physics. I'm much more approximately implemented. I would say that what can be implemented are ultimately finite automata. It's also the only part of mathematics that works.
the implication of Gödel's discovery that we have to go away from stateless mathematics and instead what we get are automata.
and we cannot define infinity without running into contradictions in the languages in which we do it. You mentioned that there are many different ways to define logic and different logics. Ultimately, they come down to the same thing that was also part of this big discovery that we made in the 20th century, that all the ways in which we can define logic and computation and so on are the same.
They have all the same power. So the Turing machine and the post machine and the lambda calculus and the combinators and Boolean logic and specific programming languages and the different approaches to define constructive mathematics turn out to be equivalent.
There are some tight small elements at the boundaries and so on where we could get into debates, but by and large, they all turn out to be this mappings between these systems. And these mappings can all happen in polynomial time or in constant time. And so it's not so bad.
The logic can be solved. If you look at geometry, there is not this question, oh my God, there is not just Euclidean geometry, but there's also non-Euclidean geometry. These are not fundamentally different. It's just that the non-Euclidean geometry relaxes one of the conditions, which means the space in which geometry takes place doesn't need to be flat. The space can have curvature or it can be beyond this and it can be very irregular and so on. And it turns out that geometry is the mathematics of too many parts to count, I think.
So as soon as you have too many parts to count, the way in which we can perform calculations is that we need to identify operators that converge in the limit, which means if you have trillions of parts and you add one more part, the result doesn't change perceptively in any way. And this is when you have something where you converge approximately against infinity when you have approximate continuity. And the set of operators that converge in the limit when you have too many parts to count, this is practically what we mean by geometry.
So it's a particular way to model worlds that are made of too many parts to keep track of the individual parts. And of course, our brain is largely confronted with the world at such a level where there are too many atoms to count, too many molecules, too many people to count, too many dollars to count and so on. And so we treat them as continuous values and we look at the limit dynamics and we have geometric models.
Two points. The first is I'm not going to make arguments about the interrelations of logic. I was making an argument that Kant took something to be a priori. He didn't know everything you just said. And so his judgments about what was the a priori were incorrect. It's plausible that that's also the case for us. And so that's all I meant to say about that.
I want to go back to the cup and me, or the cup and you, because it seems to me, given your ontology and your epistemology, the cup is, and I think you're saying that, the cup is a fiction as well, and so you're a fiction, the cup is a fiction, and yet the physics seems to not be fictional for you, and yet I don't know how we get to the physics without objects like cups and people like you and I.
The physics is generated by people like you and I using instruments that are like microscopes and whatever that are just like the cup. And therefore, how do all these fictional beings using fictional devices come up with the physics that is really the case? It seems to me that you need to say that the objects and the people doing the science are as real as the science itself. And that
would tend to say that the cup has a kind of reality to it. And you have a kind of reality to it that are have to be assumed for the practice of physics itself. That's what I was trying to say. Now, you might be saying, physics doesn't have an ontology for cups. I totally get that.
What I'm saying is why should physics have the monopoly on our ontology? What's the argument for that, given the epistemology and the psychology that you're advancing here? It seems to me like our ontology is much more rich than our current physics is capable of incorporating. That's what I'm trying to get at.
For example, you said you're not as stable as the cup. Well, you sort of have to be. I mean, there has to be a continuity in you, right? As I move around the object, it's not just that I have to find a continuity in the object. There has to be a continuity in me as a knower in order for the stability of that object to be possible. I also have to have some kind of continuity. Again, I'm trying to get at
Because, sorry, we got into this and maybe we both have taken each other too far afield. We got into this because I asked you to, like what you were dealing with, you know, the dualism problem that Descartes Gaeta gave us. And then you said there isn't a problem because it's all sort of, I heard you saying sort of all constructed in the mind.
But then if it's all constructed in the mind, so is all the things and all the tools by which we did the physics. Let's use your analogy. The physics, I wouldn't trust the physics I'm doing in a dream if I knew it was a dream. And if I know it's a simulation, which you were claiming, why should I trust the physics that are occurring within that simulation? It seems to me that there is an ontology richer than physics that is needed in order
First of all, don't worry. You don't need to apologize for taking us too far. I feel they can take us back. It's no issue if you feel that we are going too far out here. There are two ways in which I can experience physics. One is in a lucid dream, for instance, I can test whether I'm in a dream or not. Usually, for instance, by operating a light switch. I found that in lucid dreams light switches for the most part don't work. It's a funny thing, but they don't.
Another thing is when you read a text on a page, it's difficult to read the same text twice. You might have noticed this in dreams, right? And this seems to be a limitation of the way in which our working memory works. So I suspect that the lucid dream has to store all its state in working memory and the causal structure that is stable in the dream has to be held there. And there's a limit to how many bits can be held in our working memory.
And as a result, the complexity of the physics simulation in our own dream is limited.
And this means that when we want to have a physics simulation that is more detailed, we probably need to have state that is stored outside of our mind for practical reasons. It's not a philosophical argument. It's just practical observation. So if you want to experience a world in which light switches work, you need to store some state outside of your working memory in some substrate that is outside of your mind. And this could be a physical room.
So for practical purposes, if you ever find yourself in the situation that you need to figure out whether you are dreaming this or not, you could try to rely on processes in your environment and test for the existence of processes in your environment that need to update a lot of state to be stable and you check for the stability of the state.
Of course, there could still be some kind of conspiracy going on. So this is not foolproof. If an evil scientist is messing with you, then the evil scientist might be able to change your memories of what just happened and might be interjecting weird things in there. But the question that we want to answer on the other level is, is there a conspiracy going on?
And the idea that is underlying physics is not complicated assumptions about the notion of energy, time, space and causality and so on. These are all things that we infer at some level. They're not assumptions that we need to presuppose to make physics work. The basic assumption in physics is maybe there is no conspiracy. Maybe this is just mechanical.
And we have to understand why that is the case. And the idealist assumption is there is a conspiracy. We do live in a simulation. And this idealism is not solving anything in a way that physics is not solving it. You still have to, if you want to explain what's going on, make a claim that you now understand how the universe works, how that conspiracy could possibly work. And explaining the conspiracy is intrinsically harder.
If you deny the possibility of any kind of physics, and physics just being the mechanical explanation. I'll come back to the point of what I don't know we infer certain things, or our inferences presuppose them, we can come back to that in a minute. But but I mean, we're in a position, at least that's what I hear you saying different from Descartes, my person being, you know, beset by the Cartesian demon, because
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Simulation, which is precisely what can't happen. So I agree. I'm excluding the Cartesian demon because as you say, there's no way out of that well, right? If I doubt my capacity,
I'm doubting whether or not my doubt is like you can just fall forever and ever. I get that. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that we're not in that, you seem to be saying, and I think I agree with you, we're not in that position. We can come to see what is it about our consciousness and our perception that is not real. But for me, that means that our consciousness and our perception
and our intelligence also have access to reality, have an ability to pick up on what's real, because that would be the only thing I could use to contrast with my subjective experience. In order to say, I know that I'm inside something, I have to be able to give you good reason for believing there's something outside of me. And that outside of me also has to have access. I'm not saying direct access. I'm not a naive empiricist.
It has to have access to my consciousness and my reason or my intelligence or again, I can't actually posit the very model that I'm using to say that everything is a projection.
Yeah, so if we try to understand the situation, to me it's very, it's almost capable to have a PV in a similar situation as a robot living inside of some kind of computer. And this computer is set up in such a way that it provides affordances to an external environment. And now the computational system that lives inside of that computer, this
set of organized patterns that we call software is set up in such a way that it can discover regularities and the patterns and extend its affordances into this environment and thereby make sense of the environment. And it seems to me that I find myself in an arrangement that is indistinguishable from this description that is intimately familiar to me if I'm an AI researcher.
Right. I guess the question I'm asking you in your example, is it possible for the robot to discover that it is inside the computer?
Yes, I think it is. But there are certain limitations to this. And I think that you can discover this from, in a sense, from first principles, because there are no alternatives. There are many ways in which you can map this conceptually. So the ways in which you depict these entities, because there are not entities that are defined by physical appearances. They're not defined by Res Extensa. They are defined by certain conceptual relationships.
And it turns out that all the ways I think in which a mind can exist as an apparent pattern and control structure can be mapped structurally.
first principles on conceptual structures that are equivalent. So we might disagree about how this computer is set up. Is it a von Neumann architecture or anything else? There is no possible way to distinguish them and there is no claim to how this actually works. We know that the biological systems that are able to process information work in
I agree with that and so now it's what it sounds like you're saying is the most real things are the things that are sort of accessible to my a priori reason and that that's what I use in order to determine
I'm within the welter of experience and I use my ability to make sense of things and that helps me sort through and sift through those that are going to let me know that I'm inside a simulation. And then that says to me that
what's ultimately real for you. And you invoked archetypes at one point when you talked about the cup. You're sounding to me like a Platonist. You're sounding to me like you're saying what's ultimately real are sort of the mathematical objects accessible through our prior reality. And everything else is less real than them. And it's like, I mean, Plato has the first simulation theory around. You're inside the cave and you're only looking at the shadows and the echoes and you have to make your way out. Is that a fair reading?
Almost. I think that an archetype is an optimum in a description function. It's in some sense a mathematical regularity, in the same sense as the Greek gods are archetypes, personality archetypes, that basically if you take a space of personality properties and their interaction,
The Greek Gods are stable in this way, or the Christian God is the archetype of the total God.
Yeah, and it's a particular one because this thing needed to be loaded to be also an civilizational spirit for an agricultural society. So it's not actually the total God and as a slate of hand that is going on by identifying the creator God is the God of meaning and is the God of the late Roman Empire. Right. So these are different gods in a certain way that have been put into one for practical reasons.
And the reason why we have so many claims to total gods is because of this payload that the myth of the total god has to carry. But this doesn't mean that the archetype actually exists out in the physical world. There is no reason why when you have a description function and you discover an optimum on it,
why this thing needs to exist, but it will exist in systems that build these types of models, which means they exist as a point of reference. There are certain optima in which you describe things. And it's also true for our own perception. When we perceive things, what we perceive is not the features in which they are arranged. What we perceive is a certain ideal that is being projected by the features.
And this is what Platonism means. It doesn't mean a claim to the actual existence of physical things, of affairs in the world, which we causally interact. It's the observation that when we are building models of the world, there are certain models that are more pure and more elegant than others. And this is, in some sense, the platonic idea. Yeah. And so that's where you and I have a very deep kind of agreement.
because I consider myself a neoplatonist in my sort of ultimate orientation. I guess what I would say, and Plato I think might agree with me, is he would say, well, saying it doesn't exist physically, it doesn't say much, because the physics is ultimately less real than the platonic objects, right? Because the physical things, the instantiated things,
are only, as you said, only temporary instances, right, they're less stable, they're less real. And so the fact that it doesn't exist physically doesn't sound like to Plato's ears, they would go, yeah, and that's, that's to say that they're more real than a physical reality in an important way. And that seems to me,
kind of what you need in order to do science. You need to be able to posit these kinds of entities in order to do generalizations, in order to be audacious in some ways. The empiricist wouldn't like the fact that I could run some math and make conclusions about reality. I mean, you have to believe stronger, you have to assert this kind of thing. And now,
You seem to be nodding, so I don't think I'm being too imposing on you. And I'm finding that we got to this place very, very interesting because, and I don't mean this as any kind of critique of your presentation, I didn't get that when I was watching your videos, right? It took a lot of this. And again, I'm not critiquing you. But I found that I've now gotten to a very, very interesting place with you.
I don't know what, we haven't said too much about consciousness and meaning, like we promised we would, but I found this, this progression really, really powerful and interesting. Because I'm also interested, you have a knack for saying very intriguing things about religion and history. I'm very interested in the fact that Platonism, Neoplatonism, because they were a continuity,
formed an interesting kind of lingua, intellectual lingua franca along the Silk Road. You can even see this historically. Neoplatonism was able to reciprocally reconstruct with Christianity, with Islam, with Judaism, and there's now some evidence even with Buddhism. It seems to have this interesting capacity to be more of a ur or primordial representation of our shared intelligibility making process.
I find that a very interesting proposal right now, because if we could get the philosophical argument we've been exploring and the historical argument together, that means we could make a plausible argument for a shareable framework for interpreting reality and making and making claims about reality and normative judgments. And I think this is very centrally needed
for a problem I talk about extensively, which is the meaning crisis that the West is facing. So I just wanted to say, I mean, I've been sort of like very critical, but I want to now stand back and express appreciation for sort of where we got to and some of the possibilities I see in it. I hope that also wasn't imposing on you, but you were nodding as I was saying it. So it seemed like it was... You don't need to apologize in this way in any way. I don't identify with me having these ideas.
I can observe myself having ideas, but the relationship that the ideas have to me is not very interesting. I just try to play the glass-panel as well as I can, as do you, right? So you never need to apologize for criticizing an idea or having a different one or pointing out where my thinking falls short. And I'm grateful if you point out things that appear to be inconsistent.
Don't worry about this at all. Fair enough. You're playing the music with me very well and I appreciate that. My point for making the apology, first of all, I'm a Canadian and we apologize for everything. Secondly, the point for me was to try to show you from where I was coming. That was the point I was trying to make. So I'm interested. Can I ask you a question? It's slightly more personal. I think it's fair to say
The position you've taken isn't the consensus position or even the majority position. Is that fair to say?
Yes and no. I find that a lot of people who deeply think about these topics seem to be converging. So if I would be discussing with say people like Minsky, Dasher, many many other people next Thursday will have a discussion about attention with Michael Graciano and Vasudev and Jonathan Cohen.
I also don't find that my ideas are in a deep sense original. It's just that the more ideas I discover, the smaller the parties become that I am late to.
You know what I mean, right? So I don't think it's possible to have philosophical ideas about the relationship between mind and physical universe that have not been had by somebody a few thousand years ago. And if somebody has a fundamentally new idea, that's probably bad news, unless it relates to some kind of super modern physics and highly original way. And it's possible that we find discover something on this level. But by and large,
The big foundational questions about epistemology and so on are apparent for so long that I don't have any claims to originality in there. And so I would say that my ideas are not original and they're also relatively widespread. And the disagreements are largely happening, I think, when people have different epistemology.
When they think that there are ways to establishing truths that are different from the ways in which I think that truth can be established. Sure, sure, sure. I think that's why I wanted to play at the epistemological, ontological level with you. I'm interested though, because I also have a sense of a growing convergence. And that's why I like the fact that you do a big picture cognitive science, because I think you have to do big picture cognitive science to get that sense, to really get it.
I'm wondering, in your practice of doing cognitive science, how do you deal, because I agree with you about that convergence and I agree with you, how do you deal with the different ontologies? So the neuroscientist talks about neurons and does fMRI.
and the artificial intelligence person talks about programs and runs simulations, hoping that they become instantiations. The psychologist talks about working memory and does, you know, experiments on behavior. The linguist talks about deep structures and collects data about judgments of grammaticality. How do you... This question really concerns me because I think it
It's part of, again, trying to turn cognitive science back towards the existential issue that's facing us. I don't mean existential in a sense of threat. I mean like how Kierkegaard would use the word existential in the meaning making. I go back to the point I made at the very beginning, right, that for a long time, the cognitive sciences, and I'll use that plural as opposed to cognitive science that tries to do a synoptic integration,
The cognitive scientists, the cognitive sciences have promoted a fragmentation of what mind means in a profound way. And that fragmentation has, right, really, when people start to reflect, and they can, I see this in my students, right, they'll get caught up on, I don't know what this, I don't know what a mind is, because there's this cacophony of all, and then of course,
If I don't know what a mind is, I don't know what I am, and I don't know how I relate to the world, you can see where this goes. The fragmentation of the ontology by the cognitive scientists is not separate from a lot of the suffering that people have because they don't find a stable framework in which to locate the phenomena of mind.
I'm asking this because, as I said, and you invoked wisdom a while back, and so I wanted to circle back to that. What wisdom have you acquired, cultivated, realized, I don't want to know what verb you want, for helping do this? Two things, getting the various disciplines to start to pursue integration rather than fragmentation, and connecting that to
I think that the disciplines by and large are not very well incentivized to do science and philosophy.
That's something that we need to understand that there are institutions in which people go to work to feed their children. And a scientist is in some sense to me, someone who has a particular kind of personality. It's someone who very early on in the psychological development has decided to trust the analytical thinking more than their intuitions, than their feelings and their emotions and so on.
And typically this happens because they had Asperger's and the priors that they had when they interacted with other people socially failed in school. And so at some point they realized, I cannot trust my feelings because if I go by my intuitions, my interactions with the world are going to fail and I have to move to the analytical mode to make sense of the world. And if you are permanently in the analytical mode, that's a trauma mode, right? A healthy human being should understand that the purpose of analytical reasoning, which by itself is very brittle,
is to go with your darkest emotions, those where you don't see clearly what's what and in which way to go. And so analytical reasoning is a very powerful tool for very narrow areas of understanding the world, and it's happened to be the ones that should be studied in the sciences. But it's wrong to present scientists as a lifestyle archetype and as the goal of education. Only a very small subset of people should be scientists, and the existence of scientists is very useful to the world, but being a scientist is largely not fun.
And so we see science currently as more like an employment program where we put people that are difficult to employ in the industry because we don't need that many people in the industry and teach them methods and then they apply these methods and we hope that the results cumulate. And the outcome is largely not that interesting because you're not being hired into a science to answer foundational questions. There are very few ways to answer foundational questions because the low-hanging fruits have been
And so you don't actually need that many people working in the foundational disciplines and making foundational progress. And you're not incentivized to have ideas about foundational things. So among the very few people that are willing to offer answer to foundational questions and are so bold and crazy to do this, there seem to be in some sense three groups.
One of these groups is people that don't fully understand the depths of these questions and think that they have found a very simple answer that solves the problem without actually doing so.
These people tend not to be very interesting. So there are simplified notions of consciousness that do not explain the necessary and sufficient conditions for a system being conscious. And they might lead to models in neuroscience or in AI or in robotics that claim to do a certain thing, but they don't. And it's not that interesting that these exist. Then there is another type of mind that is very humble. And these people say, I don't actually know what the answer is. And I have the following questions.
and I'm aware of the following space of attempts to answer this and I am currently moving in this area of the space and this is what I'm seeing from where I'm currently standing and this is how I'm able to interact with others from this vantage point and I'm still in this exploration.
and so it's a very tentative position and so on and it's one that's also not being openly discussed very much because a scientist has to publish the things that they can hope to prove and not the things that they're seeing and most of the things that we're seeing as a possibility and most of the interesting answers on the realm of the possible cannot be established by an experiment because it's a possibility right so the possibility is often the most interesting things and possibilities are difficult to publish and discuss about exactly well said and the third group
are the crazies. These are people that think that they have certainty and they are super smart and they go very deep and often the crazies are also among the most interesting ones but it also means that you have to parse them in the right way. So the crazies are for instance Jürgen Schmidhuber or Steven Wolfram and so on. These are people that for some reason aspire to greatness and force themselves to be great no matter the personal cost to them so they're not humble
And they do have theories of everything that they are not shy to denote as such and put out there. And these ideas are often extremely interesting to bounce up against and try to understand them deeply. That's very interesting. Much in that was well said. I've been trying to talk about and model a form of interaction called theologos in which people are in the second group
but are willing to talk about sort of ideas and proposals that come from the third group, that where people are very open to, as you said, a kind of humble exploration, an idea that you can help me correct, and I can help you self correct and we can work together. And we can get we can get to ideas that emerge between us that I can't get to on my own, you can't get to on your own. And that
Openness to the possibility of genuine emergence bumps us up against what you call them the crazies because you one of the things you want to do is let some of those crazier ideas in because they help
give you, it's like letting in a different sensei into the dojo for a bit, not for very long because the dojo will fall apart, but letting them in for a bit because you get a new conceptual vocabulary, a new theoretical grammar. And so I've been trying to model that process even in an academic setting. I've been trying to pursue the presentation of ideas about consciousness
the self, etc. in a dialogical manner, rather than in a monologue in which there's all kinds of claims about closure and certainty. So I think I agree with you, I think that this is ultimately, or at least not ultimately, deeply an institutional issue.
And institutions only change when there are alternative examples of attractive forms, new forms of practice. And so I've been trying to bring this new form of practice into the forefront as a way of trying to address a lot of the concerns usage brought up. So I think that spending time doing more of this is actually not it's not an ornament.
It's not just a ceremony. It's not just a social gathering for cognitive science. It's actually essential for cognitive science if it's going to progress. I guess this is me also saying thank you to Kurt for doing this. And thank you also for you. You came here in good faith and you've been that way throughout. But I'm trying to make an argument for this being more central. And the problem is that the institution that is
Where we house the science, the university doesn't know how to deal with this emerging phenomena. It doesn't know how to deal with because of social media, because of this technology, because a lot of this understanding, this is all happening more and more and more. But when I, for example, when I try to bring this into the institution, the institution seems to still be bound
in sort of a Victorian paper and pencil mentality about how we evaluate things, how we evaluate the work people are doing. Like, for example, none of this, even though I think it's really important to the to the life of cognitive science, none of this would even show up on my CV. Because if I put it on my CV, it would just be ignored. And it seems to me that's a very problematic place that we have gotten in, we've gotten to.
John, what would be an example of you bringing this idea of dialogue to the university and the university saying no? Like, what specifically did you propose? For example, I put out a series, The Illusive Eye with Greg Enriquez and Christopher Matsui-Pietro on the nature and function of the self. Untangling the world knot with Greg Enriquez, a psychologist about consciousness, and it was done like the
Did one with Zach Stein and Greg Enriquez on towards a meta psychology that is true to transformation.
And to my mind, the kind of exploration of ideas and advancement of insightful arguments was better there. And I'm not trying to be self-congratulatory because other people are doing this, but it was better than a lot of the stuff that is typically site like you typically put on your CV to count as, right, that you're doing work in the discipline. You know, you know, you know,
That's that's what I'm trying to say. The discipline is no longer the place where the science is getting moat. Sorry, that was exactly the wrong word. The institution, the university is no longer the and I like working for the University of Toronto, by the way, I'm not trying to get myself out of a job. But right, the like, the institution is not the place really, where the kind of science we need now both for itself, and both for the culture is happening. That's the argument I'm making.
There is no other place, right? It's not like there is a new heaven that has opened itself up for experiments and thoughts like this. There is a network of basically small events of workshops, conferences and so on that happens between the disciplines, but it's mostly that we do this on the side. Yes, exactly. We do this in addition to what we do in the sciences. In the same way as Michael
Graziano or Tononi and many others basically have a daytime job in the sciences and the philosophical contributions that they do, they do on the side. It's also in many ways too fast. And it's not that we feel that I feel that I mistreated in this way. I understand why the institutional incentives are in the way they are and the reasonable and good natured reasons for this, for the most part, for why this is the way in which it is.
It just means that we need alternate ways of funding to make this happen. And we need alternate ways of organizing it to keep on this going it going on visit. I also want to just briefly make a case for the crazies. The reason why I'm not a crazy is because I'm not smart enough. I'm not smart enough to maintain the illusion that I see things that others are not seeing and often more clearly and better and with more focus than I can see them.
So basically I get humbled by my own inadequacy. And there are some people which are basically not that inadequate. So for them it takes many decades longer before they would get to the point where they are forced to humble themselves. So they can maintain an illusion of greatness that they might have developed in their adolescence as a protective measure for their own psychology and keep up with being great.
and if somebody who's really really smart is able to keep up the crazy greatness this notion of everybody else is confused and basically the only one who sees the solution and here it is basically this is an extremely valuable person to have around and they should be cherished and protected and doesn't mean that you have to believe everything that they say but they're very few people which are so bold and so daring that they sacrifice themselves in such a way. Yoshua, do you see that as a negative?
It's because the way that I hear it, it sounds like, you know, when you're at a job interview and they say, so what are your weaknesses? You say I work too hard. So what are your weaknesses? Well, I'm not upset by the illusions of the crazies. I wouldn't present this as a weakness. The typical answer in this job interview would be, I'm too honest. Right. And then the other one says, why is that a problem? Don't give a fuck what you think.
Now, the problem is when you are in a job interview and you don't fit in, the issue is what is the thing that you actually want to do? Do you want to be part of that particular hierarchy of this particular kind of organization, of this particular kind of normativity? And do you think that you can actually help it along? Do you share the aesthetics of that place of work that you will be part of?
And I found when I was in academia, I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed working with students. I found that I needed to defend a space of inquiry and the space of inquiry co-existed with the application of methods.
It was this thing that enabled me to say to a student that was not inspired, you shouldn't be here in my class if you don't like this, if you don't intrinsically want to do this. You're wasting your own time and attention and my time and attention and the time and attention of everybody who's there. Go have a relationship, go read a good book, go sit down in a cafe or watch a movie or go to another class.
Don't be here, because what we try to do is we try to abuse the machine of academia to do the things that we actually want to do, which is try to figure out our relationship to the world and make actual intellectual and philosophical and personal progress on certain questions that actually move us and that motivate us to be here and spend a portion of our precious, irreducible lifetime with each other on these problems.
So I don't find it difficult to defend, but I also understand that the machines that we are part of that we are serving are largely serving other goals. That was very well said. I guess for me, I want to, I guess I see more urgency now than there has been in the past. I agree with you about these institutions are set up the way they are for good reasons, etc. But
I do think we are we're entering into very, very significant changes. You and I both think that, you know, strong AI is something that's very possible. I know you said because you said this and you and I both think this has, you know, just important ramifications beyond what a lot of people are thinking about. And that's just one example of the way in which this is accelerating and and
and is corrosive to people's attempt to sift through and make sense, sift through the bullshit and make sense of their world. The work I did on the meeting crisis, the sense of bullshit, it's accelerating, it's accelerating exponentially. People are increasingly thinking there's more and more and more bullshit and more and more bullshit around. And I think
The kind of stuff we're doing here together is the place, the arena, the dojo, in which we both train how to wrestle with that and exemplify how to wrestle with that. And so I think there's an urgency now to get, and I think COVID accelerated it in certain ways, to give more prominence to this kind of dialogical space and practice. So I guess for me,
I want to push for more of this because the rates of suffering, both in the sense of distress and loss of agency, seem to be going up by several sort of objective markers. And so I'm concerned that I don't think the academic world is turning to this problem. And I think this is a better forum in which
We can start to explore what we need to
Part of what I was trying to put my finger on when I said, we need to be doing more of this. This is valuable. This is central. This shouldn't be on the sidelines. It should be in the center. And there's difficult tasks. There's very practical tasks of how do we make this more attractive to a wider audience of people? And how do we make it attractive so we can draw some of the first kind of people in? And how do we make it attractive so that we don't automatically exclude the crazies?
I agree with that. I mean, but you don't want you don't want you don't want just sock. You don't want a room to fill with just Socrates, a bunch of Socrates. He was a tip-off. He didn't fit in. They killed him. And so I think these for me, these questions are are are becoming increasingly central about how do we make
this what we're doing here into an attractive way of life for people. What do you mean by way of life? So what I mean by this is that, and I think you just said it, like, for me, exploring these ideas is not something I do to get sort of an intellectual orgasm. And oh, that was cool, right? Ultimately, I want to
be able to explore these ideas in a way that can ameliorate people's sense of being disconnected from themselves, from the world, from each other. And so if I get a deeper understanding of the mind and consciousness and meaning, I want that to ultimately be in service of helping people
to whatever degree they feel comfortable with and capable of, of making use of these ideas in translating them into practices, things that they do to individually and collectively to make better sense. Like, let's use a model, a historical, right? Christianity, and I'm not a Christian, I'm not proselytizing for it, was able to create this structure that went from like Aquinas to somebody's grandmother,
and got you get them to interact together, coordinate together, work together, have a shared sense of connectedness, meaning. That's the kind of thing I think we need. I'm not proposing a religion here. I sometimes say I'm proposing a religion that's not a religion. That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about that these in the end, sorry, this sounds harsh. But in the end, I don't really care deeply about what you believe. I care about what you practice.
I care about how are you transforming yourself and how are you affording other people to transform themselves in a way that makes lives less beset by foolishness, more enhanced by wisdom and flourishing for individuals. That's what I ultimately care about. Did that answer your question? Yeah, what would happen if that goal of helping people contradicted the goal of, let's say, investigating reality, whatever that means?
So for example, let's say you found out some truth via some scientific investigation that would destabilize people, that would make them feel worse, that would disconnect us. So then what do you do? You make the decision to not publish that, to not investigate that further? I guess my response to that is I have a certain kind of confidence
in the interconnection between things being true and then ultimately being good. In fact, we have to view truth as a kind of good in order to explain what we're doing as scientists. There's something about, you know Nozick's experience machine, right? Let me give you an example from, I do this in my classroom.
I ask people, how many of you are in satisfying romantic relationships? Romantic relationships are really important in our culture because they sort of take the role of religion, right? Because you ask people, what do you need to be happy in a romantic relationship and what causes you the most suffering in romantic relationships? So, right? And I ask, how many of you are in satisfying romantic relationships? And you know, I get a certain percentage. I said, of these people,
How many of you would want to know that your partner was cheating on you, even if that meant the destruction of the relationship? 95% of the people keep their hand up. There's a valuing, a meaning of being connected to what's real that seems to be, this is one of Plato's arguments, that seems to be kind of a meta desire. In addition to whatever we desire, we have a meta desire that what satisfies that desire is real.
What I want to say is there's a presumption in your question that there isn't an intrinsic value or goodness to discovering what's real, and I think there is. Can people transform themselves so they come into greater conformity to that?
Yeah, that's what I think it means to cultivate wisdom. And so I put I sort of put my trust, not in the particular metaphysics of the wisdom traditions, but the fact that we've had wisdom traditions, and we have reliably found people to become people to be capable of becoming wiser, and certain individuals to be wiser than others. So when I'm saying it, I have I put faith in those two things together. That's what I'm saying.
We found that we don't have differences, at least not in the discussion that we had in the last couple of hours. We mostly had very similar approaches and ideas and we developed our terms together in ways that were very harmonic.
We might have a difference in the reason why we do things. It seems to me that John has a different relationship to normativity than me. Maybe we can go into this question later. But basically from my perspective, it looks like John sees himself as a spiritual teacher and I don't have enough maturity
To see myself as a spiritual teacher with integrity, I also don't know what I would get out of this. My own observation of the meaning crisis is that it's inevitable because the civilization that we are part of doesn't have much of a future. And there is no way in which the civilization can be fixed without changing some of its core assumptions.
So we sense this and it's reflected in the fact that our civilization is not projecting itself into the future. We have no models that we discuss with our children in school or in our institutions. We have no plans that go beyond the next few decades. It's not that we actually think about what will life on earth look like for our civilization in 500 years from now.
And that's new. This was not true in the Christian society. They had an idea of what was going to happen in a few hundred years from then. And this idea might have been wrong, but they made plans for it. And some of these plans came to pass. And we don't have that kind of planning horizon anymore. So we basically are now in an organism as a hyper organism that is past its prime, that is in some sense visibly in its autumn and that is facing off against all sorts of existential risks.
And we feel helpless at dealing with these risks. And as a result, we don't have a shared purpose. We might have a shared purpose as an individual, with a family, with children, with friends, but we don't seem to project this shared purpose anymore at a societal level. And there are only small groups within the societies, some evangelical cults and transhumanist cults and so on.
that try to maintain the fiction of a future that they're acting with, but not at the level of the entire civilization. It is the level of this individual group. And our mainstream Weltgeist deals with this mostly by despair or denial. Yes. And or even an outright nihilism.
And I don't have an argument against that nihilism, because I think that from the perspective of the civilizational hive mind this is justified. And if you want to build something new, we have to do this from the vantage point of the next civilization. And that's almost impossible to maintain the space in your own mind what the next civilization would be looking like and how to build it.
So the only thing that I have to offer in terms of spiritual guidance is that I hug my friends. And that's not that much more. And so it's more, the possibility that I could offer somebody that I say, this is how you fix your life. This is how you fix your relationship to the world. This is how you fix your relationship to society. And this is how you fix your society itself, because they don't have these kinds of answers.
I don't know what these answers would look like. I'm willing to look for them. I'm willing to look for them with others, but I'm not convinced that there is an answer.
and instead there is more place that we can get to and this place comes from attempt to develop integrity and to be truthful and i agree with john that truth is crucial because truth is instrumental to good regulation it's even reflected in cybernetics in the good regulator theorem you cannot regulate reality when you're not truthful about it
So the attempt to bend your worldview, to make it more desirable, to deny the things that don't fit into the world that you prefer as the just one and so on, is not going to lead to a better world. It's going to lead to a world that is worse. And so you need, when you want to model the world, do this in a space that is independent of what you want to be true. So there need to be two parts of us. One that is modeling the world, this detachment.
It's not important who is looking at the world and why.
and another one where you make your personal bets and where you construct your aesthetics based on what you think is true. And this separation is something that is not a consensus in the disciplines that think about what the world should be looking like. So, for instance, there are very few sociologists that look at the world with detachment. They largely do this from a very local perspective that is congruent with what their friends think and that is basically characterized by the present ideology.
And I don't think that you can be ideological and truthful at the same time, where the analogy commits you to seeing the certain way of the things that are happening in the world, regardless of the facts that you are observing. And it makes you inclined to pick certain facts over others to support this particular kind of aesthetic. And for me, the aesthetic is something that needs to be developed independently of the reasoning about what is the case.
Most people that think normatively prefer to be part of the hivemind before they are truthful, autonomously. I have difficulty with the general notion of normativity. My own thinking is, when I do philosophy, primarily not normative. I'm thinking about everything that could be the case. I'm not thinking about what should be the case. Every should is an if-then.
There's a lot I have been in agreement with about what you said there about the meaning crisis. I guess part of what... I don't know if I'm a spiritual teacher or not, but nevertheless, perhaps what I would say is I think you were proposing a lot of what goes into the notion of wisdom.
a concern for the truth, the ability to detach from an egocentric perspective, pursuing integrity, et cetera. And I think it's one of the things we should do is consider increasing the wisdom of people. I think that's a viable project. And in conjunction with that, I think we should do what
what has typically happened when civilizations have collapsed, the Bronze Age collapse or perhaps the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. You had the building of new communities and communities of communities that made possible new ways of life for people and were able to take, salvage what the
Previous Civilization had done and exacted into the next civilization. A prototypical example of this is being somebody like Augustine. The barbarians are literally at the gate and he is shepherding sort of the Greco-Roman heritage into Christianity and he's modifying it. He's coming up with a new way of being. The autobiographical self comes into kind of awareness.
There's a new way of being a person, a new way of being a community, a new way of being in relationship to the world. I'm not saying he did this single-handedly, I'm just using it as a case, and he helps to build the possibilities of the next civilization. Now, I'm not arrogant, I hope I'm not so arrogant to think, and I know I'm Augustine and I know what it is that's going to be turned up. I think we should be getting a lot of people trying to build these models, these ways, because
Typically, if you have that kind of a translation process already in place, you get to the next civilization with much less suffering. I'm not convinced that we can, like you, that we can save this, what we have. But I guess I want to find out what is the best way individually and collectively of collecting the candles from what we have made
so that we can carry them into and make it possible for our children and so this is for me a way of trying to get back to a generational relationship like you were talking about where it's not just me here now in distraction or despair but trying to ask like and I don't mean this technologically or sociologically or politically trying to ask look for where are people trying to build
what looked like viable possible new ways for being in a civilization. And we know that this has been done in the past. And this isn't an algorithm. It can't be. But we can look at those historical figures. We can look at many of those historical examples and try and glean sort of the best lessons possible. That's what I'm proposing. I'm definitely not founding a religion or anything like that. I'm not the right person for the job. I don't want the job. And
So if that means I see myself as a spiritual practitioner, so be it. I'm fine with that, but I just wanted to clarify what I'm proposing. I'm proposing something that is possible. At least we have, I think, relevantly similar cases from history of where this has worked. You can see it, like I say, too. I've looked at carefully the axial revolution and also
I have a question for both of you. We'll start with Joscha. You mentioned that you have this relationship with your ideas, which is that you don't devote yourself to them. They're tentative. And I'm curious, in the past two years, what's an idea that you used to believe most that you no longer believe? And then what led you to that decision? That's for both of you, but we'll start with Joscha.
I'm glad he has to go first. So let's say in the most recent past two years. It usually doesn't feel like a big revolution. It's more a gradual progression or sometimes a new vista opens up. And there are a few thoughts that now are interesting to me. That is, for instance, how can the system discover itself in the world?
that I see more central than before. There are a few notions that I take to be possible that I didn't explore before. So something that I'm exploring right now is, for instance, the idea of memory not still being stored in synaptic weights only, but being stored in the soma of neurons in the form of RNA.
And this leads to a radical change in the way in which I think about the formation of memory and the execution of functions in the brain. And it's not normative in the sense that I now believe that we should be doing differently, but it changes the way in which I think about neural computation and leads me to envisioning new experiments that need to be done to figure out whether this is the case.
And this is an example of where my perspective has shifted. Or another one is the role of consciousness. So for instance, I used to think that consciousness might be a side effect of the way in which cognition works in human brains. And that other systems that process information in the service of agency are not necessarily conscious. And while I still consider that to be possible,
I think it's also conceivable that consciousness at some shape or form is crucial to make sense of the world. Basically, perception is following gradients and it's converging to a certain state. And if you just follow a gradient, you don't even need to have memory of where you're coming from. But certain kinds of reality interpretation require construction.
And construction cannot follow a gradient. Construction needs to make experiments and remember which experiments worked and why, and then recall this and use the knowledge of that. So it needs to make index memories of the operations that it performed. And it also requires some kind of central organization to construct. You need to develop a central plan and then act on that central plan. So you have some kind of top down localized imposition of a low dimensional function on the entirety of perception.
And it could be that this coincides to a very large degree with the functionality of attentional consciousness and basically consciousness in the role of a government. And the government is an agent that is imposing an offset on the payout metrics of individual participants in the system to make the national equilibrium compatible with the common good. So it's basically overcoming local incentives in the system to follow a larger plan.
So this government itself is not creating the incentives. The incentives are created by game theory, physics and an underlying dynamics of the system that is facilitating, for instance, society or that is facilitating the function of the brain. You will still have to look for foot and social interaction in all these things.
Consciousness is channeling the motivation that we have. It's not creating it. It's creating a model of where we are. This is what we experience as reality and experience a model of what we should be doing. These are our purposes. But the emotive power in these purposes comes from our underlying motivation that is outside of consciousness, that is older than consciousness itself. On the other hand, we can see that basically all the mammals are conscious.
And there's also something that I was not that acutely aware of before I started looking. But it seems to be that apparent in the interaction between animals and also the animals and humans that there is a mutual awareness of the awareness of the other. So these are things that my
Thinking has changed in the last few years and in part gradually, in part more radically. The most radical one is RNA based memory transfer, the possibility of that and the implications for that, which is just a very recent idea that I have. I don't know how long I'll hold on to this and what will come of this, but it's something that doesn't change my normative thinking in a fundamental way. And often it's these small changes to details of your technical worldview that can have a big change in your trajectory. John?
It was very cool, the consciousness as a government. I like that idea. It resonates with some of the stuff I've been thinking about. So maybe we could talk about that at some point in the future. So for me, I'm like Yosha. I mean, I often I'm aware of these things only retrospectively, not prospectively or introspectively. So I guess retrospectively, I'm noticing that I'm really
I'm focusing on this issue that we bumped up against a couple of times, which is normativity. And for a longest long time, I was very much like sort of like the problem that Habermas talks about. I saw these domains, the true, the good and the beautiful as separate from each other and autonomous. And, and then there was a hard fact value distinction, things like that. And I'm now
I'm now really seriously questioning that. I'm seeing more and more good arguments for the interpenetration of fact and value, and more and more arguments for the interpenetration, mutual affordance of truth, goodness, and beauty. And that's opening up other issues about the interconnection of affect and cognition
Um, and that, and like Yoshi, that leads into more sort of technical things. I think there's ways of integrating processes of relevance realization with predictive processing models. And I just reviewed a paper, um, it's for frontiers. I hope it gets published. I recommended to get published where people are exploring this convergence now in a really powerful way. Uh, one of my former students, um, Mark Miller does excellent work around this. And so considering a lot of this stuff,
much more deeply. So there's the downstream stuff about ways in which particular theories could be integrated together. And the upstream stuff is maybe the the the enlightenment, I mean, like the European enlightenment as a period of time, the enlightenment idea of the autonomy of the normativities is something we should go back
to questioning. A lot of the machinery behind, for example, the is-ought distinction, the fact-value distinction has actually been undermined by a lot of arguments. CaseFear has made a good case of that and others. So I'm not sure where I am on that. I'm reading some very good books by D.C. Schindler about that, but I'm really trying to get clearer about the relationship
between the true, the good and the beautiful to give the classical name on it. And then what that means about, well, being wise, how we best live our lives, because talking about how we best live our lives is a normative judgment. And how do all those three, if they aren't, I mean, part of the meaning crisis is also the fragmentation of these normativities. And we put them into weird competitions with each other. That was part of Habermas's argument.
And if it's possible that we are moving beyond that model of the modularity of the normativities, but rather there, I'm not saying their identity, by the way, but their interpenetration and mutual affordance, inter affordance, that I think has important implications for how people go about judging what it is to lead the best kind of life. So that's where my thinking, I wasn't in that position. I wasn't tackling those issues. I wasn't
Reflecting on them. I wasn't reading about them three or four years ago. So that's a Significant change for me. I had I had a whole set of presuppositions And and just don't make this heroic I didn't sort of like oh bother that by reading people like those presuppositions have been slowly archaeologically excavated and I've come to be questioning them in a way that I had not foreseen Hear that sound
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Okay, so this question comes from
Donald Hoffman, he wants to know, is space time an aspect of fundamental reality? And also, can there be a theory of everything? So you can tackle whichever one you want. And we'll start as usual with Joscha. No, it's not. The obvious giveaway is that the collapse of the waveform marks a point in your past
Beyond which you cannot obtain a model of events happening in time and space in a pinpointed fashion. That is one of the answers. Another one is that the traditional notion of time and space requires a temporal and spatial continuum. And the temporal and spatial continuum would require that you have basically an infinite granularity of things that are happening.
which if you turn this into a constructive language means that you would have to process infinite amounts of information in a finite number of steps. And this leads in contradictions in the definition of language, which means we cannot properly define these terms without running into contradictions. It's also not necessary to do this. So we can create
constructs that allow us to model the function of the universe to a very low level without going to continuity. So I don't think that space-time itself exists, but it is an apparent thing that happens at a certain level of core screening. And there are properties of space-time, which means the regularity and flatness and so on.
that
There is a reason why the universe around us looks as if it was happening in a nearly continuous space and with a nearly continuous time. John? So I guess Donald's question, I guess I would want to talk to him about fundamental ontology. Do I think that time and space are the ultimate reality?
No, I don't think so. I think I heard Yoshua saying something similar to that. That doesn't, by the way, mean that I think they're an illusion, and I don't think Yoshua was saying that either. I think we have to be very careful about when we're talking about these kinds of levels, because our
It's not the case, and this is going to go towards my answer the second thing, it's not the case that we can find all the explanations we want at any particular level. And there's lots of arguments for this, but I don't think there's one level from which all the explanations can be generated. And so in that sense, if what you mean by a theory of everything is a theory in which all explanations are reduced,
to, I don't know, quantum mechanic explanations. And even if those are explanations, it's questionable. I don't see that as a viable project. So do I think time and space are ultimate reality? No, I don't think that means they're an illusion. And I think we should talk about there being something like a levels of reality.
I think that things not only emerge out of the quantum base, they're also constrained by, you know, law-like features of reality, which aren't properly talked about as being in time and space. So, like, I don't know what it would mean to say, like, that two plus two equals four, is that temporal, spatial, that makes no sense.
Even something like E equals MC squared, it doesn't make sense to talk about it being here or there or starting then or there. And of course, there's lots of other entities like this. So we have emergence up out of something like Yoshua was talking about a non-temporal spatial probability realm. And we also have higher order constraints that also don't seem to be spatial temporal.
And I think of time and space as caught between that emergence and their emanation. I think part of what we're doing when we're playing with quantum mechanics and relativistic stuff and trying to reconcile them, this is not a perfect mapping, but we're trying to get clear about how those levels are appropriately real together. And so that would be my answer to both questions.
I don't think they're ultimately real. I don't think that says they're an illusion. And I don't think there is a theory of everything, because I don't think if by theory of everything, you mean, I'm going to pick one level, and that's the level at which I will be able to explain everything. I mean, Yoshi, for example, and he's perfectly legitimate for him doing this is not a criticism. He picks a computational level, right? And, right, and that's the level from which he works. But that doesn't mean that
Like, he thinks, I don't think he should respond to this criticism, which I take to be a pseudo criticism. Oh, but the computational is ultimately just, right, thermodynamic or something like that.
Thermodynamics is a way to talk about computation. It's the other way around. So in some sense, there, you know, has a class parent sphere, maybe it's a famous book that he has written in which he describes somewhat metaphorically, a world in which people do science and philosophy by playing a certain game with glass beads.
Yes, this game is never completely explained how it works, right? Yeah. So you are free to project whatever you want. And so you can imagine it as something like an extremely complicated avacus in which you are shifting these glass beads around according to very intricate rules. And it allows you to to reason about the world in some kind of automatic fashion.
And you're playing it against each other, but you are playing it according to rules. And the individual that is playing it is not crucial for this game at all. It's the rules of the game itself. And so I think what happened with this computation is that we discovered a glass-palin spiel and we discovered the equivalence of all glass-palin spiels that can possibly be constructed. And whenever we found something new to express ideas, we also discovered for this new thing to express ideas,
It's a good book. I love Hermann Hesse. I recommend the book.
Yeah, I guess I tend to be a little bit more pragmatic in the philosophical sense about scientific explanations, and that they're always bound to my interests, my concerns, the concerns of my group. And again, you've said things that are not inconsistent with that. So, well, I don't know if there's anything more to say. I mean, that could launch us into another long discussion, perhaps.
But I think I've tried to answer the question. I don't think they're ultimately real. I think they are intermediate, literally real, right? In some ways, as I've tried to say, that doesn't mean they're an illusion. And I'm suspicious of grand reductive explanations, maybe more suspicious than Yoshua, because I've watched them fail in the history of science and the history of philosophy.
I think more, and it's unclear whether or not what Yoshi is proposing does a reduction or does what I'm now going to talk about. What I see now is kind of reciprocal reconstruction between these various levels of discourse. I see the AI people changing the minds of the neuroscientists and vice versa.
and the AI people changing the minds of the psychologists and vice versa. It's not that any one person claims to have this. And I don't know if the glass bead game would be a game of reduction to itself or a game in which we can really facilitate the most optimal kind of reciprocal reconstruction between our various ontologies and strategies of measuring and explaining the world. So that's how I would answer that.
Sadface has a question. Can we get a discussion on their perspectives on the Chinese room thought experiment? So should I go first this time? Sure. So the Chinese room, first of all, I don't think it's an argument. I think it's a demonstration of arguments already that are already prefigured in Descartes. But nevertheless, I think Searle deserves credit. I think he's right about sort of the standard system and room reply.
Sorry, the sort of system and robot reply. That's what I meant to say. I don't think he has an answer to the virtual machine reply because he didn't foresee it. But I think he would respond to the virtual machine reply by invoking his argument about multiple realizability and that multiple realizability indicates that an entity and AIs presupposes multiple realizability.
AI is not, any AI is not intrinsic, does not intrinsically exist. It's only attributed because of multiple realisability. I think the response to that is I don't think the distinction between attributed and intrinsic is as clean as he makes it. For example, is the distinction itself intrinsic or attributed? That's a very deep problem. And secondly, we do think that there are things that are multiply realisable that nevertheless intrinsically exist.
combustion, erosion, evolution are clear examples. So I don't think his intuitive criteria for splitting intrinsic and attributed is sufficient. I think we have to look at other accounts of how we think things have a kind of independent existence from us. And so the degree to which things are, we think things are self organizing in some fashion guarantees them a kind of autonomous existence
that Searle needs to acknowledge. And because he invokes biology and other things, I think he is ultimately committed to what I just said. So I think the Chinese room argument doesn't settle anything in and of itself. I think you get shifted to the virtual machine reply. The virtual machining reply would get addressed by Searle's arguments about multiple realisability and things being intrinsic or attributed. And I think that's where the crux of the argument is.
And I think we don't always think that things that are multiply realizable are necessarily attributed. And I gave you some instances. And I think that's where the argument bottoms out. And that would be my reply to the Chinese argument. It seems to me that there are things that are multiply realizable, but we nevertheless take to be intrinsic, that they exist intrinsically, not just by our attribute. Money
only exists by attribution. We all agree it exists and exists, and if we stop agreeing, it doesn't exist. I don't think combustion, erosion, or revolution, which are multiply realizable, exist in that way. And so I think his clean dichotomy breaks down. And so that would be my answer. I think it's important work. I teach this, I teach Searle, I teach the Chinese room argument, but I teach this whole series of arguments
and it gets down to some very fundamental issues that Searle's argument and his intuitions about how you distinguish the intrinsic from the attributed, that's not well argued. And he doesn't, for example, deal with the cases I just proposed to you of things that are clearly multiply realizable and intrinsically exist. So his idea that if it's multiply realizable, it must be attributed seems to be falsifiable.
The multiple realisability is a stand-in for something deeper. It has to do with the fact that causal structure can be insulated from the substrate. And to insulate causal structure from the substrate means that you now have a causal description that happens independently of the underlying physics. For instance, the stock market could work in different universes.
The stock market in some sense is an independent causal structure and as soon as you have Turing machines that can be built in many kinds of universes, you can build causal structure on top of these Turing machines that is arbitrary. You could build a computer game in other universes as long as you can build a computer in these other universes. And this computer game can have arbitrary physics like a computer game can have.
And in a sense, I think that money would also exist if you stop believing in it, as long as we have functional mechanisms that implement the response to money. So as long as you have banks implemented in software and ATMs and stock markets and Amazon is accepting money and so on and so on, right, the money would retain its functional character independent of the beliefs of people.
And so we have updated in the sense because we no longer just see money as an agreement between people, but this agreement between people has been extended into machinery that we have built in the world that works independently of the beliefs that people have. And this leads us to the question of what is software? And software is not a thing, right? Software is something else. In which sense does software exist?
The best answer that I have so far discovered is that software is a physical law. The physical law says if you for instance arrange matter in this particular way, the following thing will happen.
And this is true for software, right? So no matter where you are in the universe, in which universe you are, if you produce the following functional arrangement of things, the following thing will happen. This is what software is about. So the programmer, in some sense, is discovering by constructing certain very peculiar circumstances, a very specific physical law. I just want to interrupt. That's really cool.
I thought when I stumbled on this insight that it was good insight that basically started to make sense, right? Because it's an apparent pattern in the interaction of many parts.
That's very good. I like that. That's very good. That's very good. So this also means because I think that mental states are best understood as software states, that the ontological status of our mental states is different from the ontological states of the one that we attribute to physical things. So this has to do with, for instance, the notion of identity of a mental state.
That is similar to the identity of a physical law, which means it's not this point-wise identity. It's a functional identity. And now let's go back to the original Chinese room argument is very simplistic in the sense like it's a children's story myth.
that Searle himself doesn't believe in. And it's an argument that is by Searle when he repeats it today made in bad faith. Searle is affiliated with this, his actual contributions to philosophy have been largely an extension of Austen's speech act theory that are boring and wouldn't give rise to fame. But the Chinese womb is somebody that everybody understands because it interfaces with certain intuitions and it's an intuition pump.
And if you disassemble these intuitions and try to make them more distinct and more clear, then many of them fall apart. And Searle is aware, because he's not stupid, he's a very smart individual, of many of the ways in which they fall apart. But he is still repeating the original Chinese Wum argument, because it's his brand.
So it's not because he believes in it. And if you actually read this work, he is aware of many of the counter arguments and he knows that he needs to go into a few levels of complications to have an interesting argument, to have an interesting case that he's making. So the superficial level of the Chinese room argument is maybe not that interesting. A slight extension that is more interesting is the Chinese brain argument. That's also aware of. And the Chinese brain argument suggests that
Instead of having this library with books in it, in which you execute the algorithm, we use a different implementation of that whole thing. And instead, what we do is we take a mechanization of the neuron itself. So if we accept that what the brain is doing is facilitated by the interaction of neurons, the neuron has to follow certain rules in order to make that happen.
And maybe we can spell out these rules in our thought experiment and then we assign a Chinese person to a neuron. And maybe we need a few more. Maybe we need 86 billion Chinese people instead of 1.4, but it's a thought experiment, so not a problem at all. And now instead of neurons, we have Chinese which follow these rules. Or we could use machines instead of the Chinese that are following these rules.
And so I think that this matching between a neuron and a Chinese person is not completely absurd on the face of it. Of course, it would be much larger and we blow it up. And now Sir would say, of course, the Chinese brain doesn't have the necessary and sufficient conditions to produce a conscious mind and then access to meaning. So it doesn't change anything, whether the Chinese room or the Chinese brain is performing these operations.
The Chinese brain is still not able to speak Chinese, because the individual identities of the Chinese people and their knowledge does not interfere in any way with their emulation of the functionality of individual neurons. So now if we have established this case, we would say the Chinese brain is not conscious, but your brain is conscious.
Let's see where is the boundary between those two systems. So let's take your brain blow it up until a person and a new one have roughly the same size to change the time. So it doesn't matter how much the Chinese need to talk to each other to make the new world functionality happening and send messages back and forth. So let's keep this an identity. And now we take basically take your neurons and so accepts that neurons are facilitating mental activity. He is not
So now let's replace step by step the neurons by some other machinery, for instance, Chinese people or machines that have neural-like functionality. And so at some point says this loses the ability to be conscious. So the consciousness is drowning out of the system by this replacement process. And what this means is that Searle
has a strong anti-functionalist position. He basically says that the function of the individual parts is not producing the essential behavior. There is somehow an essence. He's an essentialist. And I don't know how to get essentialism to work, because nobody has ever seen an essence. We can talk about an essence, but it's epiphenomenal. And the problem with epiphenomenalism is the following. Epiphenomenalism is, if you go back to our dualism from the beginning of our conversation today,
It's the idea that there is maybe a read access from the mind, where the mind is reading physics, but no write access from the mind into physics. So it's not violating the causal closure of physics. But there is a problem with epiphenomenalism. And that is the fundamental experience that you don't think you can explain in the physical mechanism is not driving anything of what you are saying, including your utterances of beliefs.
So when an epiphenomenalist says, but I feel and this cannot be explained by physics, this is caused by physics, right? Because the epiphenomenalist has to move their mouse or move their fingers to express the statement. And all these movements are caused by an entirely mechanical process.
The true feeling which happens next to the physical mechanical part of their mind, the philosophical zombie and so on, is not driving any behavior. So basically there would be this locked in epiphenomenalism that would helplessly watching their body make statements in favor or against epiphenomenalism, but there would be no causal relationship between the epiphenomenalism. So no epiphenomenalist is an epiphenomenalist because they have phenomenal experience that cannot be explained by physics. That is the issue here.
and so if sir goes down that path he goes down to a very inconvenient place that i don't know how to resolve okay john i know that you have to get going so how about i read the last question if it would take too long for you to reply then send me an email and then i'll read it when i'm re-editing this podcast sure okay sure so the last question comes from xanthias he says
Or she says, these models of consciousness seem to focus on explaining the production of intelligence or a simulation, but it isn't necessarily clear to me why a simulation should be able to perceive slash experience itself. If we think of metaconsciousness as a combination of intelligence and consciousness, the model seems to focus mainly on the rise of intelligence in metaconsciousness. How do you explain the ability to perceive slash experience the simulation?
It's important to ask that question, but it's important to not ask that question the wrong way. You can always ask what it is like, and this is like Moore's thing about the good. I can ask that for any proposal.
You can even ask that, well, you know, what it's like is to have qualia. Well, what's it like to have qualia? Do I have qualia of my quality? Like you have to you like there and this is the difficulty you have to come to a place where you're saying that's what it is like to be what it is like. And we didn't get into it too much. But like I said at the very beginning, that primary sense of relevance and I think is a big piece
of what it's likeness. It's why things stand out and are salient and are backgrounded. It's why things are aspectualized for us, to use one of Searle's notions. And many people are converging on the idea that the function of consciousness is this kind of higher order relevance realization. And that's why it overlaps with working memory and attentional machinery. So what it's like
If that's right, if what it's like is this ability to do salience landscaping, to have this dynamic texture of how things are relevant to you. If that's a big part of what it's like, and I think it is, by the way, because all of those in the pure consciousness event, all of those other things that are so beloved, all the adjectival qualias and all the other things, they go away and consciousness doesn't. So those things can't be necessary conditions for consciousness.
If that's a significant part of what it's like, then being intelligent is also that. Being intelligent is this capacity to zero in on relevant information, exclude relevant information. That's why you get high correlations between measures of general intelligence and measures of working memory. But of course, there's deep anatomical relations between the machinery of working memory and attention
and fluid intelligence and consciousness. So I think the question is now being to a place where I want to say, no, no, no. And by the way, notice how you run on that. You generally attribute consciousness where you attribute high orders of intelligence. You track them together. Like Yasha, I go further. I don't even eat mammals.
because of that conclusion about mammals. And so for me, right, there has to be a level at which you accept an identity statement. Because like I said, you can always play the game no matter what. That is what if I say X is what it is like, you can then then you can just do all but what it is it like to write X, you have to come to a place where you accept the identity claim.
And I'm proposing to you that if you look into the guts of intelligence, at least general intelligence, fluid intelligence, and then you look into the guts of consciousness, and where do we need consciousness? We seem to need consciousness for situations that are novel, that are complex, that are ill-defined, and situations that don't have those demands, we can make automatic, unconscious. That's a good point made by Bournset.
I don't think the questions about intelligence and consciousness are ultimately separable questions. And I think there's good reasons for that. I've just given you some. And therefore, I think at some level, and maybe Yoshua will like this, when a system is sufficiently intelligent, it's going to be conscious. That's what I would argue.
for the reasons I've just given and asking me but what is it like to be intelligent or what's it like to be like notice you don't ask the question of what what is it like to be conscious in the sense of what's behind it right you have to come to a level at which you say no that's what that's this this is what it is liking is this is the function it's performing this is the kind of process it is
If not, if you don't put some bound on where that identity is possible, then you just get an infinite regret aggressive this question, because no matter what I pause it for you, you can step back and say, but what is it like to x? And then I'll say, well, what's it like to x is to y. And you'll say, but what is it like to y? This is like the four year old ask you why all the time, right? You have to come to a place. And what I can't give you is I can't give you a phenomenological experience of that.
Because you're trying to ask how phenomenological experience is itself possible. What I can give you are these plausible arguments about overlapping functionality, etc. That's how I would answer that question. Okay, let me try. So there is an issue, for instance, with free will. Free will is an intermediate representation, I think.
Free will is what decision making under uncertainty looks like from your own perspective between discovering the first person perspective and deconstructing it again. And once you have deconstructed your first person perspective, you basically realize that there is a particular procedure that you are following when you are making your decisions. And when you observe yourself following that procedure, you will not have an experience of free will. It's just we rarely get to the point in our short lives where we fully deconstruct this.
And I just give this example to argue for the possibility. And I'm not sure there's no certainty there that consciousness might be an intermediate representation. It's best the simplification of the state of affairs in which we are in before we automate all the necessary behaviors that an intelligent system might want to exhibit in when it's being confronted with the world in which we are in.
The reason why we experience things is not because physical systems would be capable of doing so. It's quite the opposite. Neurons cannot experience what it would be like to be a person that is confronted with a complex world and that changes its attitudes in response to what's happening to it in this complex world. But for the organization of the neurons that is controlling the behavior of the organism, it would be very useful to have this
a knowledge of what it would be like to be a person that is changing its attitudes in response to what's happening to it. So what the neurons are doing is they implement a model of what that would be like, a simulation of what that would be like. In the same way as the neurons create a simulation of a Euclidean universe with objects that bump into each other and have causal interaction, the neurons create the model of agents that care about
future states and how they play out and make decisions about this. And one of these agents is going to be a model of the organism itself and the behavior that motivates the organism. And the reason why we experience things is not because we are in the brain. It's because we are in that model. We are in that simulation. We are in that dream that is woven by the brain to explain its own behavior. We experience things for the same reason that a character in a novel experiences things. It's because it's written in the story.
And the story that we experience of course is not a linear narrative made up of words. It's a more complicated world. It's a causal structure that contains the necessary properties to simulate physics and personality and agency and so on. And we find ourselves in that dream. So our experience of the world is virtual. It's a result of the capacity of neurons to dream and to create dreams.
There was a question that came from Anil Seth, Professor Anil Seth, and there's a podcast of Anil Seth on this channel if you'd like to check it out, on consciousness. Professor Anil Seth asks,
Yoshua responded to me via email and said, Because of this, I think it's likely that intelligent, autonomous sense-making agents with similar complexity as ours
may be considered conscious in ways that are comparable to ours, even if they run on a silicone substrate. There is an important caveat. Our computers provide some functionality which is hard to achieve in the brain.
Thank you both for coming. The audience thanks you.
There were, I think, 500 people at its peak, and right now it's around 430 or so. So it hovered from 400 to 500. Thank you all. Thank you, Josje. Thank you, John. Thank you, Kurt. Thank you for setting this up. It was a very pleasant conversation. I was surprised that we don't seem to have that many disagreements. Well, maybe it's the level we were talking at. I sort of wanted to talk at a very fundamental ontological level.
I wanted to understand you much more than just sort of simply debate you. Likewise. And I think that we were both bound by the same rules of the glass pen and spiel in a way. Yes. Yes. Yes. Very good. So thank you very much. It's a great pleasure meeting you. I enjoyed this conversation. Thank you very much. Take care of both of you. And Yoshi, you'll send me your audio. I will.
Phrasel14 wants to know what I consider Thomas Metzinger on the program. I don't know who that is.
So I will look into that. I'll make a note. Yes, I should let you know that there's a sponsor of today's episode and it's a new one. It's a small podcast by the name of the Anagogy podcast. I'll type it here. And it's run by someone named Tiago who reached out to me and he touches on similar themes. So if you look at, so that person is who is responsible for bringing this talk together. Thank you, Tiago. Okay. I guess I should get going. If there are any quick questions for me,
Then I'll answer right now. If not, then I will say goodbye to you all and get something to eat. Okay, so is there any chance of having Nima Arkani Hamed on the channel? I've reached out to Nima several times. It turns out that my brother went to university with him studying physics at the same time. So I'll see if I can use that connection, though they parted ways after graduate school.
Lisa Feldman Barrett. Yes, she's on the list, though I need to look into her work. Edvin wants to know if I expected to have more disagreements. I thought I was surprised at what Yoshi said where he said, well, we agree more than we disagree. I thought it was mainly filled with disagreements or more about clarifications than disagreements, which can be their own disagreement. Julio wants to know would I get a traditional Advaita monk? The answer is yes. And if you take a look at this video that I have about the 2022 plans, you'll see that I do
have a great interest in speaking with people from the more Eastern ends of the philosophical spectrum. So yes, the answer is yes, and that'll be toward the latter half of the year. Now, the reason for why it's so far away is because it my background is in math and physics. So let's say I'm supposed to let's say I'm going to be interviewing someone for their theory of everything, like let's say Garrett Lisey, it'll be much easier for me to understand his theory than it would be for me to understand someone who's an Advaita monk.
It would take much more time, because I'd like to implement some meditative strategies. That is, I'd like to meditate, some meditation practice, in order to experientially understand what they're saying. And it's not... it's not trivial to me. And I don't take it lightly.
I don't know if he's a materialist. I think it would be closer to materialism. One of my goals with this Theolocution was going to be that... Luckily, I didn't have to interject much. I thought that what was going to happen was they were going to be difficult to follow because much of what they say, and this is evidenced in the comment section of any of their videos, people can't follow. People have a difficult time understanding because it's so steeped in cognitive scientific jargon.
terminology that's unfamiliar to most. And then on top of that with Yoshabok, there's computer science analogies. And then on top of that, there's Yoshabok's idiolect, like his personal language, where the analogies between computer science and reality are made in a manner that is unique to him. And he's so familiar with his own model that I don't think him nor John Vervecky are aware
when they're speaking above or below someone. And I was thinking that I would have to step in and slow down and break down sentences. However, that didn't need to happen at all. Okay. Well, thank you, everyone. Thank you and have a great rest of your day.
The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you.
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"text": " This is just an editor's note I just finished editing and had to add this. There's a fascinating discussion on ontology and how it's related to epistemology, which occurs around the one hour mark. If you're interested in philosophy and consciousness, which you most likely are, given that you're on this channel, then make sure you at least watch that part, as ordinarily these two divisions aren't brought together, and it was great to hear about their interrelatedness."
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"text": " finds us here today. Click on the timestamps in the description if you'd like to skip this intro. My name's Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a Torontonian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics dedicated to the explication of the variegated terrain of theories of everything from a theoretical physics perspective, but as well as delineating the possible connection consciousness has to the fundamental laws of nature"
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"text": " if those laws exist at all and are knowable to us. If you enjoy witnessing and engaging with others on the topic of psychology, consciousness, physics, etc., then check the description for a link to the Theories of Everything Discord as well as subreddit. There's also a link to the Patreon, that is patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal if you'd like to contribute as the patrons and the sponsors are the only reasons that I can do podcasts with this level of quality and depth"
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"text": " As now, this is what I do full-time thanks to their support. With regard to sponsors, there are three. The first is joining us for the first time, and that's the Anagogy podcast. That is A-N-A-G-O-G podcast. It's a podcast dedicated to philosophy, psychology, and consciousness. Thus, if you like the conversations,"
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"text": " I did watch Yoshua's three videos you sent to me and there's stuff in there that I'd like to sort of pick up on. Great, great. Okay, well, I will get started on going live. Last time there was this thing you always forgot to do and then you remembered to do it."
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"text": " Entangling with the Weltgeist. So strange. Sometimes when this happens, it's because I'm not awake yet and it's just a lucid dream. So you're supposed to start flying, right? Do you have a method to keep yourself lucid dreaming?"
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"text": " Welcome. So, Yoshua, why don't we start with what you find most interesting about John's work and then John, you'll talk about what you find interesting about Yoshua's and then we'll get into definitions. Okay."
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"text": " I find it fascinating that John is a broad thinker that connects many different angles on cognitive science and connects this also directly with the way in which he relates to the world. So for him, science is not just the application of methods in a certain circumscribed area, but it relates to the way in which he connects to others and to himself and to his existence in the world in a way. And this means that in some sense, you can count hold him accountable for his ideas, because they"
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"text": " So I like that Yoshua is also a big picture cognitive scientist and I enjoy the fact that he is willing to tackle philosophically challenging topics in his cognitive science and for me I think that's much more of that is needed in cognitive science today."
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"text": " Now, he has a very sophisticated model of consciousness and selfhood, and there are many points of it that I would like to talk to him about. There's some things that are interesting. He talked about, just to connect to something he said about my work, in his Mind Matters talk, he talked about the feeling of what it's like as a primary sense of relevance, and that, of course, tweaked my ears."
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"text": " And then he put quite a bit of importance on attention, as I do, and trying to understand cognition. And also within his discussion of the self, he incorporates aspects of narrative. And that's something I'd very much like to talk about with him. So there's a lot that I find very interesting in his work. But like I said, I commend him for the kind of big picture cognitive science"
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"text": " I am not as familiar as I would need to be to point out all the disagreements. Also, I don't know how much John's views have changed over the last few years and decades. Typically, when you are thinking about these questions, there is always a lot of movement in your own mind, I think, and you update on ideas. And so I'm not quite sure what the current disagreements would be, but I'm sure that there are many"
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"text": " Just because of the multitude of things that have to be discussed and the angles that you can take on them. Let's talk about what the definition of consciousness is and sentience and mind. So those are consciousness, sentience and mind. Joscha, why don't you start with your definitions of them, then we'll hear John's, because obviously we have to employ the definitions. Yeah, sure. The definitions, I don't think that are necessarily contentious points. We just need to"
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"text": " anchor them somehow. So we agree on what things we are talking about and what we're not talking about, I think. So to me, mind is basically the vehicle in which everything plays out. It's basically the mechanism and substrate that is emergent over mostly the activity of the brain, I think. And inside of the mind there happens a model of the world and the self and the mind also facilitates motivation at some level."
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"text": " And then the next term that we wanted to talk about is sentience. Sentience is the ability of a system to relate to its environment and to discover itself in the environment and establish this kind of relationship. And in this way, learn what it's doing. And I don't think that sentience is the same thing as consciousness, because for instance, it doesn't have to happen in real time. That doesn't need to be an immediate reflexive awareness of this process itself that is becoming aware."
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"text": " In the sense, I think, for instance, that corporations are usually not conscious, I think, but many corporations are sentient in the sense that they understand what a corporation is, how this corporation relates to the world and how it interacts with the world and plans for it. And of course, the sentience of the corporation is facilitated by the people that work for the corporation in this planning role. But sentience is a functional property that many intelligent systems develop. And consciousness is"
},
{
"end_time": 815.196,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 787.022,
"text": " Colloquially speaking, the feeling of what it's like as a particular phenomenology, it looks like something to the system that is conscious. And I think that functionally consciousness is largely a control model of the attention of the system. And when we say that a system is conscious, for instance, a cat or a human being, what we mean is that this system is able to act on a model of its own awareness, which means it knows"
},
{
"end_time": 839.974,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 815.538,
"text": " that it is aware of things and uses that to drive its own behavior in the moment. Is that distinct from self-consciousness, that it's aware that it's aware? Self is slightly different because you can be conscious without having a self. For instance, in dreams, you will very often notice that you are conscious, but there is no eye. And also in meditative states, you don't need to focus on the eye."
},
{
"end_time": 868.916,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 840.469,
"text": " What typically happens though in the type of consciousness that we have is that we know that something is conscious. So we are aware of the awareness, but that doesn't need to have a first person perspective and consciousness. So I would say that first person perspective and consciousness, even though in our normal daytime, vague full state are largely related, actually orthogonal, you can have them independently of each other in a way. Okay, john, so what are your definitions? Or what do you agree with disagree with?"
},
{
"end_time": 899.462,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 870.128,
"text": " Well, first of all, about the reference before the sense. Yeah, I take it to my mind to refer to, although whether or not it forms a unified entity is perhaps part of the question. But when we're referring to mine refer referring to some unity, some system by which we are intelligent and conscious. And I take intelligence to be the capacity to be a general problem solver. And"
},
{
"end_time": 927.415,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 900.418,
"text": " I'm not sure what the problem I have with this in cognitive science is the term mind is equivocal. People use it in different ways, make different identity claims, a neuroscientist perhaps saying it's brain function. The AI person may say it's a particular kind of learning algorithm. The psychologist will say it's, you know, that which generates behavior. And the point about this is it's not just a termological difference."
},
{
"end_time": 955.725,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 927.739,
"text": " They use different methods of gathering evidence, they make different kinds of arguments, they have different kinds of theoretical entities. The psychologist may talk about working memory, right? The AI person may talk about certain aspects of machine learning, of course, the neuroscientist may talk about neural networks, various neural networks in the biological sense. So I take it that what I'm trying to do as a cognitive scientist is find out if all of those different definitions of mind can"
},
{
"end_time": 985.196,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 956.152,
"text": " work together to get back to the coherent unity that we traditionally met by the word mind. So that's part of the problem. But it's part of the fun of trying to do cognitive scientists. It's often very hard to get the anthropologist, the linguist, the psychologist, the neuroscientist and the AI person to all agree, and you put them in the room. And then usually you throw in philosophers who are supposed to help get all that discourse running smoothly. And they often make things more challenging, which is makes it especially fun."
},
{
"end_time": 1015.043,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 985.538,
"text": " So I largely agree with what Yoshua said, although I want to problematize it. And specifically, it's something that cognitive science is asking the question, what is mind, is not a clear question anymore. And I think getting clear about what that question is, is one of the tasks of cognitive science. So sentience and awareness. And I tend to have, I tend to bind sentience to Mateson's notion of sentience"
},
{
"end_time": 1042.483,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1015.64,
"text": " which is aware, I think it might overlap with what notion means by awareness, but a sentient system is one that can in some sense size up its situation. It's aware of it, but not in just sort of the negative sense, right? It can foreground and background information, things like that. So perhaps I think a little bit of a tighter connection between sentience and perceptual awareness."
},
{
"end_time": 1061.169,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1043.729,
"text": " Consciousness is usually sort of two aspects. And of course, everything I'm saying here is fraught. People talk about two aspects of consciousness. There's one aspect that's often called access consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 1085.52,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1061.578,
"text": " This is part of what consciousness means is I can ready things. I can make things ready for reason. I can make them ready for problem solving. And I can bring aspects of my skills and my perception and my understanding together. And then there's what's called the phenomenal. Some people say phenomenological. There's a bit of confusion around that."
},
{
"end_time": 1111.357,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1086.067,
"text": " But anyways, as Yoshua said, this is the feeling of what it's like, what it's like to be me here now in this situation. It can mean that, it can mean something very primitive, like what is it like to experience green? And this is the so-called problem of qualia. And so one way people think of consciousness is the place where qualia exists. For me, there's two central questions we are asking."
},
{
"end_time": 1132.807,
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"start_time": 1111.766,
"text": " And part of what I would argue is we need to integrate them together. And one of the strengths I see of Yoshis work is I do see him attempting and I don't mean attempting as a as an insult. We're all attempting here attempting to integrate these two questions together. One is the function question, which is basically what the hell does consciousness do given that so much"
},
{
"end_time": 1144.684,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1133.456,
"text": " So much of our intelligent behavior happens unconsciously. What is consciousness for? Some people are willing to say it's not for anything. It's just an epiphenomenon. It doesn't do anything. It has no function. Yoshua doesn't say that. I'm not saying he does."
},
{
"end_time": 1173.302,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1145.026,
"text": " The other question is the nature problem. How is it that something like consciousness exists in this physical world, which amongst all these objects that don't seem to have any of these subjective properties, qualia, things like that. At least since the scientific revolution, we separated all of those out from the physical universe and we put them in this place. Now, I happen to think that you should try and answer those questions together and in an integrated fashion."
},
{
"end_time": 1199.855,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1174.497,
"text": " One of the criticisms I have of some of the central theories is they tend to answer one question while neglecting the other and vice versa. So I think that's my best. I had to say a little bit more because he went first. So I had to sort of take into what he said. But that's trying to answer any good definition of consciousness should try and answer the function and the nature questions in an integrated fashion."
},
{
"end_time": 1220.913,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1201.357,
"text": " John, you said that some people say that consciousness is where qualia exists. What do you mean? So one way, I mean, this goes back largely to Descartes and it's picked up by Locke. So Galileo made a distinction between primary qualities, right, or qualia."
},
{
"end_time": 1245.708,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1221.664,
"text": " And secondary, primary qualities are ones that are mathematically measurable in some sense, like the length of an object, its mass, things like that. And Galileo proposed that those were real. They were in the objective world. And then there are all the qualia that are not mathematically measurable, like the experience."
},
{
"end_time": 1275.879,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1246.135,
"text": " not the reflectance pattern, but the experience of greenness, the experience of sweetness, the experience of beauty, perhaps. And so for for Descartes following up on Galileo, those things did not exist in the world. They existed only in the mind. They were therefore only in the subject. They were subjective. And that's qualia. Now, the idea is there's lots of your there's lots of stuff happening in the mind unconsciously that doesn't seem to be generating any of that qualitative experience."
},
{
"end_time": 1301.305,
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"start_time": 1276.288,
"text": " It only seems to be the case, or it seems to be the case that, not only seems to be, it seems to be the case that those qualia only exist when I'm awake, alert, and aware in some fashion. And so they seem to be in consciousness. Now, that in is at best metaphorical, but that's how many people take that to be the central phenomena of consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 1319.77,
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"start_time": 1301.783,
"text": " and that the problem of consciousness is largely the problem of answering that. Other people think other aspects of consciousness are essential, like intentionality, that consciousness seems to be about things, directed at things. Yoshida, do you have any comments on any of what John said?"
},
{
"end_time": 1350.009,
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"text": " So personally, I don't think that the aboutness is so much the problem, but we can go into what we personally find puzzling about the entire affair. With respect to qualia, I think that there are two aspects that should be kept separate. One is what is the difference between these elements and features of experience and a measurement? And the other one is what makes them experiential? What is experience itself? Hear that sound?"
},
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"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
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"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way,"
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"text": " powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in."
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"text": " The first question is something that became, I think, quite apparent in early work that I participated in robotics. We taught little Sony ivory robots to play soccer. And in the course of this task, they had to watch balls moving over a field and we had to segment out the balls. And when the task was set up by the people who developed this game,"
},
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"end_time": 1492.534,
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"text": " We already made this task as easy as possible. At least we thought we made the field extremely and homogeneously green. There were some white lines on the field, but still. And the ball was very orange. And unfortunately the ball was a little bit reflecting and the field was also taking up some of these reflections. And we thought we could solve the problem basically with the lookup table where we just would match certain color values from the RGB sensors of the camera of the robot."
},
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"end_time": 1521.135,
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"start_time": 1492.807,
"text": " to whether it's ball or field and this didn't work. We found that the pixels below the ball were more orange than the pixels at the bottom of the ball were not green. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
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"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
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"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
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"text": " If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g dot com slash everything and use the code everything. So in some sense, if you just did color tables, the colors were in the area where the ball touched the field were inverted."
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"end_time": 1618.114,
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"text": " And so we needed to be more intelligent. We needed to figure out ultimately of whether pixels that we see in a certain region of the field are probably part of the ball and are probably part of the field. And depending on this context, we would have to reinterpret them. And so I noticed that a color is not just a certain wavelengths or a certain RGB value that you take from your camera sensor."
},
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"end_time": 1647.466,
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"text": " It's an interpretation that is qualitatively bound to the context in which it's being measured. So the property of redness is not just a certain RGB value. It is given in the context of a red object, the interpretation of the surface properties in a stationary way of that object. So it's a property that attaches to an object in a certain context. Redness is the property that is shared by all the red objects."
},
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"end_time": 1677.381,
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"text": " And you cannot separate redness from this in the processing if you have changing lighting and real world lighting. So there needs to be some kind of feature processing that turns a measurement into a context dependent feature that is in multiple dimensions qualitative. So I think it's a happy accident that this rhymes to qualia. It's not actually the reason, but this answers, I think to some degree, the first question. Why is"
},
{
"end_time": 1697.329,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1677.841,
"text": " The elements of the experience are different from measurements and what distinguishes them from measurements. But it doesn't answer the second question. What is it to experience? Why is this thing part of my inner reality? And this has to be explained in a different way. It has to be explained by a certain kind of architecture. And this is what some people find very passing."
},
{
"end_time": 1716.169,
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"text": " Doesn't look that puzzling to me and we can look into the details of what it looks like. But for instance, one important aspect is that we can learn to deconstruct the qualitative experience of the things that we're looking at. So when we look, for instance, at a face, what we typically see is an expression in the face."
},
{
"end_time": 1744.326,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1716.834,
"text": " It's not just a geometrical arrangement of features, but we can stare for a face for long enough until the faceness of the face disappears. And the only thing that's left is a geometrical arrangement. And we can go further and let the geometry disappear. And we just see colored blobs and flickering and so on. And in this way, we can start deconstructing the elements of our experience. And once we see how they are deconstructed, we can also get a glimpse on how they are constructed in the first place."
},
{
"end_time": 1772.432,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1745.196,
"text": " One of my students once told me, you know, there's a very weird thing. I can see faces in power plugs and vault sockets. Sorry, faces where? In vault sockets, right? If you look at a power socket in a vault, you can, people can see a face in it. I said, yeah, most people can do that, right? It's called a parallel layer. It's basically this ability to see faces and other things in patterns in our environment."
},
{
"end_time": 1788.2,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1772.91,
"text": " And so on, and she said, but you know, there are no faces in power sockets. And I told her, yeah, the dark secret is there are also no faces on people. You just project them there, right? It's there intrinsically, there's just geometry."
},
{
"end_time": 1818.882,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1788.985,
"text": " It's this thing that there is something that you look at, another one that looks at you, that looks out of their eyes and is interpreting the world in a particular way and you see that in their face. You see in their face what they feel and so on, how they relate to you. This is just a projection that your mind is making. It's not actually a visual feature. It's a high level interpretation of things like the emotional state and so on that are all mixed into your interpretation of reality."
},
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"end_time": 1843.234,
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"text": " I guess I don't have any disagreement with that, at least right now. I'm in agreement with this idea that when we're talking about perception, we're talking about doing things in terms of a context dependence, and then the sensitivity to that, the sensitivity to context and conduct"
},
{
"end_time": 1869.565,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1843.643,
"text": " context dependence I think is really, really crucial. I see that sensitivity as bound up with the capacity for interpretation. Interpretation means being able to in some way direct your attention or your awareness to some features rather than others, because you can of course take in all possible features of the object or the environment, etc."
},
{
"end_time": 1897.756,
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"start_time": 1869.804,
"text": " So I guess I see those two processes as a little bit more closely related. And I do think that part of what it's like to experience a face is to find it relevant in a particular fashion, to find it as fitted to that context and fitted to your task within that context. And I think that also, as Yoshua said, I think that goes into the perception of it. So I see, I guess, perhaps a deeper interpenetration between"
},
{
"end_time": 1923.558,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1898.729,
"text": " the perception and the interpretation. This goes around ideas like I've been talking about, about relevance realization. Now, there was an interesting movement there, and I don't know how fast we want to go ontological, where there was, you know, the face isn't really there, and it's just a projection."
},
{
"end_time": 1948.439,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1923.865,
"text": " And so I'm not quite sure what that means. Maybe Yoshi can because I take it, for example, that that would generalize to everything in my experience that I find meaningful. And like, do I want to say that the various, you know, gauges I'm using in science are just projections?"
},
{
"end_time": 1974.292,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1948.797,
"text": " Do I want to say that the other people that are debating with me are just projections? Sometimes you do. Yeah. But the problem is there's an implicit normativity of realness there that I guess I want to unpack a little bit. Because like I said, I think the point that Yoshime just generalizes to everything"
},
{
"end_time": 2000.452,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1974.77,
"text": " And then I have sort of epistemological and ontological concerns about that, because it might, I'm not saying it does, I'm saying it might sort of lead me into kind of a solipsistic skepticism, which makes the very attempt to do science itself kind of implausible. So what is it? Surely there must, surely, maybe not surely, there must be"
},
{
"end_time": 2030.896,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2001.118,
"text": " Perception that counts as observation of the environment, I take it. And why is it not just a projection? I guess is my question. Yes, so this particular point relates to the question of whether faces are part of res extensa. And you have to sort out what we mean by res extensa. The typical way in which Descartes is interpreted is that there are two"
},
{
"end_time": 2060.572,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2031.084,
"text": " substances out in physics in a way, ontologically at the level at which the universe exists. And one of these substances is stuff in space, the extended things, the objects in the world. And then we have res cogitans, which is the space of ideas in which the mind exists and somehow they interact with each other. So basically the mind exists in a different dimension of the universe and remote controls the physical body via the pineal gland or"
},
{
"end_time": 2080.23,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2060.913,
"text": " I think this is a misunderstanding that ultimately can be mapped to faulty epistemology."
},
{
"end_time": 2105.845,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2080.23,
"text": " a weird perspective on what we think is and in the way in which it is constituted. It's also reflected in the Christian interpretation of Genesis. And maybe this is not unrelated because it's part of the same cultural tradition, this interpretation of Genesis and the interpretation of Descartes. And in Genesis, we have the creation of a physical universe by a supernatural being in the common interpretation."
},
{
"end_time": 2122.005,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2105.845,
"text": " And it starts out with the creation of light and darkness which are separated from each other and then the creation of sky and ground and then the plants and the animals eventually and then they all get their name. But we do know that sky and ground are not physical entities."
},
{
"end_time": 2146.186,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2122.551,
"text": " And colors are not in physics. There are constructions that only happen in our mind. And when we look at foundational physics, we see a weird quantum graph that has very complicated properties among them, apparently the property to throw regular patterns at our systemic interface so our brain can find regularity in them. And part of these regularities that our mind is discovering in quite reliable ways is"
},
{
"end_time": 2175.623,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2146.544,
"text": " darkness and brightness and sky and ground and plants and animals and giving them all their names, which is cognitive development. So the universe that you and me are interacting with experimentally and also intersubjectively is not a physical universe. You're not talking about entities in physics and we talk about the universe to each other. We largely talk about entities in our experience. And now it turns out that this experience that our brain is constructing for us to relate to"
},
{
"end_time": 2192.176,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2176.118,
"text": " which is a core screening of the patterns that the physical universe throws at us contain two types of entities. And one group of entities is what we could call stuff in space. It's like a physics engine in a computer game. So we have"
},
{
"end_time": 2222.159,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2192.517,
"text": " three-dimensional basically Euclidean space in which we have extended objects that occupy volumes and these objects can be solid or liquid or gaseous and they displace each other and they have all these properties that we would call res extensa but this res extensa is geometric it's mechanical it doesn't want something it's just moving in a mechanical way and so when the student said that there are no faces"
},
{
"end_time": 2243.148,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2222.534,
"text": " in power sockets what she meant is that the physical thing, the res extensor thing, the geometrical thing, the face, is not really on the power plug. And I pointed to her out that the face itself is not a geometrical thing. So when you see a face, what you see is not actually a geometry. It's not part of something that you would construct with a 3D program."
},
{
"end_time": 2269.172,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2243.148,
"text": " What you have to construct is a certain part of res cogitans. It's a certain interpretation of a high level feature that is already a mental feature, that we see this intentional entity in the world expressed by its interface to the world. And so I think this way we can, John and me, probably agree on a way in which we disassemble the category or at least make the next step."
},
{
"end_time": 2290.52,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2269.616,
"text": " And so I would agree that, of course, every entity that we make out in the universe ultimately is an imposition that our mind is making. This imposition is not necessarily an arbitrary one because the universe cannot be efficiently encoded in every possible way. There are certain ways in which the encoding makes sense and others where it doesn't help you to interpret the world."
},
{
"end_time": 2315.452,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2291.305,
"text": " So the way in which we draw the boundaries between objects is not arbitrary but the boundaries are drawn by our mind. Think Verizon the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single"
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{
"end_time": 2346.681,
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"start_time": 2317.261,
"text": " Bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Ranking is based on root metric true square report dated 1H2025. Your results may vary. You must provide a post-paid consumer mobile bill dated within the past 45 days. The bill must be in the same name as the person who made the deal. Additional terms apply. Okay, so of course you're aware of the... I mean, first of all, a comment. I do think there's a deep connection between the Christian model, which is sort of a two-worlds mythology,"
},
{
"end_time": 2374.616,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2347.039,
"text": " and Descartes' dualism of mind and body. So I think that's an accurate historical observation. I talk a bit about that connection in my Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series. In fact, I often talk about Christian Cartesianism as the link between those. So I think that's a good historical observation. Of course, the deep problem with finding that division of res extensia and res cardicons"
},
{
"end_time": 2401.032,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2375.333,
"text": " to be the sort of final note on your ontology is the problem that beset Descartes, which is the problem that Spinoza immediately recognized is that there's no possible causal interaction between these domains and you get the separation of, right, reasons from causes and you get all of these kinds of problems. And so I take it that there is something fundamentally wrong with the ontology"
},
{
"end_time": 2419.121,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2401.391,
"text": " If I if."
},
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"index": 97,
"start_time": 2419.582,
"text": " If I presume that kind of dualism, then of course, I can't also pick up on your mental states, because all I get is your bodily behavior, etc. And if there is no causal relationship between your mental states and your bodily behavior, then of course, I can't pick up on other minds. And so, I mean, I know you know this, because you've mentioned it in one of the talks. I mean, that ontology is deeply problematic, because it generates these really, really"
},
{
"end_time": 2469.565,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2446.817,
"text": " I think that the solution is relatively simple. Res extensa and res cogitans both exist in the mind. They are just different domains in which you make sense of the world. One is this mechanical level of geometric perception and the other one is hidden states."
},
{
"end_time": 2487.398,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2469.94,
"text": " of intentional systems that animate part of this world. And when a meditator believes that res cognitance is separate from res extensa and res extensa is out there in the physical world and experiencing the physical world,"
},
{
"end_time": 2502.722,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2487.398,
"text": " And they managed to go to the state of reality construction where this boundary between self and world is obliterated and they suddenly notice this unity of the system and oh my god everything is consciousness. They became panpsychists."
},
{
"end_time": 2524.36,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2503.166,
"text": " Right. It's a fundamental confusion that results from this error in the ontology. And when I was young, I stumbled on the same issue as you just mentioned. If you are a dualist, how does this interface between the causally closed physical universe and the mind work?"
},
{
"end_time": 2547.278,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2524.991,
"text": " There are some solutions to this, like for instance, occasionalism, which means they just happen to be synchronous, but there is no direct connection between them. And ultimately, this is a form of epiphenomenalism. So it would not be a violation of the causal closure of physics if your ontologically separate mind would be reading it, but wouldn't have right access, right? So you could have"
},
{
"end_time": 2575.009,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2547.688,
"text": " this physical universe mechanically clicking by itself, but you could have the mind look at it from the outside. But as soon as the mind writes, you should be able sometimes to see certain violations of the conservation of energy or the conservation of information in the lab. And apparently you don't. And Popper and Eccles hope that it's possible to basically hide this in the randomness of quantum events, but still would need to be a systematic violation. So I don't think that this would work."
},
{
"end_time": 2582.176,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2575.009,
"text": " And the attempts to solve this problem, I think that they don't work out."
},
{
"end_time": 2609.923,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2582.705,
"text": " So I thought there is two possibilities. One is either we are in an entirely mechanical universe and there is no conspiracy going on. Of course, it's also possible that the mechanical universe is in some kind of simulation, right? So we could be running in some kind of nerds computer that is stationed in the next level universe. And of course, this nerd could also interact with our world. And in a sense, dualism in some sense might be possible. It could also be that our minds indeed run on a separate machine."
},
{
"end_time": 2621.92,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2609.923,
"text": " and interact with it. But in this sense every supernatural thing would have to have a natural cause at some level in one of the parent universes. Just unfortunately this intermediate level could be a symbolic one."
},
{
"end_time": 2650.845,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2622.637,
"text": " And the symbolic universe is a magical universe, right? If you have a magical interaction that, for instance, in Minecraft, you can open up a shell and you can say times a day in the sun rises. And there is no process within the cellular automaton of Minecraft that explains this mechanical. You would have to go a level behind that and understand the way in which the Minecraft universe is constituted as some kind of simulation and simulacrum in part running on a computer and a parent universe that allows you to do magic."
},
{
"end_time": 2672.483,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2651.527,
"text": " But a step back, the alternative to the mechanical universe of physics and physicalism is the idea that there is a mechanical universe happening in base reality and we are directly emergent over that base universe, so we don't live in some kind of simulation. That is physicalism. And the alternative is we live in a dream."
},
{
"end_time": 2689.48,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2672.483,
"text": " And in a dream magic is possible. In a dream it's possible that you can break the laws of physics. It's possible that you can have telepathy in a way that violates the standard model and you can have ghosts and you can have all sorts of weird things for which you cannot possibly have a physical explanation."
},
{
"end_time": 2709.684,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2689.48,
"text": " Maybe for some of them there are physical explanations, but by and large this is the main boundary. And when you look at the philosophies that exist, there are basically these two types of big philosophical approaches that exist in the history of humanity that either are fully monistically idealist and say we do live in a dream,"
},
{
"end_time": 2730.964,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2709.684,
"text": " And the idealists have to explain why this dream looks in many parts so damn regular and mechanical. And the other group says the universe is entirely mechanical and this group has to explain why so many magic things seem to be happening. And then we have to find an agreement which of the things are mechanical and which of the things are magical and why."
},
{
"end_time": 2753.985,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2731.442,
"text": " At some point it became apparent to me that we obviously do live in a dream, but that this dream would have to be dreamt by some kind of mind in a higher plane of existence, probably in some kind of mechanical fashion, because you need functionality that facilitates the interaction of the elements in your dream, because it's not random."
},
{
"end_time": 2777.637,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2753.985,
"text": " This is also apparent when you have a lucid dream. Once you observe a number of your lucid dreams, you notice how they are composed. You notice some of the mechanisms of lucid dreaming. You notice some of the limitations of how many elements can be stable for how long in your lucid dream and so on, the ways in which you interact with them. And so the lucid dream itself becomes apparent as something that is facilitated by mechanisms."
},
{
"end_time": 2794.019,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2778.114,
"text": " And so what would be the properties of that higher plane of existence? And I think this higher plane of existence is physics. At physical systems cannot be conscious. Only simulated things can be conscious. Consciousness is a virtual property. It's simulated. It exists in the dream."
},
{
"end_time": 2809.633,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2794.582,
"text": " And the system that dreams us according to our best theories right now is the brain in physics. And the confusion that we have about this when we think about this arises through the notion that what we experience when we look at brains are brains."
},
{
"end_time": 2834.326,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2810.128,
"text": " But we don't. These squishy pink things are elements of our dream that are generated in non-random fashion in the parent reality. And the parent reality is something that we can never have access to. We cannot experience physics. There is no way in which the physical world can be experienced from inside of a brain. So wouldn't that mean then that there's no knowledge of the physics possible then?"
},
{
"end_time": 2864.633,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2835.503,
"text": " No, that's what it means. We can have knowledge from first principles, which means we can understand the way in which thinking could possibly happen, which means understanding the realm of all languages in the way in which something could mean something. That's one aspect. So we have a priori knowledge, which is a category of ideas that we get by understanding how systems can be about other things. We can understand how languages work."
},
{
"end_time": 2879.821,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2864.633,
"text": " And the other thing is that we can make observations and we can identify regularities in the observations and then using our understanding of first principles to get a notion of what the significance of these observables is."
},
{
"end_time": 2901.647,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2880.265,
"text": " And so I think it's a good simplification to say that we find regular patterns at our systemic interface. And in these regular patterns, we find non-random ways to disassemble them and build them into hierarchies of features and objects. I don't know if I don't know"
},
{
"end_time": 2930.896,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2902.142,
"text": " I made myself clear. What I was trying to get at, maybe I should ask a question first. Are you proposing that you can do physics a priori? Because that doesn't seem to be the case. We tried to do physics a priori. That's Descartes' project and it collapses. You can't do physics a priori. And then you said we can observe regularities, which I think is what physics does. But that means you're saying that regularities are really there. And then I guess the"
},
{
"end_time": 2954.599,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2931.067,
"text": " problem becomes what privileges those experiences of, I mean I can have, to use your analogy, I can have regularities in my dream and I don't take them to have given me an account of how the world really is. But if I do say that regularities work, what is it about them that gets me outside of"
},
{
"end_time": 2984.155,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2955.128,
"text": " simulation. I'm worried about a problem of skepticism here. I'm worried about a problem of, right, because this is what, you know, this is what Hume does. He says, well, you know, you've got all these regularities, but those regularities are themselves only projected by the mind. Their causation is just association between ideas and experiences, and therefore, I really can't know the world, and Kant, etc. And so I guess, I'm wondering, there seems to be a, I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 3011.834,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2984.974,
"text": " To say things are a projection is to say that other things are real, because it's a contrast term. To say that everything is an illusion, for example, doesn't make any sense. It's like saying everything's tall, right? So I'm trying to get at what is like, what surely we must have experiences that count as access to the real, or else we are just locked inside an internal self referential system. That's what I'm that's what I'm asking. Did that make sense?"
},
{
"end_time": 3037.159,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3012.278,
"text": " Yes, but let's start out with one of these aspects. There are several points that we, I think, would need to address and some of them are veritable rabbit holes. So let's start out with the problem of skepticism. Personally, I don't see skepticism as a problem because I think that when I am observing the trajectories that my mind can take,"
},
{
"end_time": 3050.162,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3037.159,
"text": " There is not usually many points where I open a door and go through and I cannot go back. It's not that I, in the course of intellectual exploration, go through one way doors."
},
{
"end_time": 3074.019,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3051.357,
"text": " that I can see before and I say, I cannot come back. This might exist in some religions. So here is a wonderful, delicious brain worm. You take it on and you can give it back in three weeks from now. And ideologies usually work in such a way that they warp your mind in such a way that you get cut off from the rest of human thought space and you cannot come back."
},
{
"end_time": 3095.316,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3074.633,
"text": " And I think that in a rational world this cannot happen. So when you think rationally, everything that you think is conditional on something else. And so everything that is not impossible is possible. And the confidence among the possible things has to be disputed, distributed according to the evidence that is available."
},
{
"end_time": 3120.981,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3095.845,
"text": " So the possibility that nothing exists in the way in which I perceive it and I don't exist and other people don't exist or only I exist and only other people exist is always a possibility and there is nothing scary about it and they don't need to be worried about it. There are no assumptions that they need to make to avoid this so I never fall into this trap and never come back. Oh my God. No, it's not not a problem. The possibility that there are no other people should be considered."
},
{
"end_time": 3145.657,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3121.374,
"text": " And I should see what observations suggest that this is the case and which observations speak against it. And if I ever find out that there never been other people, why should I be surprised? I should consider this. I should see how deep the rabbit hole goes. There's nothing scary about it. It's not infinitely deep. There are not infinitely many conclusions that I will draw from this. This will not lock me in an inhospitable place of the intellectual universe if I consider this path."
},
{
"end_time": 3173.985,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3146.084,
"text": " So I would suggest basically consider the entire space of possibilities and the idea that there are other minds in the world that are constituted in a quite similar way to mine but have a larger diversity than some people might be willing to acknowledge at first glance and so on. This seems to be a good theory. There seem to be other objects that look a lot like me in this mind and they seem to be like me the side effect of the regulation needs of the hairless monkey in the present universe and"
},
{
"end_time": 3196.988,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3174.343,
"text": " This is a good theory. It gives good predictions. It's a useful encoding of the patterns that are thrown at my systemic boundary. And there's another aspect to solipsism, which is more an experiential one. This is if you cannot perceive other minds as minds based on the prayers that you have. Most people don't learn a lot of wisdom in their life."
},
{
"end_time": 3221.118,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3197.312,
"text": " And that the wisdom they have is largely a structure that is innate to them. They are lucky to be born wise. And they just converge in the observation of the world to more details in this structure and so on. And people that are born unwise have difficulty to ever get to wisdom. So we do learn new structure, but largely the architecture that we use to interpret the world seems to be something that is"
},
{
"end_time": 3241.459,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3221.766,
"text": " to a large degree innate that is mapped to the circumstances that our ancestors found themselves in in the world. And what we notice, for instance, many Europeans that live in the US have all these weird quirks in which they relate to the world that are the remnant of non-existent European societies that they brought within their own minds and the structure"
},
{
"end_time": 3262.073,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3241.459,
"text": " that is built into their soul over many generations. And now they try this in this very brutish and weird pioneer society that is the US. And many of these patterns don't make sense. And this is not just the case for Europeans. It's just for Europeans, I can notice and interpret these patterns better than for other cultures that are part of this hodgepodge of the US."
},
{
"end_time": 3281.169,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3263.166,
"text": " It's very interesting to see that solipsism might be a property of some people. I sometimes think that our previous president has been a solipsist, not in the sense that he is an evil person. I think it's psychologically interesting that when he talks to other people, his important criterion was always"
},
{
"end_time": 3308.575,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3282.415,
"text": " can say whatever he wants as long as he gets away with it. And communication is a tool to get what he wants. And this seems to be somewhat invariant in politics, but he be lines for it, right? He is able to think outside of a box because he never acknowledged the existence of this box. There is a certain prior that there are other minds that he need to share truth with that is absent. He can just say whatever he wants. He's free to do this because there are no other people."
},
{
"end_time": 3334.991,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3309.172,
"text": " There's only something like an almost faceless audience that relates to him in a particular way and that he relates to in a particular way that makes him fit for this particular role. It was probably unwise to make this tangent because I don't want to make a normative statement one way or the other about Trump. I just think that he happens to be somebody that we all know and who is psychologically interesting because I think he might be a solipsist in an experiential, functional, not necessarily philosophical sense."
},
{
"end_time": 3361.084,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3336.391,
"text": " So don't worry, Yosh. I'm not going to draw you into any kind of political debate around Trump. So that would be unfair to you and unfair to the spirit in which you offered the example. I'm trying to think of how to reply because you said about 7,000 really interesting things in that last thing. But one thing I seem to pick up on was that"
},
{
"end_time": 3387.944,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3361.305,
"text": " you know, reality seems to be determined by rational processes of making sense, which, I mean, and that's a classical kind of idealism, that's sort of like Hegelian idealism, that ultimately the real is dependent on the capacity for rationality. And so rationality has to be as real as anything else, because of that dependency relationship. Now, the thing about that is rationality seems to be"
},
{
"end_time": 3402.363,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3388.985,
"text": " a quintessential mental property too. And does that mean that we don't have, I mean, you know, you know, you know this too. I know, you know, again, I've seen your talks."
},
{
"end_time": 3430.435,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3402.602,
"text": " you know, the problems of deep time that idealism faces, right, the problem with deep time, you know, there seems to be a significant difference between Darwin discovering the theory of evolution in 1859, process of rational reflection, gathering the evidence, and the process of evolution that actually led to Darwin's existence, right, they have different, they have different temporal, spatial extensions, etc. And so the problem, I guess I'm trying to get at is"
},
{
"end_time": 3461.817,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3433.319,
"text": " When I'm talking about it that way, doesn't that mean that I have to take it that that rationality really exists, since my ability to determine what is real is dependent on my rational processes, like you said, better theories, worth theories, making better sense, etc, etc. And then that seems to indicate a very high level of organization at which things can be real, rather than just"
},
{
"end_time": 3488.285,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3462.329,
"text": " what is typically taken to be the physical. I take it that at least traditionally, at least currently, rationality is not part of the ontology of physics. It's presupposed in the practice of physics, but it's not part of the ontology. And so that means, it sounds to me, either like you have a kind of strong idealism or, because you brought this up as another possibility,"
},
{
"end_time": 3513.677,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3488.609,
"text": " You see rationality as emerging, perhaps out of intelligence and intelligence emerging out of the behavior of the brain. But it wouldn't be an epiphone. It could not be given this argument epiphenomenal emergence, rationality would have to be a real thing that really exists and really directs people's behavior in some fashion. How does that land with you? Or have I misinterpreted you?"
},
{
"end_time": 3542.415,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3515.503,
"text": " So we probably have to agree on what we mean by rationality to be able to disassemble this term a little bit further. Typically, it's the ability to reach a certain goal in which you have reason to believe that these tools that you use are suitable to get to that goal. I would add, in addition to the instrumentality aspect of rationality, that rationality includes a capacity for self-correction."
},
{
"end_time": 3563.541,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3542.978,
"text": " So the system has to be able to correct itself as it's pursuing these goals and be able to seek out more reliable means of achieving those goals. So the system is inherently self-correcting, which means in a very important way, the system has to be self-transcending in some fashion. It has to be able to exceed itself. It has to be able to grow. It has to be able to develop."
},
{
"end_time": 3591.63,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3563.968,
"text": " I just wanted to point out that that's often not explicated"
},
{
"end_time": 3604.77,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3591.971,
"text": " But I don't think that rationality in this sense is necessarily a thing that exists as an object, but it exists as an archetype."
},
{
"end_time": 3630.64,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3605.367,
"text": " It exists as a strategy that I can specify from some basic desirables for any kind of system that is strategizing on solving a control problem in a complex world. So basically if you have a system that has the ability to error-correct on a deep level and that is able to discover enough regularities in the world to notice its own existence in the world."
},
{
"end_time": 3652.705,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3630.725,
"text": " Then the system, as soon as it's able to evaluate strategies that it applies to make sense of the world, will discover rationality as an option. And there are not that many alternatives to it. And when you think about how to be a rational idealist, if you are a deep idealist, can you afford to be rational?"
},
{
"end_time": 3677.739,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3652.944,
"text": " In some sense, two possibilities in which you are an idealist. One is an idealist that is willing to deal with the French problem of idealism, like why is there regularity in there and where does the dream come from? And the alternative is Mysterionism. And Mysterionism is a position in cognitive science that is held by several people. Mysterionism basically says that something cannot be understood if it cannot be understood by Noam Chomsky."
},
{
"end_time": 3707.329,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3679.582,
"text": " And not surprisingly, Chomsky himself is a mysterious about consciousness. Yeah, and I think, yeah, I think Begin does similar things. Yeah. For me, before we, I don't want to get too far afield about this. I think there's equivocation around mysteriousism. It invokes, I think, a non-controversial notion of epistemic boundedness."
},
{
"end_time": 3733.131,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3707.79,
"text": " like every other organism, it's highly probable we are epistemically bounded. And then it claims we're epistemically bounded with respect to to the mind, like having a mind doesn't mean that the mind is capable of explaining itself. And that, of course, I don't think chimps will ever generate a theory explaining their own cognition, etc. I think that's non controversial. The problem"
},
{
"end_time": 3743.677,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3733.37,
"text": " is the specific argument saying that that is actually occurring in our attempts to solve consciousness or intelligence etc."
},
{
"end_time": 3767.739,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3743.763,
"text": " Well, I agree about the egocentrism of some of the arguments that you've pointed to. I think there's also a deep equivocation there between different senses of epistemic boundedness that hasn't been sort of properly worked out very carefully. Of course, I think, like I said, in one sense, it's got to be non-controversial, I think, that we're epistemically bounded. Even younger versions of myself were epistemically bounded with respect to these"
},
{
"end_time": 3793.575,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3767.739,
"text": " The idea is, how do I distinguish between epistemic boundedness that is sort of hardwired into me, cultural epistemic boundedness, historical epistemic boundedness, developmental epistemic boundedness? And so I find that whole argument sort of deeply confused because there's a lot of equivocation going on. So I take it that you don't like it either."
},
{
"end_time": 3821.834,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3793.968,
"text": " Well, I think it's maybe an unhelpful notion, because in the way in which the term is constructed, it suggests that there is indeed a heart bound. And the question is, is this a useful way to think about the way in which my experience works? So maybe chimpanzees are just stupid people, because they have a very short childhood, so before their brain loses neuroplasticity at all the respective levels where they would be able to form concepts,"
},
{
"end_time": 3845.23,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3821.834,
"text": " It already solidifies and they're not able to make sense of the world beyond a certain depth because it's for them difficult to focus on these ideas for long enough and to build suitable representations about them. And a similar thing happens with people. Most people are unable to focus on an idea for more than 20 minutes if it's not related to their social or erotic success."
},
{
"end_time": 3875.503,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3845.759,
"text": " And so you need very weird people that are able to focus on certain ideas for very, very long. And then we already die after a few decades. Does this imply that there is a heart epistemic bound? Probably not. And there could be a heart epistemic bound. That is, we can figure out by the timing characteristics how many layers our brain effectively has. Our brain is not organized in need layers. It's recurrent and so on. But still,"
},
{
"end_time": 3904.155,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3875.657,
"text": " It seems to be difficult for us to hold thoughts beyond a certain length or construct thoughts beyond a certain length. For most people, very difficult to hold a thought in their mind stable that is longer than a few tens of seconds. And some people are able to hold the thoughts stable in their mind that takes a few hours. But this means uninterrupted focus on this thought. And so if you think about how many oscillations can you fit into such a thought,"
},
{
"end_time": 3921.834,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3904.548,
"text": " is the level of complexity that this model has sufficient to understand foundational physics, for instance. And it could be that foundational physics poses a few questions that are close to the boundary of what we can integrate all at once and that we need machines to extend our mind."
},
{
"end_time": 3947.841,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3922.244,
"text": " to keep the thought stable and detailed for long enough. I think it is unfair to expect from Descartes that he is able to solve foundational physics because there were many fundamental insights that were not available to him, that were not part of what he had time to figure out by himself and that were not available to him in books and ideas around him. He largely still lived in a Euclidean universe in which the objects were very large."
},
{
"end_time": 3975.196,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3947.841,
"text": " and in which it was not apparent how to build more simple automata over which the complexity of the approximately three-dimensional Euclidean world or space-time later on would emerge. So in this time there was no way to go to understand the emergence of physics from something that is more simple and closer to first principles and I think this is only just now happening. I think"
},
{
"end_time": 3999.974,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3975.708,
"text": " That's what I was trying to say. Issues of epistemic boundedness are mixing up and confusing together biological issues, cultural issues, historical issues. Yes. So maybe epistemic boundness is not a thing. So that was my point. So it might exist approximately. But if you treat it as that, oh, my God, there's this boundary. There it is. There is the wall that separates us from"
},
{
"end_time": 4028.541,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4000.418,
"text": " from the next country and we will never be able to cross it because this is for some natural law the reason in which human minds have to be constructed. I am not sure if you can actually make that claim, if you can prove that there is a boundary that we need to run against. Well this is Hegel's argument and maybe I can use that to circle back because Hegel's argument is you can actually only talk about a limit if you have the capacity to exceed it. It doesn't make any sense to say from just this side that there's a limit."
},
{
"end_time": 4052.398,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4028.916,
"text": " So there are boundaries. One is Lyb's theorem, which says that a system basically cannot make statements about something outside of itself. Also the way in which Gödel, for instance, talks about the whole of mathematics and these properties of mathematics works by building an automaton that reconstructs the whole of mathematics that he wants to talk about from first principles."
},
{
"end_time": 4079.087,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4052.807,
"text": " So it talks about something that is contained in the system. If I want to talk about the whole of mathematics, I have to talk about it by reconstructing it from first principles. If I cannot make such a definition, I don't know what I'm talking about. And so the world that I am talking about is one that I need to construct in the first place. And I'm not able to talk about something that exists outside of these constructions, unless I can prove that I have constructed things in the only possible way."
},
{
"end_time": 4098.114,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4079.821,
"text": " which means I have to make statements about the possible nature of language itself. So this is one of the boundaries that I can run into. And the other one is has to do with the problem of the access to of the universe itself. And this is much more"
},
{
"end_time": 4111.169,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4098.831,
"text": " Obvious to people than Loeb's theory, even though it's related, you cannot exclude the possibility that for instance that you could be a brain in the vet. Some philosophers have tried to do this, but they are a slate of hands and wishful thinking."
},
{
"end_time": 4137.466,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4111.578,
"text": " There is no way that you and me cannot know beforehand of whether we are currently in some kind of weird dream from which we wake up in the next moment and realize, oh my God, this actually didn't happen. It was a fake memory. This was not true. This is not a description of the physical universe. This was just a weird illusion that I had in a night dream. There is no way in which we can, in principle, exclude this possibility."
},
{
"end_time": 4166.425,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4137.824,
"text": " There is only ways in which we can deal with the probabilities based on our past experiences. But if we have never experienced a certain thing before in this fundamental way, for instance, after I had long surgery for eight hours, I had extremely lucid dreams that were so intense that I could not in the intensity distinguish them from daytime experiences. And it was because of the narcotics that were still my bloodstream. And I never had experiences like that before."
},
{
"end_time": 4192.739,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4166.92,
"text": " Of course, these experiences were just brain states. They had nothing prophetic about this. This was not an alternate universe that it was dropping in. But the experiential qualities were very similar. And so my argument is that you can not possibly make such a distinction beforehand. And that's why you can also not exclude the possibility of skepticism. And this is one of the boundaries of what we can be achieving as a mind. We cannot rely on our own coherence in a fundamental sense."
},
{
"end_time": 4218.387,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4192.944,
"text": " We always have to hope and pray that the world remains as coherent as it appears to me right now in the next thought. So that gets me back to the point that realness seems to be bound to some normative notion of rationality. You've invoked a priori a couple of times."
},
{
"end_time": 4241.374,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4218.814,
"text": " The problem with our priori is, again, that hasn't been stable. What Kant thought was our priori, and he famously posited the our priori as central, many people don't agree with his set of our priori that logic is Aristotelian logic. There's many logicians that say, no, that's not the only possible logic."
},
{
"end_time": 4270.947,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4242.21,
"text": " Euclidean geometry is the only geometry. That's not true, et cetera. And so, again, it seems that even the a priori is dependent on these more basic processes of how we think everything hangs together, how everything is intelligible, how it all makes sense to us. And for me, that's the thing I really want to understand. I really want to understand"
},
{
"end_time": 4295.486,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4271.288,
"text": " how and why we find the universe intelligible, and if we're justified in doing so, and then how does that relate to intelligence and consciousness? That's the issue. And I take it that there are sort of certain central problems that go back to this fundamental act of interpretation."
},
{
"end_time": 4324.462,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4295.776,
"text": " which is what are you going to pay attention to, how long are you going to pay attention to it, how much importance are you going to give to it, how are you going to prioritize one thing over another, etc. And interestingly enough, these are kind of a lot of the contending candidates for theories of what attention is. And I know you put a lot of centrality on attention in your mental, in your model of consciousness. And so"
},
{
"end_time": 4351.118,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4324.804,
"text": " I'm very interested about this process by which we attend to things in the right way so that we are capable of making intelligible sense of our experience in a way that gives us some good reason, I'm not saying demonstratively certain, but some good reason, it could be probabilistic if you want, for saying X is real and Y is not because"
},
{
"end_time": 4381.374,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4351.374,
"text": " If we can't do that, if we can't make those basic kinds of distinctions, we can't do science itself. And then a lot of the data that we're using to make our arguments fall through the bottom, because we have no ontological ground for science itself. So I'm very interested in exactly those kinds of fundamental issues. So for me, the problem of consciousness ultimately is bound up with"
},
{
"end_time": 4402.568,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4381.63,
"text": " the problem of intelligence, the problem of making sense. But those are not just psychological problems, they are ultimately epistemological ontological problems. And answering them together, I think is something well, that's what I'm trying to do with you here. Now I'm trying to get how it is that"
},
{
"end_time": 4432.637,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4402.79,
"text": " I'm trying to get your model of ontology and where, because you have to rely on judgments, like you went back. It's only a projection. There's not really a face there. That's a positing of what's real versus not real. And I'm trying to get at, is your account of rationality bound up with your account of consciousness and intelligence?"
},
{
"end_time": 4446.766,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4433.097,
"text": " It seems like it is. And doesn't that mean therefore that we have to posit a certain kind of realness to intelligence and consciousness the way we have to for rationality, because rationality is how we determine"
},
{
"end_time": 4476.63,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4447.125,
"text": " What's real in the world? Again, I acknowledge with you, I'm not saying that I can do that, you know, with any kind of certainty, but nevertheless, I have to be able to do it in some kind of fashion. I have to be able to make judgments about real versus not real in order to be generating the kind of data we're both using when we're talking here right now. So here's the argument in a nutshell. It seems that what's real depends on what's rational and being rational seems to involve"
},
{
"end_time": 4506.032,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4476.852,
"text": " requires some kind of self-awareness, some kind of consciousness, and rational seems to also require some kind of basic ability to be intelligent, to find certain things relevant rather than others, to pay attention to hear, to see the relevance of certain acts to goals, etc. And doesn't that mean therefore that consciousness and intelligence"
},
{
"end_time": 4524.258,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4506.374,
"text": " The question is what is real? It's a tricky question. It's a good question."
},
{
"end_time": 4553.268,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4524.974,
"text": " The property of being experientially real requires I think that it needs to be in our mind. So there is no way in which you can wake up from the dream in your mind and still exist because out there in physics you are not conscious. Neurons are not conscious, brains are not conscious, physical apparatus are not conscious. You need to be inside of that dream. So if you ever transcend the dream, you will not be there. The experience of waking up is something that you dream. You can only"
},
{
"end_time": 4574.462,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4553.882,
"text": " experience making up value are still in a dream. And so you're not going to wake up in some any kind of reality. And there is this big question why there is something rather than nothing, it seems to be hard to deny that something exists. And it's difficult to figure out how it's possible that there is something rather than nothing."
},
{
"end_time": 4596.425,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4575.316,
"text": " And the easiest explanation that the foundational physicists that I've so far been talked to have come up with is always the same. So and rather than positing that for some funny reason, something exists and all the other things do not exist, maybe existence is the default."
},
{
"end_time": 4620.52,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4597.892,
"text": " So for some funny reason, the universe is not set up as our intuition says that basically nothing exists by itself by default. And then something needs to be brought into existence somehow from first principles. The easier explanation is to reduce the steps to say that well, just everything exists and we have to now explain why something don't seem to be the case."
},
{
"end_time": 4634.787,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4621.783,
"text": " And so what would it mean for something to exist? In my understanding for something to exist, it needs to be implemented. And I would say that many things only exist to an approximate degree."
},
{
"end_time": 4653.217,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4635.708,
"text": " So, for instance, this cup here exists to a very good approximate degree, right? It's a certain idea that I can project consistently in the universe that gives me certain affordances and it's stable for a pretty long time and there are well-defined conditions for the most part for when this model falls apart and I can no longer treat this as a cup."
},
{
"end_time": 4681.834,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4654.206,
"text": " And for instance, when it breaks or when my ability to interact with it breaks or when the local physical continuum breaks in such a way that the parts no longer neatly assemble into a cup and so on. Right. So there are certain boundary conditions where the cupness would no longer hold, but for the most part, the cup is very stable. If I take rationality as an object becomes slightly more fishy. Or if I take my own personal identity as an object, my own existence, it becomes super fishy."
},
{
"end_time": 4710.367,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4682.432,
"text": " Because to which degree do I really stably exist, and to which degree is this a fiction that I conveniently maintain to be able to reason about myself over extended time spans? I think that I probably don't exist to the same degree of solidity as the cup exists. I'm much more approximate. I'm much more like a voice in the wind blowing through the mountains. My existence is much more virtual and vague and approximate than the existence of the cup itself."
},
{
"end_time": 4735.503,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4710.981,
"text": " If I go back to this notion of why there is something rather than nothing and all these things that can be implemented exist, the cup is implemented in physics to a tighter degree than I am implemented in physics. I'm much more approximately implemented. I would say that what can be implemented are ultimately finite automata. It's also the only part of mathematics that works."
},
{
"end_time": 4742.824,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4735.879,
"text": " the implication of Gödel's discovery that we have to go away from stateless mathematics and instead what we get are automata."
},
{
"end_time": 4766.101,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4743.285,
"text": " and we cannot define infinity without running into contradictions in the languages in which we do it. You mentioned that there are many different ways to define logic and different logics. Ultimately, they come down to the same thing that was also part of this big discovery that we made in the 20th century, that all the ways in which we can define logic and computation and so on are the same."
},
{
"end_time": 4782.551,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4766.101,
"text": " They have all the same power. So the Turing machine and the post machine and the lambda calculus and the combinators and Boolean logic and specific programming languages and the different approaches to define constructive mathematics turn out to be equivalent."
},
{
"end_time": 4803.66,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4783.848,
"text": " There are some tight small elements at the boundaries and so on where we could get into debates, but by and large, they all turn out to be this mappings between these systems. And these mappings can all happen in polynomial time or in constant time. And so it's not so bad."
},
{
"end_time": 4833.677,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4804.241,
"text": " The logic can be solved. If you look at geometry, there is not this question, oh my God, there is not just Euclidean geometry, but there's also non-Euclidean geometry. These are not fundamentally different. It's just that the non-Euclidean geometry relaxes one of the conditions, which means the space in which geometry takes place doesn't need to be flat. The space can have curvature or it can be beyond this and it can be very irregular and so on. And it turns out that geometry is the mathematics of too many parts to count, I think."
},
{
"end_time": 4864.206,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4834.224,
"text": " So as soon as you have too many parts to count, the way in which we can perform calculations is that we need to identify operators that converge in the limit, which means if you have trillions of parts and you add one more part, the result doesn't change perceptively in any way. And this is when you have something where you converge approximately against infinity when you have approximate continuity. And the set of operators that converge in the limit when you have too many parts to count, this is practically what we mean by geometry."
},
{
"end_time": 4888.899,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4864.735,
"text": " So it's a particular way to model worlds that are made of too many parts to keep track of the individual parts. And of course, our brain is largely confronted with the world at such a level where there are too many atoms to count, too many molecules, too many people to count, too many dollars to count and so on. And so we treat them as continuous values and we look at the limit dynamics and we have geometric models."
},
{
"end_time": 4913.319,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4890.606,
"text": " Two points. The first is I'm not going to make arguments about the interrelations of logic. I was making an argument that Kant took something to be a priori. He didn't know everything you just said. And so his judgments about what was the a priori were incorrect. It's plausible that that's also the case for us. And so that's all I meant to say about that."
},
{
"end_time": 4940.93,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4913.643,
"text": " I want to go back to the cup and me, or the cup and you, because it seems to me, given your ontology and your epistemology, the cup is, and I think you're saying that, the cup is a fiction as well, and so you're a fiction, the cup is a fiction, and yet the physics seems to not be fictional for you, and yet I don't know how we get to the physics without objects like cups and people like you and I."
},
{
"end_time": 4970.333,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 4941.271,
"text": " The physics is generated by people like you and I using instruments that are like microscopes and whatever that are just like the cup. And therefore, how do all these fictional beings using fictional devices come up with the physics that is really the case? It seems to me that you need to say that the objects and the people doing the science are as real as the science itself. And that"
},
{
"end_time": 4991.613,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 4971.323,
"text": " would tend to say that the cup has a kind of reality to it. And you have a kind of reality to it that are have to be assumed for the practice of physics itself. That's what I was trying to say. Now, you might be saying, physics doesn't have an ontology for cups. I totally get that."
},
{
"end_time": 5014.411,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 4992.022,
"text": " What I'm saying is why should physics have the monopoly on our ontology? What's the argument for that, given the epistemology and the psychology that you're advancing here? It seems to me like our ontology is much more rich than our current physics is capable of incorporating. That's what I'm trying to get at."
},
{
"end_time": 5043.353,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5014.804,
"text": " For example, you said you're not as stable as the cup. Well, you sort of have to be. I mean, there has to be a continuity in you, right? As I move around the object, it's not just that I have to find a continuity in the object. There has to be a continuity in me as a knower in order for the stability of that object to be possible. I also have to have some kind of continuity. Again, I'm trying to get at"
},
{
"end_time": 5067.193,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5043.831,
"text": " Because, sorry, we got into this and maybe we both have taken each other too far afield. We got into this because I asked you to, like what you were dealing with, you know, the dualism problem that Descartes Gaeta gave us. And then you said there isn't a problem because it's all sort of, I heard you saying sort of all constructed in the mind."
},
{
"end_time": 5097.568,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5067.961,
"text": " But then if it's all constructed in the mind, so is all the things and all the tools by which we did the physics. Let's use your analogy. The physics, I wouldn't trust the physics I'm doing in a dream if I knew it was a dream. And if I know it's a simulation, which you were claiming, why should I trust the physics that are occurring within that simulation? It seems to me that there is an ontology richer than physics that is needed in order"
},
{
"end_time": 5125.776,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5098.012,
"text": " First of all, don't worry. You don't need to apologize for taking us too far. I feel they can take us back. It's no issue if you feel that we are going too far out here. There are two ways in which I can experience physics. One is in a lucid dream, for instance, I can test whether I'm in a dream or not. Usually, for instance, by operating a light switch. I found that in lucid dreams light switches for the most part don't work. It's a funny thing, but they don't."
},
{
"end_time": 5152.142,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5126.015,
"text": " Another thing is when you read a text on a page, it's difficult to read the same text twice. You might have noticed this in dreams, right? And this seems to be a limitation of the way in which our working memory works. So I suspect that the lucid dream has to store all its state in working memory and the causal structure that is stable in the dream has to be held there. And there's a limit to how many bits can be held in our working memory."
},
{
"end_time": 5158.712,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5152.534,
"text": " And as a result, the complexity of the physics simulation in our own dream is limited."
},
{
"end_time": 5184.514,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5159.121,
"text": " And this means that when we want to have a physics simulation that is more detailed, we probably need to have state that is stored outside of our mind for practical reasons. It's not a philosophical argument. It's just practical observation. So if you want to experience a world in which light switches work, you need to store some state outside of your working memory in some substrate that is outside of your mind. And this could be a physical room."
},
{
"end_time": 5202.807,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5184.514,
"text": " So for practical purposes, if you ever find yourself in the situation that you need to figure out whether you are dreaming this or not, you could try to rely on processes in your environment and test for the existence of processes in your environment that need to update a lot of state to be stable and you check for the stability of the state."
},
{
"end_time": 5222.278,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5203.353,
"text": " Of course, there could still be some kind of conspiracy going on. So this is not foolproof. If an evil scientist is messing with you, then the evil scientist might be able to change your memories of what just happened and might be interjecting weird things in there. But the question that we want to answer on the other level is, is there a conspiracy going on?"
},
{
"end_time": 5247.79,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5223.029,
"text": " And the idea that is underlying physics is not complicated assumptions about the notion of energy, time, space and causality and so on. These are all things that we infer at some level. They're not assumptions that we need to presuppose to make physics work. The basic assumption in physics is maybe there is no conspiracy. Maybe this is just mechanical."
},
{
"end_time": 5276.783,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5248.473,
"text": " And we have to understand why that is the case. And the idealist assumption is there is a conspiracy. We do live in a simulation. And this idealism is not solving anything in a way that physics is not solving it. You still have to, if you want to explain what's going on, make a claim that you now understand how the universe works, how that conspiracy could possibly work. And explaining the conspiracy is intrinsically harder."
},
{
"end_time": 5305.367,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5277.193,
"text": " If you deny the possibility of any kind of physics, and physics just being the mechanical explanation. I'll come back to the point of what I don't know we infer certain things, or our inferences presuppose them, we can come back to that in a minute. But but I mean, we're in a position, at least that's what I hear you saying different from Descartes, my person being, you know, beset by the Cartesian demon, because"
},
{
"end_time": 5310.452,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5305.947,
"text": " Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 5337.602,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5311.493,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 5357.415,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5337.602,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
{
"end_time": 5387.039,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5357.415,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 5413.797,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5387.039,
"text": " Simulation, which is precisely what can't happen. So I agree. I'm excluding the Cartesian demon because as you say, there's no way out of that well, right? If I doubt my capacity,"
},
{
"end_time": 5441.647,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5414.036,
"text": " I'm doubting whether or not my doubt is like you can just fall forever and ever. I get that. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that we're not in that, you seem to be saying, and I think I agree with you, we're not in that position. We can come to see what is it about our consciousness and our perception that is not real. But for me, that means that our consciousness and our perception"
},
{
"end_time": 5470.964,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5442.09,
"text": " and our intelligence also have access to reality, have an ability to pick up on what's real, because that would be the only thing I could use to contrast with my subjective experience. In order to say, I know that I'm inside something, I have to be able to give you good reason for believing there's something outside of me. And that outside of me also has to have access. I'm not saying direct access. I'm not a naive empiricist."
},
{
"end_time": 5480.845,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5471.34,
"text": " It has to have access to my consciousness and my reason or my intelligence or again, I can't actually posit the very model that I'm using to say that everything is a projection."
},
{
"end_time": 5511.374,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5484.138,
"text": " Yeah, so if we try to understand the situation, to me it's very, it's almost capable to have a PV in a similar situation as a robot living inside of some kind of computer. And this computer is set up in such a way that it provides affordances to an external environment. And now the computational system that lives inside of that computer, this"
},
{
"end_time": 5534.531,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5511.698,
"text": " set of organized patterns that we call software is set up in such a way that it can discover regularities and the patterns and extend its affordances into this environment and thereby make sense of the environment. And it seems to me that I find myself in an arrangement that is indistinguishable from this description that is intimately familiar to me if I'm an AI researcher."
},
{
"end_time": 5543.439,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5536.067,
"text": " Right. I guess the question I'm asking you in your example, is it possible for the robot to discover that it is inside the computer?"
},
{
"end_time": 5573.08,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5547.602,
"text": " Yes, I think it is. But there are certain limitations to this. And I think that you can discover this from, in a sense, from first principles, because there are no alternatives. There are many ways in which you can map this conceptually. So the ways in which you depict these entities, because there are not entities that are defined by physical appearances. They're not defined by Res Extensa. They are defined by certain conceptual relationships."
},
{
"end_time": 5583.37,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5573.08,
"text": " And it turns out that all the ways I think in which a mind can exist as an apparent pattern and control structure can be mapped structurally."
},
{
"end_time": 5607.244,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5583.814,
"text": " first principles on conceptual structures that are equivalent. So we might disagree about how this computer is set up. Is it a von Neumann architecture or anything else? There is no possible way to distinguish them and there is no claim to how this actually works. We know that the biological systems that are able to process information work in"
},
{
"end_time": 5637.21,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5607.244,
"text": " I agree with that and so now it's what it sounds like you're saying is the most real things are the things that are sort of accessible to my a priori reason and that that's what I use in order to determine"
},
{
"end_time": 5656.118,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5637.722,
"text": " I'm within the welter of experience and I use my ability to make sense of things and that helps me sort through and sift through those that are going to let me know that I'm inside a simulation. And then that says to me that"
},
{
"end_time": 5684.633,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5656.51,
"text": " what's ultimately real for you. And you invoked archetypes at one point when you talked about the cup. You're sounding to me like a Platonist. You're sounding to me like you're saying what's ultimately real are sort of the mathematical objects accessible through our prior reality. And everything else is less real than them. And it's like, I mean, Plato has the first simulation theory around. You're inside the cave and you're only looking at the shadows and the echoes and you have to make your way out. Is that a fair reading?"
},
{
"end_time": 5701.869,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5685.759,
"text": " Almost. I think that an archetype is an optimum in a description function. It's in some sense a mathematical regularity, in the same sense as the Greek gods are archetypes, personality archetypes, that basically if you take a space of personality properties and their interaction,"
},
{
"end_time": 5722.193,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5702.261,
"text": " The Greek Gods are stable in this way, or the Christian God is the archetype of the total God."
},
{
"end_time": 5746.988,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5722.619,
"text": " Yeah, and it's a particular one because this thing needed to be loaded to be also an civilizational spirit for an agricultural society. So it's not actually the total God and as a slate of hand that is going on by identifying the creator God is the God of meaning and is the God of the late Roman Empire. Right. So these are different gods in a certain way that have been put into one for practical reasons."
},
{
"end_time": 5765.742,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5746.988,
"text": " And the reason why we have so many claims to total gods is because of this payload that the myth of the total god has to carry. But this doesn't mean that the archetype actually exists out in the physical world. There is no reason why when you have a description function and you discover an optimum on it,"
},
{
"end_time": 5789.838,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5765.947,
"text": " why this thing needs to exist, but it will exist in systems that build these types of models, which means they exist as a point of reference. There are certain optima in which you describe things. And it's also true for our own perception. When we perceive things, what we perceive is not the features in which they are arranged. What we perceive is a certain ideal that is being projected by the features."
},
{
"end_time": 5819.36,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5789.838,
"text": " And this is what Platonism means. It doesn't mean a claim to the actual existence of physical things, of affairs in the world, which we causally interact. It's the observation that when we are building models of the world, there are certain models that are more pure and more elegant than others. And this is, in some sense, the platonic idea. Yeah. And so that's where you and I have a very deep kind of agreement."
},
{
"end_time": 5843.763,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 5819.753,
"text": " because I consider myself a neoplatonist in my sort of ultimate orientation. I guess what I would say, and Plato I think might agree with me, is he would say, well, saying it doesn't exist physically, it doesn't say much, because the physics is ultimately less real than the platonic objects, right? Because the physical things, the instantiated things,"
},
{
"end_time": 5865.845,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 5844.087,
"text": " are only, as you said, only temporary instances, right, they're less stable, they're less real. And so the fact that it doesn't exist physically doesn't sound like to Plato's ears, they would go, yeah, and that's, that's to say that they're more real than a physical reality in an important way. And that seems to me,"
},
{
"end_time": 5891.357,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 5866.698,
"text": " kind of what you need in order to do science. You need to be able to posit these kinds of entities in order to do generalizations, in order to be audacious in some ways. The empiricist wouldn't like the fact that I could run some math and make conclusions about reality. I mean, you have to believe stronger, you have to assert this kind of thing. And now,"
},
{
"end_time": 5917.415,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 5892.176,
"text": " You seem to be nodding, so I don't think I'm being too imposing on you. And I'm finding that we got to this place very, very interesting because, and I don't mean this as any kind of critique of your presentation, I didn't get that when I was watching your videos, right? It took a lot of this. And again, I'm not critiquing you. But I found that I've now gotten to a very, very interesting place with you."
},
{
"end_time": 5941.886,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 5917.705,
"text": " I don't know what, we haven't said too much about consciousness and meaning, like we promised we would, but I found this, this progression really, really powerful and interesting. Because I'm also interested, you have a knack for saying very intriguing things about religion and history. I'm very interested in the fact that Platonism, Neoplatonism, because they were a continuity,"
},
{
"end_time": 5971.783,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 5942.363,
"text": " formed an interesting kind of lingua, intellectual lingua franca along the Silk Road. You can even see this historically. Neoplatonism was able to reciprocally reconstruct with Christianity, with Islam, with Judaism, and there's now some evidence even with Buddhism. It seems to have this interesting capacity to be more of a ur or primordial representation of our shared intelligibility making process."
},
{
"end_time": 5995.981,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 5972.142,
"text": " I find that a very interesting proposal right now, because if we could get the philosophical argument we've been exploring and the historical argument together, that means we could make a plausible argument for a shareable framework for interpreting reality and making and making claims about reality and normative judgments. And I think this is very centrally needed"
},
{
"end_time": 6025.418,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 5996.476,
"text": " for a problem I talk about extensively, which is the meaning crisis that the West is facing. So I just wanted to say, I mean, I've been sort of like very critical, but I want to now stand back and express appreciation for sort of where we got to and some of the possibilities I see in it. I hope that also wasn't imposing on you, but you were nodding as I was saying it. So it seemed like it was... You don't need to apologize in this way in any way. I don't identify with me having these ideas."
},
{
"end_time": 6048.234,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6025.418,
"text": " I can observe myself having ideas, but the relationship that the ideas have to me is not very interesting. I just try to play the glass-panel as well as I can, as do you, right? So you never need to apologize for criticizing an idea or having a different one or pointing out where my thinking falls short. And I'm grateful if you point out things that appear to be inconsistent."
},
{
"end_time": 6077.892,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6048.643,
"text": " Don't worry about this at all. Fair enough. You're playing the music with me very well and I appreciate that. My point for making the apology, first of all, I'm a Canadian and we apologize for everything. Secondly, the point for me was to try to show you from where I was coming. That was the point I was trying to make. So I'm interested. Can I ask you a question? It's slightly more personal. I think it's fair to say"
},
{
"end_time": 6093.951,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6078.131,
"text": " The position you've taken isn't the consensus position or even the majority position. Is that fair to say?"
},
{
"end_time": 6120.52,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6095.196,
"text": " Yes and no. I find that a lot of people who deeply think about these topics seem to be converging. So if I would be discussing with say people like Minsky, Dasher, many many other people next Thursday will have a discussion about attention with Michael Graciano and Vasudev and Jonathan Cohen."
},
{
"end_time": 6145.503,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6120.52,
"text": " I also don't find that my ideas are in a deep sense original. It's just that the more ideas I discover, the smaller the parties become that I am late to."
},
{
"end_time": 6173.78,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6148.473,
"text": " You know what I mean, right? So I don't think it's possible to have philosophical ideas about the relationship between mind and physical universe that have not been had by somebody a few thousand years ago. And if somebody has a fundamentally new idea, that's probably bad news, unless it relates to some kind of super modern physics and highly original way. And it's possible that we find discover something on this level. But by and large,"
},
{
"end_time": 6197.585,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6173.78,
"text": " The big foundational questions about epistemology and so on are apparent for so long that I don't have any claims to originality in there. And so I would say that my ideas are not original and they're also relatively widespread. And the disagreements are largely happening, I think, when people have different epistemology."
},
{
"end_time": 6228.507,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6198.558,
"text": " When they think that there are ways to establishing truths that are different from the ways in which I think that truth can be established. Sure, sure, sure. I think that's why I wanted to play at the epistemological, ontological level with you. I'm interested though, because I also have a sense of a growing convergence. And that's why I like the fact that you do a big picture cognitive science, because I think you have to do big picture cognitive science to get that sense, to really get it."
},
{
"end_time": 6254.36,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6228.814,
"text": " I'm wondering, in your practice of doing cognitive science, how do you deal, because I agree with you about that convergence and I agree with you, how do you deal with the different ontologies? So the neuroscientist talks about neurons and does fMRI."
},
{
"end_time": 6283.302,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6254.906,
"text": " and the artificial intelligence person talks about programs and runs simulations, hoping that they become instantiations. The psychologist talks about working memory and does, you know, experiments on behavior. The linguist talks about deep structures and collects data about judgments of grammaticality. How do you... This question really concerns me because I think it"
},
{
"end_time": 6313.08,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6283.677,
"text": " It's part of, again, trying to turn cognitive science back towards the existential issue that's facing us. I don't mean existential in a sense of threat. I mean like how Kierkegaard would use the word existential in the meaning making. I go back to the point I made at the very beginning, right, that for a long time, the cognitive sciences, and I'll use that plural as opposed to cognitive science that tries to do a synoptic integration,"
},
{
"end_time": 6340.862,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6313.831,
"text": " The cognitive scientists, the cognitive sciences have promoted a fragmentation of what mind means in a profound way. And that fragmentation has, right, really, when people start to reflect, and they can, I see this in my students, right, they'll get caught up on, I don't know what this, I don't know what a mind is, because there's this cacophony of all, and then of course,"
},
{
"end_time": 6366.067,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6341.305,
"text": " If I don't know what a mind is, I don't know what I am, and I don't know how I relate to the world, you can see where this goes. The fragmentation of the ontology by the cognitive scientists is not separate from a lot of the suffering that people have because they don't find a stable framework in which to locate the phenomena of mind."
},
{
"end_time": 6394.735,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6366.783,
"text": " I'm asking this because, as I said, and you invoked wisdom a while back, and so I wanted to circle back to that. What wisdom have you acquired, cultivated, realized, I don't want to know what verb you want, for helping do this? Two things, getting the various disciplines to start to pursue integration rather than fragmentation, and connecting that to"
},
{
"end_time": 6416.51,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6396.271,
"text": " I think that the disciplines by and large are not very well incentivized to do science and philosophy."
},
{
"end_time": 6442.807,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6416.886,
"text": " That's something that we need to understand that there are institutions in which people go to work to feed their children. And a scientist is in some sense to me, someone who has a particular kind of personality. It's someone who very early on in the psychological development has decided to trust the analytical thinking more than their intuitions, than their feelings and their emotions and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 6472.688,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6443.217,
"text": " And typically this happens because they had Asperger's and the priors that they had when they interacted with other people socially failed in school. And so at some point they realized, I cannot trust my feelings because if I go by my intuitions, my interactions with the world are going to fail and I have to move to the analytical mode to make sense of the world. And if you are permanently in the analytical mode, that's a trauma mode, right? A healthy human being should understand that the purpose of analytical reasoning, which by itself is very brittle,"
},
{
"end_time": 6502.09,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6473.046,
"text": " is to go with your darkest emotions, those where you don't see clearly what's what and in which way to go. And so analytical reasoning is a very powerful tool for very narrow areas of understanding the world, and it's happened to be the ones that should be studied in the sciences. But it's wrong to present scientists as a lifestyle archetype and as the goal of education. Only a very small subset of people should be scientists, and the existence of scientists is very useful to the world, but being a scientist is largely not fun."
},
{
"end_time": 6530.196,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6502.995,
"text": " And so we see science currently as more like an employment program where we put people that are difficult to employ in the industry because we don't need that many people in the industry and teach them methods and then they apply these methods and we hope that the results cumulate. And the outcome is largely not that interesting because you're not being hired into a science to answer foundational questions. There are very few ways to answer foundational questions because the low-hanging fruits have been"
},
{
"end_time": 6552.602,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6530.196,
"text": " And so you don't actually need that many people working in the foundational disciplines and making foundational progress. And you're not incentivized to have ideas about foundational things. So among the very few people that are willing to offer answer to foundational questions and are so bold and crazy to do this, there seem to be in some sense three groups."
},
{
"end_time": 6562.244,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6553.558,
"text": " One of these groups is people that don't fully understand the depths of these questions and think that they have found a very simple answer that solves the problem without actually doing so."
},
{
"end_time": 6590.811,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6562.517,
"text": " These people tend not to be very interesting. So there are simplified notions of consciousness that do not explain the necessary and sufficient conditions for a system being conscious. And they might lead to models in neuroscience or in AI or in robotics that claim to do a certain thing, but they don't. And it's not that interesting that these exist. Then there is another type of mind that is very humble. And these people say, I don't actually know what the answer is. And I have the following questions."
},
{
"end_time": 6607.09,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6591.203,
"text": " and I'm aware of the following space of attempts to answer this and I am currently moving in this area of the space and this is what I'm seeing from where I'm currently standing and this is how I'm able to interact with others from this vantage point and I'm still in this exploration."
},
{
"end_time": 6637.807,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6607.927,
"text": " and so it's a very tentative position and so on and it's one that's also not being openly discussed very much because a scientist has to publish the things that they can hope to prove and not the things that they're seeing and most of the things that we're seeing as a possibility and most of the interesting answers on the realm of the possible cannot be established by an experiment because it's a possibility right so the possibility is often the most interesting things and possibilities are difficult to publish and discuss about exactly well said and the third group"
},
{
"end_time": 6666.152,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6637.995,
"text": " are the crazies. These are people that think that they have certainty and they are super smart and they go very deep and often the crazies are also among the most interesting ones but it also means that you have to parse them in the right way. So the crazies are for instance Jürgen Schmidhuber or Steven Wolfram and so on. These are people that for some reason aspire to greatness and force themselves to be great no matter the personal cost to them so they're not humble"
},
{
"end_time": 6691.852,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6666.152,
"text": " And they do have theories of everything that they are not shy to denote as such and put out there. And these ideas are often extremely interesting to bounce up against and try to understand them deeply. That's very interesting. Much in that was well said. I've been trying to talk about and model a form of interaction called theologos in which people are in the second group"
},
{
"end_time": 6720.145,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6692.244,
"text": " but are willing to talk about sort of ideas and proposals that come from the third group, that where people are very open to, as you said, a kind of humble exploration, an idea that you can help me correct, and I can help you self correct and we can work together. And we can get we can get to ideas that emerge between us that I can't get to on my own, you can't get to on your own. And that"
},
{
"end_time": 6736.067,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6720.435,
"text": " Openness to the possibility of genuine emergence bumps us up against what you call them the crazies because you one of the things you want to do is let some of those crazier ideas in because they help"
},
{
"end_time": 6766.766,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6737.039,
"text": " give you, it's like letting in a different sensei into the dojo for a bit, not for very long because the dojo will fall apart, but letting them in for a bit because you get a new conceptual vocabulary, a new theoretical grammar. And so I've been trying to model that process even in an academic setting. I've been trying to pursue the presentation of ideas about consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 6787.637,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6767.09,
"text": " the self, etc. in a dialogical manner, rather than in a monologue in which there's all kinds of claims about closure and certainty. So I think I agree with you, I think that this is ultimately, or at least not ultimately, deeply an institutional issue."
},
{
"end_time": 6817.449,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6788.2,
"text": " And institutions only change when there are alternative examples of attractive forms, new forms of practice. And so I've been trying to bring this new form of practice into the forefront as a way of trying to address a lot of the concerns usage brought up. So I think that spending time doing more of this is actually not it's not an ornament."
},
{
"end_time": 6843.507,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 6818.029,
"text": " It's not just a ceremony. It's not just a social gathering for cognitive science. It's actually essential for cognitive science if it's going to progress. I guess this is me also saying thank you to Kurt for doing this. And thank you also for you. You came here in good faith and you've been that way throughout. But I'm trying to make an argument for this being more central. And the problem is that the institution that is"
},
{
"end_time": 6864.258,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 6843.933,
"text": " Where we house the science, the university doesn't know how to deal with this emerging phenomena. It doesn't know how to deal with because of social media, because of this technology, because a lot of this understanding, this is all happening more and more and more. But when I, for example, when I try to bring this into the institution, the institution seems to still be bound"
},
{
"end_time": 6889.036,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 6864.497,
"text": " in sort of a Victorian paper and pencil mentality about how we evaluate things, how we evaluate the work people are doing. Like, for example, none of this, even though I think it's really important to the to the life of cognitive science, none of this would even show up on my CV. Because if I put it on my CV, it would just be ignored. And it seems to me that's a very problematic place that we have gotten in, we've gotten to."
},
{
"end_time": 6914.258,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 6890.299,
"text": " John, what would be an example of you bringing this idea of dialogue to the university and the university saying no? Like, what specifically did you propose? For example, I put out a series, The Illusive Eye with Greg Enriquez and Christopher Matsui-Pietro on the nature and function of the self. Untangling the world knot with Greg Enriquez, a psychologist about consciousness, and it was done like the"
},
{
"end_time": 6920.998,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 6914.258,
"text": " Did one with Zach Stein and Greg Enriquez on towards a meta psychology that is true to transformation."
},
{
"end_time": 6946.971,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 6921.442,
"text": " And to my mind, the kind of exploration of ideas and advancement of insightful arguments was better there. And I'm not trying to be self-congratulatory because other people are doing this, but it was better than a lot of the stuff that is typically site like you typically put on your CV to count as, right, that you're doing work in the discipline. You know, you know, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6977.125,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 6947.688,
"text": " That's that's what I'm trying to say. The discipline is no longer the place where the science is getting moat. Sorry, that was exactly the wrong word. The institution, the university is no longer the and I like working for the University of Toronto, by the way, I'm not trying to get myself out of a job. But right, the like, the institution is not the place really, where the kind of science we need now both for itself, and both for the culture is happening. That's the argument I'm making."
},
{
"end_time": 7002.381,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 6978.387,
"text": " There is no other place, right? It's not like there is a new heaven that has opened itself up for experiments and thoughts like this. There is a network of basically small events of workshops, conferences and so on that happens between the disciplines, but it's mostly that we do this on the side. Yes, exactly. We do this in addition to what we do in the sciences. In the same way as Michael"
},
{
"end_time": 7030.691,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7002.381,
"text": " Graziano or Tononi and many others basically have a daytime job in the sciences and the philosophical contributions that they do, they do on the side. It's also in many ways too fast. And it's not that we feel that I feel that I mistreated in this way. I understand why the institutional incentives are in the way they are and the reasonable and good natured reasons for this, for the most part, for why this is the way in which it is."
},
{
"end_time": 7059.582,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7030.981,
"text": " It just means that we need alternate ways of funding to make this happen. And we need alternate ways of organizing it to keep on this going it going on visit. I also want to just briefly make a case for the crazies. The reason why I'm not a crazy is because I'm not smart enough. I'm not smart enough to maintain the illusion that I see things that others are not seeing and often more clearly and better and with more focus than I can see them."
},
{
"end_time": 7084.94,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7059.906,
"text": " So basically I get humbled by my own inadequacy. And there are some people which are basically not that inadequate. So for them it takes many decades longer before they would get to the point where they are forced to humble themselves. So they can maintain an illusion of greatness that they might have developed in their adolescence as a protective measure for their own psychology and keep up with being great."
},
{
"end_time": 7114.292,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7085.213,
"text": " and if somebody who's really really smart is able to keep up the crazy greatness this notion of everybody else is confused and basically the only one who sees the solution and here it is basically this is an extremely valuable person to have around and they should be cherished and protected and doesn't mean that you have to believe everything that they say but they're very few people which are so bold and so daring that they sacrifice themselves in such a way. Yoshua, do you see that as a negative?"
},
{
"end_time": 7142.517,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7114.616,
"text": " It's because the way that I hear it, it sounds like, you know, when you're at a job interview and they say, so what are your weaknesses? You say I work too hard. So what are your weaknesses? Well, I'm not upset by the illusions of the crazies. I wouldn't present this as a weakness. The typical answer in this job interview would be, I'm too honest. Right. And then the other one says, why is that a problem? Don't give a fuck what you think."
},
{
"end_time": 7165.845,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7144.804,
"text": " Now, the problem is when you are in a job interview and you don't fit in, the issue is what is the thing that you actually want to do? Do you want to be part of that particular hierarchy of this particular kind of organization, of this particular kind of normativity? And do you think that you can actually help it along? Do you share the aesthetics of that place of work that you will be part of?"
},
{
"end_time": 7179.019,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7166.323,
"text": " And I found when I was in academia, I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed working with students. I found that I needed to defend a space of inquiry and the space of inquiry co-existed with the application of methods."
},
{
"end_time": 7199.48,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7179.36,
"text": " It was this thing that enabled me to say to a student that was not inspired, you shouldn't be here in my class if you don't like this, if you don't intrinsically want to do this. You're wasting your own time and attention and my time and attention and the time and attention of everybody who's there. Go have a relationship, go read a good book, go sit down in a cafe or watch a movie or go to another class."
},
{
"end_time": 7225.725,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7199.48,
"text": " Don't be here, because what we try to do is we try to abuse the machine of academia to do the things that we actually want to do, which is try to figure out our relationship to the world and make actual intellectual and philosophical and personal progress on certain questions that actually move us and that motivate us to be here and spend a portion of our precious, irreducible lifetime with each other on these problems."
},
{
"end_time": 7252.415,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7226.203,
"text": " So I don't find it difficult to defend, but I also understand that the machines that we are part of that we are serving are largely serving other goals. That was very well said. I guess for me, I want to, I guess I see more urgency now than there has been in the past. I agree with you about these institutions are set up the way they are for good reasons, etc. But"
},
{
"end_time": 7282.449,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7253.063,
"text": " I do think we are we're entering into very, very significant changes. You and I both think that, you know, strong AI is something that's very possible. I know you said because you said this and you and I both think this has, you know, just important ramifications beyond what a lot of people are thinking about. And that's just one example of the way in which this is accelerating and and"
},
{
"end_time": 7309.616,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7284.616,
"text": " and is corrosive to people's attempt to sift through and make sense, sift through the bullshit and make sense of their world. The work I did on the meeting crisis, the sense of bullshit, it's accelerating, it's accelerating exponentially. People are increasingly thinking there's more and more and more bullshit and more and more bullshit around. And I think"
},
{
"end_time": 7339.224,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7310.077,
"text": " The kind of stuff we're doing here together is the place, the arena, the dojo, in which we both train how to wrestle with that and exemplify how to wrestle with that. And so I think there's an urgency now to get, and I think COVID accelerated it in certain ways, to give more prominence to this kind of dialogical space and practice. So I guess for me,"
},
{
"end_time": 7368.951,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7340.691,
"text": " I want to push for more of this because the rates of suffering, both in the sense of distress and loss of agency, seem to be going up by several sort of objective markers. And so I'm concerned that I don't think the academic world is turning to this problem. And I think this is a better forum in which"
},
{
"end_time": 7379.172,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7369.36,
"text": " We can start to explore what we need to"
},
{
"end_time": 7410.674,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7381.954,
"text": " Part of what I was trying to put my finger on when I said, we need to be doing more of this. This is valuable. This is central. This shouldn't be on the sidelines. It should be in the center. And there's difficult tasks. There's very practical tasks of how do we make this more attractive to a wider audience of people? And how do we make it attractive so we can draw some of the first kind of people in? And how do we make it attractive so that we don't automatically exclude the crazies?"
},
{
"end_time": 7436.22,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7411.049,
"text": " I agree with that. I mean, but you don't want you don't want you don't want just sock. You don't want a room to fill with just Socrates, a bunch of Socrates. He was a tip-off. He didn't fit in. They killed him. And so I think these for me, these questions are are are becoming increasingly central about how do we make"
},
{
"end_time": 7464.326,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7436.715,
"text": " this what we're doing here into an attractive way of life for people. What do you mean by way of life? So what I mean by this is that, and I think you just said it, like, for me, exploring these ideas is not something I do to get sort of an intellectual orgasm. And oh, that was cool, right? Ultimately, I want to"
},
{
"end_time": 7490.947,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7465.043,
"text": " be able to explore these ideas in a way that can ameliorate people's sense of being disconnected from themselves, from the world, from each other. And so if I get a deeper understanding of the mind and consciousness and meaning, I want that to ultimately be in service of helping people"
},
{
"end_time": 7521.698,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7492.142,
"text": " to whatever degree they feel comfortable with and capable of, of making use of these ideas in translating them into practices, things that they do to individually and collectively to make better sense. Like, let's use a model, a historical, right? Christianity, and I'm not a Christian, I'm not proselytizing for it, was able to create this structure that went from like Aquinas to somebody's grandmother,"
},
{
"end_time": 7550.452,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7521.988,
"text": " and got you get them to interact together, coordinate together, work together, have a shared sense of connectedness, meaning. That's the kind of thing I think we need. I'm not proposing a religion here. I sometimes say I'm proposing a religion that's not a religion. That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about that these in the end, sorry, this sounds harsh. But in the end, I don't really care deeply about what you believe. I care about what you practice."
},
{
"end_time": 7579.48,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7550.845,
"text": " I care about how are you transforming yourself and how are you affording other people to transform themselves in a way that makes lives less beset by foolishness, more enhanced by wisdom and flourishing for individuals. That's what I ultimately care about. Did that answer your question? Yeah, what would happen if that goal of helping people contradicted the goal of, let's say, investigating reality, whatever that means?"
},
{
"end_time": 7605.93,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7580.077,
"text": " So for example, let's say you found out some truth via some scientific investigation that would destabilize people, that would make them feel worse, that would disconnect us. So then what do you do? You make the decision to not publish that, to not investigate that further? I guess my response to that is I have a certain kind of confidence"
},
{
"end_time": 7627.79,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7606.203,
"text": " in the interconnection between things being true and then ultimately being good. In fact, we have to view truth as a kind of good in order to explain what we're doing as scientists. There's something about, you know Nozick's experience machine, right? Let me give you an example from, I do this in my classroom."
},
{
"end_time": 7653.968,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7628.541,
"text": " I ask people, how many of you are in satisfying romantic relationships? Romantic relationships are really important in our culture because they sort of take the role of religion, right? Because you ask people, what do you need to be happy in a romantic relationship and what causes you the most suffering in romantic relationships? So, right? And I ask, how many of you are in satisfying romantic relationships? And you know, I get a certain percentage. I said, of these people,"
},
{
"end_time": 7683.439,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7654.309,
"text": " How many of you would want to know that your partner was cheating on you, even if that meant the destruction of the relationship? 95% of the people keep their hand up. There's a valuing, a meaning of being connected to what's real that seems to be, this is one of Plato's arguments, that seems to be kind of a meta desire. In addition to whatever we desire, we have a meta desire that what satisfies that desire is real."
},
{
"end_time": 7712.654,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7684.002,
"text": " What I want to say is there's a presumption in your question that there isn't an intrinsic value or goodness to discovering what's real, and I think there is. Can people transform themselves so they come into greater conformity to that?"
},
{
"end_time": 7740.469,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 7712.91,
"text": " Yeah, that's what I think it means to cultivate wisdom. And so I put I sort of put my trust, not in the particular metaphysics of the wisdom traditions, but the fact that we've had wisdom traditions, and we have reliably found people to become people to be capable of becoming wiser, and certain individuals to be wiser than others. So when I'm saying it, I have I put faith in those two things together. That's what I'm saying."
},
{
"end_time": 7762.176,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 7741.305,
"text": " We found that we don't have differences, at least not in the discussion that we had in the last couple of hours. We mostly had very similar approaches and ideas and we developed our terms together in ways that were very harmonic."
},
{
"end_time": 7783.541,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 7762.602,
"text": " We might have a difference in the reason why we do things. It seems to me that John has a different relationship to normativity than me. Maybe we can go into this question later. But basically from my perspective, it looks like John sees himself as a spiritual teacher and I don't have enough maturity"
},
{
"end_time": 7807.261,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 7783.916,
"text": " To see myself as a spiritual teacher with integrity, I also don't know what I would get out of this. My own observation of the meaning crisis is that it's inevitable because the civilization that we are part of doesn't have much of a future. And there is no way in which the civilization can be fixed without changing some of its core assumptions."
},
{
"end_time": 7830.23,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 7808.029,
"text": " So we sense this and it's reflected in the fact that our civilization is not projecting itself into the future. We have no models that we discuss with our children in school or in our institutions. We have no plans that go beyond the next few decades. It's not that we actually think about what will life on earth look like for our civilization in 500 years from now."
},
{
"end_time": 7859.957,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 7830.776,
"text": " And that's new. This was not true in the Christian society. They had an idea of what was going to happen in a few hundred years from then. And this idea might have been wrong, but they made plans for it. And some of these plans came to pass. And we don't have that kind of planning horizon anymore. So we basically are now in an organism as a hyper organism that is past its prime, that is in some sense visibly in its autumn and that is facing off against all sorts of existential risks."
},
{
"end_time": 7882.466,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 7860.401,
"text": " And we feel helpless at dealing with these risks. And as a result, we don't have a shared purpose. We might have a shared purpose as an individual, with a family, with children, with friends, but we don't seem to project this shared purpose anymore at a societal level. And there are only small groups within the societies, some evangelical cults and transhumanist cults and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 7904.292,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 7882.824,
"text": " that try to maintain the fiction of a future that they're acting with, but not at the level of the entire civilization. It is the level of this individual group. And our mainstream Weltgeist deals with this mostly by despair or denial. Yes. And or even an outright nihilism."
},
{
"end_time": 7927.227,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 7905.589,
"text": " And I don't have an argument against that nihilism, because I think that from the perspective of the civilizational hive mind this is justified. And if you want to build something new, we have to do this from the vantage point of the next civilization. And that's almost impossible to maintain the space in your own mind what the next civilization would be looking like and how to build it."
},
{
"end_time": 7952.688,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 7927.841,
"text": " So the only thing that I have to offer in terms of spiritual guidance is that I hug my friends. And that's not that much more. And so it's more, the possibility that I could offer somebody that I say, this is how you fix your life. This is how you fix your relationship to the world. This is how you fix your relationship to society. And this is how you fix your society itself, because they don't have these kinds of answers."
},
{
"end_time": 7961.527,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 7953.029,
"text": " I don't know what these answers would look like. I'm willing to look for them. I'm willing to look for them with others, but I'm not convinced that there is an answer."
},
{
"end_time": 7985.759,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 7962.125,
"text": " and instead there is more place that we can get to and this place comes from attempt to develop integrity and to be truthful and i agree with john that truth is crucial because truth is instrumental to good regulation it's even reflected in cybernetics in the good regulator theorem you cannot regulate reality when you're not truthful about it"
},
{
"end_time": 8013.183,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 7985.759,
"text": " So the attempt to bend your worldview, to make it more desirable, to deny the things that don't fit into the world that you prefer as the just one and so on, is not going to lead to a better world. It's going to lead to a world that is worse. And so you need, when you want to model the world, do this in a space that is independent of what you want to be true. So there need to be two parts of us. One that is modeling the world, this detachment."
},
{
"end_time": 8017.295,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8014.002,
"text": " It's not important who is looking at the world and why."
},
{
"end_time": 8044.889,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8017.91,
"text": " and another one where you make your personal bets and where you construct your aesthetics based on what you think is true. And this separation is something that is not a consensus in the disciplines that think about what the world should be looking like. So, for instance, there are very few sociologists that look at the world with detachment. They largely do this from a very local perspective that is congruent with what their friends think and that is basically characterized by the present ideology."
},
{
"end_time": 8072.892,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8045.247,
"text": " And I don't think that you can be ideological and truthful at the same time, where the analogy commits you to seeing the certain way of the things that are happening in the world, regardless of the facts that you are observing. And it makes you inclined to pick certain facts over others to support this particular kind of aesthetic. And for me, the aesthetic is something that needs to be developed independently of the reasoning about what is the case."
},
{
"end_time": 8100.589,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8074.206,
"text": " Most people that think normatively prefer to be part of the hivemind before they are truthful, autonomously. I have difficulty with the general notion of normativity. My own thinking is, when I do philosophy, primarily not normative. I'm thinking about everything that could be the case. I'm not thinking about what should be the case. Every should is an if-then."
},
{
"end_time": 8127.381,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8101.067,
"text": " There's a lot I have been in agreement with about what you said there about the meaning crisis. I guess part of what... I don't know if I'm a spiritual teacher or not, but nevertheless, perhaps what I would say is I think you were proposing a lot of what goes into the notion of wisdom."
},
{
"end_time": 8156.425,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8127.756,
"text": " a concern for the truth, the ability to detach from an egocentric perspective, pursuing integrity, et cetera. And I think it's one of the things we should do is consider increasing the wisdom of people. I think that's a viable project. And in conjunction with that, I think we should do what"
},
{
"end_time": 8186.152,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8157.022,
"text": " what has typically happened when civilizations have collapsed, the Bronze Age collapse or perhaps the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. You had the building of new communities and communities of communities that made possible new ways of life for people and were able to take, salvage what the"
},
{
"end_time": 8208.916,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8187.312,
"text": " Previous Civilization had done and exacted into the next civilization. A prototypical example of this is being somebody like Augustine. The barbarians are literally at the gate and he is shepherding sort of the Greco-Roman heritage into Christianity and he's modifying it. He's coming up with a new way of being. The autobiographical self comes into kind of awareness."
},
{
"end_time": 8238.575,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8209.309,
"text": " There's a new way of being a person, a new way of being a community, a new way of being in relationship to the world. I'm not saying he did this single-handedly, I'm just using it as a case, and he helps to build the possibilities of the next civilization. Now, I'm not arrogant, I hope I'm not so arrogant to think, and I know I'm Augustine and I know what it is that's going to be turned up. I think we should be getting a lot of people trying to build these models, these ways, because"
},
{
"end_time": 8265.452,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 8239.326,
"text": " Typically, if you have that kind of a translation process already in place, you get to the next civilization with much less suffering. I'm not convinced that we can, like you, that we can save this, what we have. But I guess I want to find out what is the best way individually and collectively of collecting the candles from what we have made"
},
{
"end_time": 8294.241,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 8265.845,
"text": " so that we can carry them into and make it possible for our children and so this is for me a way of trying to get back to a generational relationship like you were talking about where it's not just me here now in distraction or despair but trying to ask like and I don't mean this technologically or sociologically or politically trying to ask look for where are people trying to build"
},
{
"end_time": 8324.394,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 8294.616,
"text": " what looked like viable possible new ways for being in a civilization. And we know that this has been done in the past. And this isn't an algorithm. It can't be. But we can look at those historical figures. We can look at many of those historical examples and try and glean sort of the best lessons possible. That's what I'm proposing. I'm definitely not founding a religion or anything like that. I'm not the right person for the job. I don't want the job. And"
},
{
"end_time": 8351.305,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 8324.787,
"text": " So if that means I see myself as a spiritual practitioner, so be it. I'm fine with that, but I just wanted to clarify what I'm proposing. I'm proposing something that is possible. At least we have, I think, relevantly similar cases from history of where this has worked. You can see it, like I say, too. I've looked at carefully the axial revolution and also"
},
{
"end_time": 8379.07,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 8352.244,
"text": " I have a question for both of you. We'll start with Joscha. You mentioned that you have this relationship with your ideas, which is that you don't devote yourself to them. They're tentative. And I'm curious, in the past two years, what's an idea that you used to believe most that you no longer believe? And then what led you to that decision? That's for both of you, but we'll start with Joscha."
},
{
"end_time": 8407.995,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 8380.077,
"text": " I'm glad he has to go first. So let's say in the most recent past two years. It usually doesn't feel like a big revolution. It's more a gradual progression or sometimes a new vista opens up. And there are a few thoughts that now are interesting to me. That is, for instance, how can the system discover itself in the world?"
},
{
"end_time": 8432.142,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 8408.251,
"text": " that I see more central than before. There are a few notions that I take to be possible that I didn't explore before. So something that I'm exploring right now is, for instance, the idea of memory not still being stored in synaptic weights only, but being stored in the soma of neurons in the form of RNA."
},
{
"end_time": 8458.609,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 8432.756,
"text": " And this leads to a radical change in the way in which I think about the formation of memory and the execution of functions in the brain. And it's not normative in the sense that I now believe that we should be doing differently, but it changes the way in which I think about neural computation and leads me to envisioning new experiments that need to be done to figure out whether this is the case."
},
{
"end_time": 8489.121,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 8459.753,
"text": " And this is an example of where my perspective has shifted. Or another one is the role of consciousness. So for instance, I used to think that consciousness might be a side effect of the way in which cognition works in human brains. And that other systems that process information in the service of agency are not necessarily conscious. And while I still consider that to be possible,"
},
{
"end_time": 8509.258,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 8489.462,
"text": " I think it's also conceivable that consciousness at some shape or form is crucial to make sense of the world. Basically, perception is following gradients and it's converging to a certain state. And if you just follow a gradient, you don't even need to have memory of where you're coming from. But certain kinds of reality interpretation require construction."
},
{
"end_time": 8539.053,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 8509.872,
"text": " And construction cannot follow a gradient. Construction needs to make experiments and remember which experiments worked and why, and then recall this and use the knowledge of that. So it needs to make index memories of the operations that it performed. And it also requires some kind of central organization to construct. You need to develop a central plan and then act on that central plan. So you have some kind of top down localized imposition of a low dimensional function on the entirety of perception."
},
{
"end_time": 8567.841,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 8539.65,
"text": " And it could be that this coincides to a very large degree with the functionality of attentional consciousness and basically consciousness in the role of a government. And the government is an agent that is imposing an offset on the payout metrics of individual participants in the system to make the national equilibrium compatible with the common good. So it's basically overcoming local incentives in the system to follow a larger plan."
},
{
"end_time": 8584.872,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 8568.336,
"text": " So this government itself is not creating the incentives. The incentives are created by game theory, physics and an underlying dynamics of the system that is facilitating, for instance, society or that is facilitating the function of the brain. You will still have to look for foot and social interaction in all these things."
},
{
"end_time": 8613.712,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 8584.872,
"text": " Consciousness is channeling the motivation that we have. It's not creating it. It's creating a model of where we are. This is what we experience as reality and experience a model of what we should be doing. These are our purposes. But the emotive power in these purposes comes from our underlying motivation that is outside of consciousness, that is older than consciousness itself. On the other hand, we can see that basically all the mammals are conscious."
},
{
"end_time": 8633.114,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 8613.712,
"text": " And there's also something that I was not that acutely aware of before I started looking. But it seems to be that apparent in the interaction between animals and also the animals and humans that there is a mutual awareness of the awareness of the other. So these are things that my"
},
{
"end_time": 8663.814,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 8633.916,
"text": " Thinking has changed in the last few years and in part gradually, in part more radically. The most radical one is RNA based memory transfer, the possibility of that and the implications for that, which is just a very recent idea that I have. I don't know how long I'll hold on to this and what will come of this, but it's something that doesn't change my normative thinking in a fundamental way. And often it's these small changes to details of your technical worldview that can have a big change in your trajectory. John?"
},
{
"end_time": 8691.937,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 8664.053,
"text": " It was very cool, the consciousness as a government. I like that idea. It resonates with some of the stuff I've been thinking about. So maybe we could talk about that at some point in the future. So for me, I'm like Yosha. I mean, I often I'm aware of these things only retrospectively, not prospectively or introspectively. So I guess retrospectively, I'm noticing that I'm really"
},
{
"end_time": 8718.558,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 8692.585,
"text": " I'm focusing on this issue that we bumped up against a couple of times, which is normativity. And for a longest long time, I was very much like sort of like the problem that Habermas talks about. I saw these domains, the true, the good and the beautiful as separate from each other and autonomous. And, and then there was a hard fact value distinction, things like that. And I'm now"
},
{
"end_time": 8749.121,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 8719.292,
"text": " I'm now really seriously questioning that. I'm seeing more and more good arguments for the interpenetration of fact and value, and more and more arguments for the interpenetration, mutual affordance of truth, goodness, and beauty. And that's opening up other issues about the interconnection of affect and cognition"
},
{
"end_time": 8779.684,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 8749.701,
"text": " Um, and that, and like Yoshi, that leads into more sort of technical things. I think there's ways of integrating processes of relevance realization with predictive processing models. And I just reviewed a paper, um, it's for frontiers. I hope it gets published. I recommended to get published where people are exploring this convergence now in a really powerful way. Uh, one of my former students, um, Mark Miller does excellent work around this. And so considering a lot of this stuff,"
},
{
"end_time": 8803.251,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 8780.265,
"text": " much more deeply. So there's the downstream stuff about ways in which particular theories could be integrated together. And the upstream stuff is maybe the the the enlightenment, I mean, like the European enlightenment as a period of time, the enlightenment idea of the autonomy of the normativities is something we should go back"
},
{
"end_time": 8829.565,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 8803.797,
"text": " to questioning. A lot of the machinery behind, for example, the is-ought distinction, the fact-value distinction has actually been undermined by a lot of arguments. CaseFear has made a good case of that and others. So I'm not sure where I am on that. I'm reading some very good books by D.C. Schindler about that, but I'm really trying to get clearer about the relationship"
},
{
"end_time": 8857.09,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 8829.991,
"text": " between the true, the good and the beautiful to give the classical name on it. And then what that means about, well, being wise, how we best live our lives, because talking about how we best live our lives is a normative judgment. And how do all those three, if they aren't, I mean, part of the meaning crisis is also the fragmentation of these normativities. And we put them into weird competitions with each other. That was part of Habermas's argument."
},
{
"end_time": 8886.288,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 8857.875,
"text": " And if it's possible that we are moving beyond that model of the modularity of the normativities, but rather there, I'm not saying their identity, by the way, but their interpenetration and mutual affordance, inter affordance, that I think has important implications for how people go about judging what it is to lead the best kind of life. So that's where my thinking, I wasn't in that position. I wasn't tackling those issues. I wasn't"
},
{
"end_time": 8914.565,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 8887.159,
"text": " Reflecting on them. I wasn't reading about them three or four years ago. So that's a Significant change for me. I had I had a whole set of presuppositions And and just don't make this heroic I didn't sort of like oh bother that by reading people like those presuppositions have been slowly archaeologically excavated and I've come to be questioning them in a way that I had not foreseen Hear that sound"
},
{
"end_time": 8941.596,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 8915.503,
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{
"end_time": 9046.527,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 9031.152,
"text": " Anything from touchdown to threes, and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from any sport on PrizePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. PrizePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,"
},
{
"end_time": 9075.811,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 9046.783,
"text": " Okay, so this question comes from"
},
{
"end_time": 9098.985,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 9076.152,
"text": " Donald Hoffman, he wants to know, is space time an aspect of fundamental reality? And also, can there be a theory of everything? So you can tackle whichever one you want. And we'll start as usual with Joscha. No, it's not. The obvious giveaway is that the collapse of the waveform marks a point in your past"
},
{
"end_time": 9125.145,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 9099.565,
"text": " Beyond which you cannot obtain a model of events happening in time and space in a pinpointed fashion. That is one of the answers. Another one is that the traditional notion of time and space requires a temporal and spatial continuum. And the temporal and spatial continuum would require that you have basically an infinite granularity of things that are happening."
},
{
"end_time": 9145.828,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 9125.64,
"text": " which if you turn this into a constructive language means that you would have to process infinite amounts of information in a finite number of steps. And this leads in contradictions in the definition of language, which means we cannot properly define these terms without running into contradictions. It's also not necessary to do this. So we can create"
},
{
"end_time": 9168.387,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 9146.152,
"text": " constructs that allow us to model the function of the universe to a very low level without going to continuity. So I don't think that space-time itself exists, but it is an apparent thing that happens at a certain level of core screening. And there are properties of space-time, which means the regularity and flatness and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 9190.026,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 9168.643,
"text": " that"
},
{
"end_time": 9217.295,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 9190.589,
"text": " There is a reason why the universe around us looks as if it was happening in a nearly continuous space and with a nearly continuous time. John? So I guess Donald's question, I guess I would want to talk to him about fundamental ontology. Do I think that time and space are the ultimate reality?"
},
{
"end_time": 9240.708,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 9217.756,
"text": " No, I don't think so. I think I heard Yoshua saying something similar to that. That doesn't, by the way, mean that I think they're an illusion, and I don't think Yoshua was saying that either. I think we have to be very careful about when we're talking about these kinds of levels, because our"
},
{
"end_time": 9267.346,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 9241.135,
"text": " It's not the case, and this is going to go towards my answer the second thing, it's not the case that we can find all the explanations we want at any particular level. And there's lots of arguments for this, but I don't think there's one level from which all the explanations can be generated. And so in that sense, if what you mean by a theory of everything is a theory in which all explanations are reduced,"
},
{
"end_time": 9297.278,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 9267.756,
"text": " to, I don't know, quantum mechanic explanations. And even if those are explanations, it's questionable. I don't see that as a viable project. So do I think time and space are ultimate reality? No, I don't think that means they're an illusion. And I think we should talk about there being something like a levels of reality."
},
{
"end_time": 9324.07,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 9298.439,
"text": " I think that things not only emerge out of the quantum base, they're also constrained by, you know, law-like features of reality, which aren't properly talked about as being in time and space. So, like, I don't know what it would mean to say, like, that two plus two equals four, is that temporal, spatial, that makes no sense."
},
{
"end_time": 9352.125,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 9324.548,
"text": " Even something like E equals MC squared, it doesn't make sense to talk about it being here or there or starting then or there. And of course, there's lots of other entities like this. So we have emergence up out of something like Yoshua was talking about a non-temporal spatial probability realm. And we also have higher order constraints that also don't seem to be spatial temporal."
},
{
"end_time": 9379.923,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 9352.568,
"text": " And I think of time and space as caught between that emergence and their emanation. I think part of what we're doing when we're playing with quantum mechanics and relativistic stuff and trying to reconcile them, this is not a perfect mapping, but we're trying to get clear about how those levels are appropriately real together. And so that would be my answer to both questions."
},
{
"end_time": 9410.026,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 9380.196,
"text": " I don't think they're ultimately real. I don't think that says they're an illusion. And I don't think there is a theory of everything, because I don't think if by theory of everything, you mean, I'm going to pick one level, and that's the level at which I will be able to explain everything. I mean, Yoshi, for example, and he's perfectly legitimate for him doing this is not a criticism. He picks a computational level, right? And, right, and that's the level from which he works. But that doesn't mean that"
},
{
"end_time": 9425.179,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 9410.316,
"text": " Like, he thinks, I don't think he should respond to this criticism, which I take to be a pseudo criticism. Oh, but the computational is ultimately just, right, thermodynamic or something like that."
},
{
"end_time": 9448.319,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 9425.862,
"text": " Thermodynamics is a way to talk about computation. It's the other way around. So in some sense, there, you know, has a class parent sphere, maybe it's a famous book that he has written in which he describes somewhat metaphorically, a world in which people do science and philosophy by playing a certain game with glass beads."
},
{
"end_time": 9470.913,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 9448.558,
"text": " Yes, this game is never completely explained how it works, right? Yeah. So you are free to project whatever you want. And so you can imagine it as something like an extremely complicated avacus in which you are shifting these glass beads around according to very intricate rules. And it allows you to to reason about the world in some kind of automatic fashion."
},
{
"end_time": 9499.94,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 9471.63,
"text": " And you're playing it against each other, but you are playing it according to rules. And the individual that is playing it is not crucial for this game at all. It's the rules of the game itself. And so I think what happened with this computation is that we discovered a glass-palin spiel and we discovered the equivalence of all glass-palin spiels that can possibly be constructed. And whenever we found something new to express ideas, we also discovered for this new thing to express ideas,"
},
{
"end_time": 9530.043,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 9500.265,
"text": " It's a good book. I love Hermann Hesse. I recommend the book."
},
{
"end_time": 9559.309,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 9530.845,
"text": " Yeah, I guess I tend to be a little bit more pragmatic in the philosophical sense about scientific explanations, and that they're always bound to my interests, my concerns, the concerns of my group. And again, you've said things that are not inconsistent with that. So, well, I don't know if there's anything more to say. I mean, that could launch us into another long discussion, perhaps."
},
{
"end_time": 9589.087,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 9559.565,
"text": " But I think I've tried to answer the question. I don't think they're ultimately real. I think they are intermediate, literally real, right? In some ways, as I've tried to say, that doesn't mean they're an illusion. And I'm suspicious of grand reductive explanations, maybe more suspicious than Yoshua, because I've watched them fail in the history of science and the history of philosophy."
},
{
"end_time": 9613.626,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 9589.548,
"text": " I think more, and it's unclear whether or not what Yoshi is proposing does a reduction or does what I'm now going to talk about. What I see now is kind of reciprocal reconstruction between these various levels of discourse. I see the AI people changing the minds of the neuroscientists and vice versa."
},
{
"end_time": 9640.708,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 9614.155,
"text": " and the AI people changing the minds of the psychologists and vice versa. It's not that any one person claims to have this. And I don't know if the glass bead game would be a game of reduction to itself or a game in which we can really facilitate the most optimal kind of reciprocal reconstruction between our various ontologies and strategies of measuring and explaining the world. So that's how I would answer that."
},
{
"end_time": 9670.998,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 9641.118,
"text": " Sadface has a question. Can we get a discussion on their perspectives on the Chinese room thought experiment? So should I go first this time? Sure. So the Chinese room, first of all, I don't think it's an argument. I think it's a demonstration of arguments already that are already prefigured in Descartes. But nevertheless, I think Searle deserves credit. I think he's right about sort of the standard system and room reply."
},
{
"end_time": 9700.691,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 9671.63,
"text": " Sorry, the sort of system and robot reply. That's what I meant to say. I don't think he has an answer to the virtual machine reply because he didn't foresee it. But I think he would respond to the virtual machine reply by invoking his argument about multiple realizability and that multiple realizability indicates that an entity and AIs presupposes multiple realizability."
},
{
"end_time": 9730.179,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 9701.288,
"text": " AI is not, any AI is not intrinsic, does not intrinsically exist. It's only attributed because of multiple realisability. I think the response to that is I don't think the distinction between attributed and intrinsic is as clean as he makes it. For example, is the distinction itself intrinsic or attributed? That's a very deep problem. And secondly, we do think that there are things that are multiply realisable that nevertheless intrinsically exist."
},
{
"end_time": 9760.401,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 9730.606,
"text": " combustion, erosion, evolution are clear examples. So I don't think his intuitive criteria for splitting intrinsic and attributed is sufficient. I think we have to look at other accounts of how we think things have a kind of independent existence from us. And so the degree to which things are, we think things are self organizing in some fashion guarantees them a kind of autonomous existence"
},
{
"end_time": 9790.691,
"index": 396,
"start_time": 9760.759,
"text": " that Searle needs to acknowledge. And because he invokes biology and other things, I think he is ultimately committed to what I just said. So I think the Chinese room argument doesn't settle anything in and of itself. I think you get shifted to the virtual machine reply. The virtual machining reply would get addressed by Searle's arguments about multiple realisability and things being intrinsic or attributed. And I think that's where the crux of the argument is."
},
{
"end_time": 9820.538,
"index": 397,
"start_time": 9790.981,
"text": " And I think we don't always think that things that are multiply realizable are necessarily attributed. And I gave you some instances. And I think that's where the argument bottoms out. And that would be my reply to the Chinese argument. It seems to me that there are things that are multiply realizable, but we nevertheless take to be intrinsic, that they exist intrinsically, not just by our attribute. Money"
},
{
"end_time": 9847.654,
"index": 398,
"start_time": 9821.357,
"text": " only exists by attribution. We all agree it exists and exists, and if we stop agreeing, it doesn't exist. I don't think combustion, erosion, or revolution, which are multiply realizable, exist in that way. And so I think his clean dichotomy breaks down. And so that would be my answer. I think it's important work. I teach this, I teach Searle, I teach the Chinese room argument, but I teach this whole series of arguments"
},
{
"end_time": 9875.401,
"index": 399,
"start_time": 9847.995,
"text": " and it gets down to some very fundamental issues that Searle's argument and his intuitions about how you distinguish the intrinsic from the attributed, that's not well argued. And he doesn't, for example, deal with the cases I just proposed to you of things that are clearly multiply realizable and intrinsically exist. So his idea that if it's multiply realizable, it must be attributed seems to be falsifiable."
},
{
"end_time": 9905.111,
"index": 400,
"start_time": 9875.947,
"text": " The multiple realisability is a stand-in for something deeper. It has to do with the fact that causal structure can be insulated from the substrate. And to insulate causal structure from the substrate means that you now have a causal description that happens independently of the underlying physics. For instance, the stock market could work in different universes."
},
{
"end_time": 9929.224,
"index": 401,
"start_time": 9905.64,
"text": " The stock market in some sense is an independent causal structure and as soon as you have Turing machines that can be built in many kinds of universes, you can build causal structure on top of these Turing machines that is arbitrary. You could build a computer game in other universes as long as you can build a computer in these other universes. And this computer game can have arbitrary physics like a computer game can have."
},
{
"end_time": 9953.131,
"index": 402,
"start_time": 9929.667,
"text": " And in a sense, I think that money would also exist if you stop believing in it, as long as we have functional mechanisms that implement the response to money. So as long as you have banks implemented in software and ATMs and stock markets and Amazon is accepting money and so on and so on, right, the money would retain its functional character independent of the beliefs of people."
},
{
"end_time": 9978.865,
"index": 403,
"start_time": 9953.575,
"text": " And so we have updated in the sense because we no longer just see money as an agreement between people, but this agreement between people has been extended into machinery that we have built in the world that works independently of the beliefs that people have. And this leads us to the question of what is software? And software is not a thing, right? Software is something else. In which sense does software exist?"
},
{
"end_time": 9992.056,
"index": 404,
"start_time": 9979.531,
"text": " The best answer that I have so far discovered is that software is a physical law. The physical law says if you for instance arrange matter in this particular way, the following thing will happen."
},
{
"end_time": 10016.459,
"index": 405,
"start_time": 9992.756,
"text": " And this is true for software, right? So no matter where you are in the universe, in which universe you are, if you produce the following functional arrangement of things, the following thing will happen. This is what software is about. So the programmer, in some sense, is discovering by constructing certain very peculiar circumstances, a very specific physical law. I just want to interrupt. That's really cool."
},
{
"end_time": 10045.742,
"index": 406,
"start_time": 10016.561,
"text": " I thought when I stumbled on this insight that it was good insight that basically started to make sense, right? Because it's an apparent pattern in the interaction of many parts."
},
{
"end_time": 10070.247,
"index": 407,
"start_time": 10046.152,
"text": " That's very good. I like that. That's very good. That's very good. So this also means because I think that mental states are best understood as software states, that the ontological status of our mental states is different from the ontological states of the one that we attribute to physical things. So this has to do with, for instance, the notion of identity of a mental state."
},
{
"end_time": 10087.91,
"index": 408,
"start_time": 10070.247,
"text": " That is similar to the identity of a physical law, which means it's not this point-wise identity. It's a functional identity. And now let's go back to the original Chinese room argument is very simplistic in the sense like it's a children's story myth."
},
{
"end_time": 10114.019,
"index": 409,
"start_time": 10087.91,
"text": " that Searle himself doesn't believe in. And it's an argument that is by Searle when he repeats it today made in bad faith. Searle is affiliated with this, his actual contributions to philosophy have been largely an extension of Austen's speech act theory that are boring and wouldn't give rise to fame. But the Chinese womb is somebody that everybody understands because it interfaces with certain intuitions and it's an intuition pump."
},
{
"end_time": 10132.108,
"index": 410,
"start_time": 10114.855,
"text": " And if you disassemble these intuitions and try to make them more distinct and more clear, then many of them fall apart. And Searle is aware, because he's not stupid, he's a very smart individual, of many of the ways in which they fall apart. But he is still repeating the original Chinese Wum argument, because it's his brand."
},
{
"end_time": 10161.305,
"index": 411,
"start_time": 10133.183,
"text": " So it's not because he believes in it. And if you actually read this work, he is aware of many of the counter arguments and he knows that he needs to go into a few levels of complications to have an interesting argument, to have an interesting case that he's making. So the superficial level of the Chinese room argument is maybe not that interesting. A slight extension that is more interesting is the Chinese brain argument. That's also aware of. And the Chinese brain argument suggests that"
},
{
"end_time": 10185.589,
"index": 412,
"start_time": 10162.159,
"text": " Instead of having this library with books in it, in which you execute the algorithm, we use a different implementation of that whole thing. And instead, what we do is we take a mechanization of the neuron itself. So if we accept that what the brain is doing is facilitated by the interaction of neurons, the neuron has to follow certain rules in order to make that happen."
},
{
"end_time": 10210.657,
"index": 413,
"start_time": 10186.084,
"text": " And maybe we can spell out these rules in our thought experiment and then we assign a Chinese person to a neuron. And maybe we need a few more. Maybe we need 86 billion Chinese people instead of 1.4, but it's a thought experiment, so not a problem at all. And now instead of neurons, we have Chinese which follow these rules. Or we could use machines instead of the Chinese that are following these rules."
},
{
"end_time": 10237.568,
"index": 414,
"start_time": 10210.981,
"text": " And so I think that this matching between a neuron and a Chinese person is not completely absurd on the face of it. Of course, it would be much larger and we blow it up. And now Sir would say, of course, the Chinese brain doesn't have the necessary and sufficient conditions to produce a conscious mind and then access to meaning. So it doesn't change anything, whether the Chinese room or the Chinese brain is performing these operations."
},
{
"end_time": 10257.432,
"index": 415,
"start_time": 10237.568,
"text": " The Chinese brain is still not able to speak Chinese, because the individual identities of the Chinese people and their knowledge does not interfere in any way with their emulation of the functionality of individual neurons. So now if we have established this case, we would say the Chinese brain is not conscious, but your brain is conscious."
},
{
"end_time": 10284.77,
"index": 416,
"start_time": 10257.756,
"text": " Let's see where is the boundary between those two systems. So let's take your brain blow it up until a person and a new one have roughly the same size to change the time. So it doesn't matter how much the Chinese need to talk to each other to make the new world functionality happening and send messages back and forth. So let's keep this an identity. And now we take basically take your neurons and so accepts that neurons are facilitating mental activity. He is not"
},
{
"end_time": 10312.961,
"index": 417,
"start_time": 10284.77,
"text": " So now let's replace step by step the neurons by some other machinery, for instance, Chinese people or machines that have neural-like functionality. And so at some point says this loses the ability to be conscious. So the consciousness is drowning out of the system by this replacement process. And what this means is that Searle"
},
{
"end_time": 10342.688,
"index": 418,
"start_time": 10313.285,
"text": " has a strong anti-functionalist position. He basically says that the function of the individual parts is not producing the essential behavior. There is somehow an essence. He's an essentialist. And I don't know how to get essentialism to work, because nobody has ever seen an essence. We can talk about an essence, but it's epiphenomenal. And the problem with epiphenomenalism is the following. Epiphenomenalism is, if you go back to our dualism from the beginning of our conversation today,"
},
{
"end_time": 10367.654,
"index": 419,
"start_time": 10343.148,
"text": " It's the idea that there is maybe a read access from the mind, where the mind is reading physics, but no write access from the mind into physics. So it's not violating the causal closure of physics. But there is a problem with epiphenomenalism. And that is the fundamental experience that you don't think you can explain in the physical mechanism is not driving anything of what you are saying, including your utterances of beliefs."
},
{
"end_time": 10384.309,
"index": 420,
"start_time": 10368.131,
"text": " So when an epiphenomenalist says, but I feel and this cannot be explained by physics, this is caused by physics, right? Because the epiphenomenalist has to move their mouse or move their fingers to express the statement. And all these movements are caused by an entirely mechanical process."
},
{
"end_time": 10411.971,
"index": 421,
"start_time": 10384.753,
"text": " The true feeling which happens next to the physical mechanical part of their mind, the philosophical zombie and so on, is not driving any behavior. So basically there would be this locked in epiphenomenalism that would helplessly watching their body make statements in favor or against epiphenomenalism, but there would be no causal relationship between the epiphenomenalism. So no epiphenomenalist is an epiphenomenalist because they have phenomenal experience that cannot be explained by physics. That is the issue here."
},
{
"end_time": 10434.821,
"index": 422,
"start_time": 10412.671,
"text": " and so if sir goes down that path he goes down to a very inconvenient place that i don't know how to resolve okay john i know that you have to get going so how about i read the last question if it would take too long for you to reply then send me an email and then i'll read it when i'm re-editing this podcast sure okay sure so the last question comes from xanthias he says"
},
{
"end_time": 10462.193,
"index": 423,
"start_time": 10435.043,
"text": " Or she says, these models of consciousness seem to focus on explaining the production of intelligence or a simulation, but it isn't necessarily clear to me why a simulation should be able to perceive slash experience itself. If we think of metaconsciousness as a combination of intelligence and consciousness, the model seems to focus mainly on the rise of intelligence in metaconsciousness. How do you explain the ability to perceive slash experience the simulation?"
},
{
"end_time": 10489.309,
"index": 424,
"start_time": 10464.804,
"text": " It's important to ask that question, but it's important to not ask that question the wrong way. You can always ask what it is like, and this is like Moore's thing about the good. I can ask that for any proposal."
},
{
"end_time": 10516.032,
"index": 425,
"start_time": 10490.179,
"text": " You can even ask that, well, you know, what it's like is to have qualia. Well, what's it like to have qualia? Do I have qualia of my quality? Like you have to you like there and this is the difficulty you have to come to a place where you're saying that's what it is like to be what it is like. And we didn't get into it too much. But like I said at the very beginning, that primary sense of relevance and I think is a big piece"
},
{
"end_time": 10545.111,
"index": 426,
"start_time": 10516.323,
"text": " of what it's likeness. It's why things stand out and are salient and are backgrounded. It's why things are aspectualized for us, to use one of Searle's notions. And many people are converging on the idea that the function of consciousness is this kind of higher order relevance realization. And that's why it overlaps with working memory and attentional machinery. So what it's like"
},
{
"end_time": 10574.326,
"index": 427,
"start_time": 10546.391,
"text": " If that's right, if what it's like is this ability to do salience landscaping, to have this dynamic texture of how things are relevant to you. If that's a big part of what it's like, and I think it is, by the way, because all of those in the pure consciousness event, all of those other things that are so beloved, all the adjectival qualias and all the other things, they go away and consciousness doesn't. So those things can't be necessary conditions for consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 10603.814,
"index": 428,
"start_time": 10575.094,
"text": " If that's a significant part of what it's like, then being intelligent is also that. Being intelligent is this capacity to zero in on relevant information, exclude relevant information. That's why you get high correlations between measures of general intelligence and measures of working memory. But of course, there's deep anatomical relations between the machinery of working memory and attention"
},
{
"end_time": 10633.626,
"index": 429,
"start_time": 10604.104,
"text": " and fluid intelligence and consciousness. So I think the question is now being to a place where I want to say, no, no, no. And by the way, notice how you run on that. You generally attribute consciousness where you attribute high orders of intelligence. You track them together. Like Yasha, I go further. I don't even eat mammals."
},
{
"end_time": 10662.619,
"index": 430,
"start_time": 10633.831,
"text": " because of that conclusion about mammals. And so for me, right, there has to be a level at which you accept an identity statement. Because like I said, you can always play the game no matter what. That is what if I say X is what it is like, you can then then you can just do all but what it is it like to write X, you have to come to a place where you accept the identity claim."
},
{
"end_time": 10688.285,
"index": 431,
"start_time": 10664.36,
"text": " And I'm proposing to you that if you look into the guts of intelligence, at least general intelligence, fluid intelligence, and then you look into the guts of consciousness, and where do we need consciousness? We seem to need consciousness for situations that are novel, that are complex, that are ill-defined, and situations that don't have those demands, we can make automatic, unconscious. That's a good point made by Bournset."
},
{
"end_time": 10715.401,
"index": 432,
"start_time": 10689.121,
"text": " I don't think the questions about intelligence and consciousness are ultimately separable questions. And I think there's good reasons for that. I've just given you some. And therefore, I think at some level, and maybe Yoshua will like this, when a system is sufficiently intelligent, it's going to be conscious. That's what I would argue."
},
{
"end_time": 10741.715,
"index": 433,
"start_time": 10716.254,
"text": " for the reasons I've just given and asking me but what is it like to be intelligent or what's it like to be like notice you don't ask the question of what what is it like to be conscious in the sense of what's behind it right you have to come to a level at which you say no that's what that's this this is what it is liking is this is the function it's performing this is the kind of process it is"
},
{
"end_time": 10769.889,
"index": 434,
"start_time": 10743.336,
"text": " If not, if you don't put some bound on where that identity is possible, then you just get an infinite regret aggressive this question, because no matter what I pause it for you, you can step back and say, but what is it like to x? And then I'll say, well, what's it like to x is to y. And you'll say, but what is it like to y? This is like the four year old ask you why all the time, right? You have to come to a place. And what I can't give you is I can't give you a phenomenological experience of that."
},
{
"end_time": 10792.91,
"index": 435,
"start_time": 10770.401,
"text": " Because you're trying to ask how phenomenological experience is itself possible. What I can give you are these plausible arguments about overlapping functionality, etc. That's how I would answer that question. Okay, let me try. So there is an issue, for instance, with free will. Free will is an intermediate representation, I think."
},
{
"end_time": 10822.654,
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"text": " Free will is what decision making under uncertainty looks like from your own perspective between discovering the first person perspective and deconstructing it again. And once you have deconstructed your first person perspective, you basically realize that there is a particular procedure that you are following when you are making your decisions. And when you observe yourself following that procedure, you will not have an experience of free will. It's just we rarely get to the point in our short lives where we fully deconstruct this."
},
{
"end_time": 10846.92,
"index": 437,
"start_time": 10823.473,
"text": " And I just give this example to argue for the possibility. And I'm not sure there's no certainty there that consciousness might be an intermediate representation. It's best the simplification of the state of affairs in which we are in before we automate all the necessary behaviors that an intelligent system might want to exhibit in when it's being confronted with the world in which we are in."
},
{
"end_time": 10876.749,
"index": 438,
"start_time": 10847.995,
"text": " The reason why we experience things is not because physical systems would be capable of doing so. It's quite the opposite. Neurons cannot experience what it would be like to be a person that is confronted with a complex world and that changes its attitudes in response to what's happening to it in this complex world. But for the organization of the neurons that is controlling the behavior of the organism, it would be very useful to have this"
},
{
"end_time": 10903.507,
"index": 439,
"start_time": 10877.295,
"text": " a knowledge of what it would be like to be a person that is changing its attitudes in response to what's happening to it. So what the neurons are doing is they implement a model of what that would be like, a simulation of what that would be like. In the same way as the neurons create a simulation of a Euclidean universe with objects that bump into each other and have causal interaction, the neurons create the model of agents that care about"
},
{
"end_time": 10930.691,
"index": 440,
"start_time": 10903.797,
"text": " future states and how they play out and make decisions about this. And one of these agents is going to be a model of the organism itself and the behavior that motivates the organism. And the reason why we experience things is not because we are in the brain. It's because we are in that model. We are in that simulation. We are in that dream that is woven by the brain to explain its own behavior. We experience things for the same reason that a character in a novel experiences things. It's because it's written in the story."
},
{
"end_time": 10956.886,
"index": 441,
"start_time": 10931.391,
"text": " And the story that we experience of course is not a linear narrative made up of words. It's a more complicated world. It's a causal structure that contains the necessary properties to simulate physics and personality and agency and so on. And we find ourselves in that dream. So our experience of the world is virtual. It's a result of the capacity of neurons to dream and to create dreams."
},
{
"end_time": 10977.739,
"index": 442,
"start_time": 10959.872,
"text": " There was a question that came from Anil Seth, Professor Anil Seth, and there's a podcast of Anil Seth on this channel if you'd like to check it out, on consciousness. Professor Anil Seth asks,"
},
{
"end_time": 11004.377,
"index": 443,
"start_time": 10978.387,
"text": " Yoshua responded to me via email and said, Because of this, I think it's likely that intelligent, autonomous sense-making agents with similar complexity as ours"
},
{
"end_time": 11016.613,
"index": 444,
"start_time": 11004.377,
"text": " may be considered conscious in ways that are comparable to ours, even if they run on a silicone substrate. There is an important caveat. Our computers provide some functionality which is hard to achieve in the brain."
},
{
"end_time": 11045.299,
"index": 445,
"start_time": 11017.022,
"text": " Thank you both for coming. The audience thanks you."
},
{
"end_time": 11074.957,
"index": 446,
"start_time": 11045.708,
"text": " There were, I think, 500 people at its peak, and right now it's around 430 or so. So it hovered from 400 to 500. Thank you all. Thank you, Josje. Thank you, John. Thank you, Kurt. Thank you for setting this up. It was a very pleasant conversation. I was surprised that we don't seem to have that many disagreements. Well, maybe it's the level we were talking at. I sort of wanted to talk at a very fundamental ontological level."
},
{
"end_time": 11104.838,
"index": 447,
"start_time": 11076.51,
"text": " I wanted to understand you much more than just sort of simply debate you. Likewise. And I think that we were both bound by the same rules of the glass pen and spiel in a way. Yes. Yes. Yes. Very good. So thank you very much. It's a great pleasure meeting you. I enjoyed this conversation. Thank you very much. Take care of both of you. And Yoshi, you'll send me your audio. I will."
},
{
"end_time": 11134.326,
"index": 448,
"start_time": 11105.162,
"text": " Phrasel14 wants to know what I consider Thomas Metzinger on the program. I don't know who that is."
},
{
"end_time": 11164.206,
"index": 449,
"start_time": 11135.026,
"text": " So I will look into that. I'll make a note. Yes, I should let you know that there's a sponsor of today's episode and it's a new one. It's a small podcast by the name of the Anagogy podcast. I'll type it here. And it's run by someone named Tiago who reached out to me and he touches on similar themes. So if you look at, so that person is who is responsible for bringing this talk together. Thank you, Tiago. Okay. I guess I should get going. If there are any quick questions for me,"
},
{
"end_time": 11184.053,
"index": 450,
"start_time": 11164.667,
"text": " Then I'll answer right now. If not, then I will say goodbye to you all and get something to eat. Okay, so is there any chance of having Nima Arkani Hamed on the channel? I've reached out to Nima several times. It turns out that my brother went to university with him studying physics at the same time. So I'll see if I can use that connection, though they parted ways after graduate school."
},
{
"end_time": 11213.814,
"index": 451,
"start_time": 11185.196,
"text": " Lisa Feldman Barrett. Yes, she's on the list, though I need to look into her work. Edvin wants to know if I expected to have more disagreements. I thought I was surprised at what Yoshi said where he said, well, we agree more than we disagree. I thought it was mainly filled with disagreements or more about clarifications than disagreements, which can be their own disagreement. Julio wants to know would I get a traditional Advaita monk? The answer is yes. And if you take a look at this video that I have about the 2022 plans, you'll see that I do"
},
{
"end_time": 11244.121,
"index": 452,
"start_time": 11214.872,
"text": " have a great interest in speaking with people from the more Eastern ends of the philosophical spectrum. So yes, the answer is yes, and that'll be toward the latter half of the year. Now, the reason for why it's so far away is because it my background is in math and physics. So let's say I'm supposed to let's say I'm going to be interviewing someone for their theory of everything, like let's say Garrett Lisey, it'll be much easier for me to understand his theory than it would be for me to understand someone who's an Advaita monk."
},
{
"end_time": 11268.353,
"index": 453,
"start_time": 11244.804,
"text": " It would take much more time, because I'd like to implement some meditative strategies. That is, I'd like to meditate, some meditation practice, in order to experientially understand what they're saying. And it's not... it's not trivial to me. And I don't take it lightly."
},
{
"end_time": 11298.729,
"index": 454,
"start_time": 11268.729,
"text": " I don't know if he's a materialist. I think it would be closer to materialism. One of my goals with this Theolocution was going to be that... Luckily, I didn't have to interject much. I thought that what was going to happen was they were going to be difficult to follow because much of what they say, and this is evidenced in the comment section of any of their videos, people can't follow. People have a difficult time understanding because it's so steeped in cognitive scientific jargon."
},
{
"end_time": 11326.92,
"index": 455,
"start_time": 11299.343,
"text": " terminology that's unfamiliar to most. And then on top of that with Yoshabok, there's computer science analogies. And then on top of that, there's Yoshabok's idiolect, like his personal language, where the analogies between computer science and reality are made in a manner that is unique to him. And he's so familiar with his own model that I don't think him nor John Vervecky are aware"
},
{
"end_time": 11344.923,
"index": 456,
"start_time": 11327.176,
"text": " when they're speaking above or below someone. And I was thinking that I would have to step in and slow down and break down sentences. However, that didn't need to happen at all. Okay. Well, thank you, everyone. Thank you and have a great rest of your day."
},
{
"end_time": 11367.005,
"index": 457,
"start_time": 11347.858,
"text": " The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you."
}
]
}No transcript available.