Know Thyself
E130 - Gregg Braden: Artificial vs Ancient Intelligence: The Rise of Tech Without Losing Our Power
Tue, 07 Jan 2025
Scientist Gregg Braden is back on Know Thyself today for a deeper dive into the inherent beauty of humanity and the technology that threatens it. Pulling on the threads of our last conversations, Gregg opens up about the current state of the world: from transhumanism to artificial intelligence, giving a warning message about these innovations. He provides a reframe on what we’ve been told about human potential: revealing that we are far greater than we know and these technologies threaten that very greatness. Our discussion encompasses a range of critical topics, including the ongoing struggle between good and evil on Earth, the pivotal Year 2030, and the Future of Humanity. Furthermore, Gregg draws intriguing parallels to popular culture, exploring how films like "The Matrix" serve as allegories for deeper truths about our reality, prompting us to question the nature of existence itself. Sleep Better with the Birch Mattress - Save 25% Off Sitewide + 2 Free Eco-Rest Pillows with Mattress Purchase:http://birchliving.com/knowthyselfAndré's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books___________0:00 Intro 1:59 Technology is Evolving Faster than Our Morality11:41 Is Transhumanism an Inevitable Phase of Evolution?19:30 Who’s Really Controlling the Show?26:13 Why We Can’t Manufacture Consciousness31:00 The Neuroscience of Our Divinity 36:50 How Our Neurons Atrophy from Technology 44:13 Science's Attempt at Cloning (and why it won’t work)50:25 Ad: Sleep Better with the Birch Mattress & Save 25%53:32 Earth’s Battle Between Good & Evil1:09:24 How Love vs Fear Creates our Reality 1:13:11 Year 2030 & The Future of Humanity 1:26:04 Why We’re Drawn to Wholeness 1:33:44 Embracing the Truth of Who You Are1:40:55 Conclusion ___________New York Times best-selling author and scientist Gregg Braden is internationally renowned as a pioneer in bridging science, spirituality and the real world. Following a successful career as a Computer Geologist during the 1970s energy crisis, he worked in the 1980s as a Senior Liaison with the U.S. Air Force Space Command. In 1991 he became the First Technical Operations Manager for Cisco Systems. Since 1986 Gregg has explored high mountain villages, remote monasteries, and forgotten texts to merge their timeless secrets with the best science of today. The author of 11 award-winning books published in 38 languages, Gregg has received numerous honours, including a 2016 nomination for the prestigious Templeton Award. He has shared his presentations with The United Nations, Fortune 500 companies, and the U.S. military, as well as in media specials aired throughout the world. Pre-order NEW Book “Pure Human”: https://a.co/d/i9LDO4mWebsite: https://greggbraden.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/gregg.braden/___________Know ThyselfInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/Website: https://www.knowthyself.oneClips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKgListen to all episodes on Audio: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927André DuqumInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/
Chapter 1: How is technology evolving faster than our morality?
So here we are at the precipice of giving our humanness away to technology within the context of a belief system that says we're flawed to begin with, and there's no reason not to do this, where the best science of the modern world is telling us just the opposite. And that context, I think, changes everything. Here's what it does. We're going to get through it. The question is, what do we become?
Do we allow the events unfolding in the world to drive us to hate? Or do those events awaken within us the deep truth of our love, our compassion, our forgiveness? It all comes down to love. Do we love ourselves enough?
Greg, welcome back.
Andre, it is so good to be back in the Know Thyself New and Improved studio, that new mics, and I'm appreciating being in exactly the place where so many of my brothers and sisters, colleagues, and people I've never met but I admire tremendously have been. It's an honor to be here with you. It's been a few months, and we're in a very different world now, and this is unscripted.
I'm excited to see where this conversation goes.
I was filled with joy to see that this week you were on the schedule to come in studio and just to see you. And man, I love the continued brotherhood, friendship, and service that we share together. And I'm hoping this conversation can pull along similar threads to our last conversation, diving deeper into some nuance.
You have a new book called Pure Human as well, which follows along alongside a lot of these themes we're going to pick apart today. In 1945, human knowledge was doubling every 25 years on average. Now it's doubling every 12 hours. And we see this exponential rise of technology and human knowledge, and yet, unless coupled with the wisdom to wield those tools, they could contribute to our demise.
And so in many ways, if we don't acknowledge the power within our humanness and slow down to the same capacity we're speeding up, There's going to be a lot of things that we're just not tapping into that we're missing. And so what is that sacredness? What is that power within humanness that we need to recognize?
Wow, that's a big question to begin with. You know, in many respects, the technology is advancing faster than our morality. and our wisdom in terms of what the values are that we claim that we share as a human family. A perfect example of this. I think people sometimes learn better through example. I read an interview with Ray Kurzweil Ray Kurzweil, I think many people know, is a futurist.
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Chapter 2: Is transhumanism an inevitable phase of evolution?
And when he was asked in the interview what that means to us, you know, of course, we're developing this technology at a lightning speed. It's like the floodgates have been opened and there's no stopping where that technology is going. And when he and others have been asked the question, what does that mean to us?
What does it mean for humans to merge our humanness into the Internet of all things with artificial intelligence? The answer is, I think is telling because he essentially says, don't ask me, I'm an engineer. My job is to push the technology as far and as fast as I can. He said, that's somebody else's bailiwick to determine what it means to us socially. And I think it's this disconnect.
And I think it is a disconnect. that we are empowering the technology within the context of a world we've been taught that we are powerless victims of our world, that we are a flawed species to begin with, that carbon-based life in general and humans specifically are a flawed species.
And through multiple generations, we have been led to believe, indoctrinated to believe that this is the case, that we need something outside of ourselves to be healthy in our bodies and to be successful in business and successful in life. So with that mindset, the development of the technology opens the door to us giving our power away
from our biology and from the potential of our humanness, relinquishing that power into the technology, computer chips in the brain, chemicals in the blood, RFID chips under the skin, nanobots moving through the circulatory system, artificial intelligence, and so much more. And we're seeing that movement now.
One of the things I think that sets today apart from any other time in the past, and you mentioned the new book, I opened the new book by speaking about this, is that as humans, we've always had the ability to change the world around us. We could, we sometimes not such good ways, we've clear cut forest, we've hunted species to the point of extinction.
Sometimes we can do some good things in terms of ecology and engineering, But the point is we've always been able to look and say if we don't like what we did, we can change that, maybe go back to what we had before.
What sets today apart, Andre, from any other time in our history is that for the first time in the 200,000 years of our existence, 10,000 generations ago is when we emerged on this planet. That's really not that long ago. For the first time, we have the ability not only to change the world around us, but to forever change the world within us, to change our very biology.
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Chapter 3: Who is really controlling technological advancements?
And when we make those changes in our biology, unlike the external world, we can't go back. Once we make the shift in engineering our immune system, for example, and replacing our own immune system with technology that creates the limited immunity for us, or very specified kinds of immunity, the body begins to say, well, maybe you don't need me to do what I did in the past.
And so one generation, that becomes the way things are done, the next generation through what we call epigenetics. Next generation, children are born and the body says, oh, you know, we don't do it that way anymore. That's a vestige of our past because now we have a new way, a chemical base to develop our immune system. And that's just one example.
So here we are at the precipice of giving our humanness away to technology, replacing our bodies with synthetics and replacing our biology with with synthetics within a context of a belief system that says we're flawed to begin with, and there's no reason not to do this.
where the best science of the modern world is telling us just the opposite, the real science, not the pop science that you see in the magazine covers in the airports and cable news network, things like that, but the real science behind the scenes. Andre, the new discoveries are showing us nothing short of the immensely extraordinary beings that we are.
We are literally a highly advanced, technologically sophisticated, soft technology. Hard technology is computer chips, as we said, and chemicals and sensors under the skin. But we're more than that as human. We're neurons and cell membranes and DNA with the ability to morph and adapt to our environment as that environment changes.
And in many cases, we not only meet, but we exceed the capacity of the computer chips and the artificial intelligence. And there are studies that have been done recently, the Salk Institute here in California, for example. compared a human brain to a microprocessor. And the way they did that is really interesting. They equated the synapses in the brain with the transistors on the computer chip.
And interestingly, the numbers for both are very, very close. And they made the calculations, and with the bottom line, what they found was that the human brain is 100-fold faster and more adaptable to the kinds of information that's coming in than the computer chip can be. And let me just round that out by explaining why, because this is one of the things that sets us apart.
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Chapter 4: Why can't we manufacture consciousness?
Any technology is going to be limited by the physics of the stuff it's made of. Right now, computer chips typically are silicon. If you go to the periodic table and you look at a little map of a silicon atom, what makes that silicon, silicon is never gonna change. And the distance between those atoms and the geometric arrangement of the atoms to make the silicon isn't going to change.
And information can only flow so fast between those. It's limited by the physics. that makes the silicon, silicon. So you say, what is the scalability of a computer chip? And what we have to say is that the scalability is finite. And you mentioned this Moore's law, was a law referencing the doubling, not only of information, but the doubling of computer speeds and chips as well.
Every 18 to 24 months. 18 to 24 months. We now are at almost the quantum level where it has happened so fast that we are up against the limits on a quantum level. And Then you ask the question, what about a human neuron? What about our limits?
And this is, it's so beautiful because every time the scientists and the medical teams, they push a human neuron up against what has been perceived to be a limit in the past, we do what humans do. We morph and we adapt to that limit, opening a new vista, an entire new vista of potential that was unknown previously. So that when we say, what is our scalability?
What we have to say honestly right now is we don't know. Right now, it appears the scalability of a human neuron is infinite. And that's only one example of where we're being conditioned to believe that the technology is our savior, that the AI and the computer chips are the savior at the cost, the very high price of relinquishing our humanness.
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Chapter 5: What is the neuroscience behind our divinity?
And we begin replacing our biology with that technology. That's how you lose a species. That's exactly how you lose a species.
So I want to hold and put the evolutionary heritage of our untapped human potential. I want to dive into that in a moment. It seems as though, I mean, humanity is baby steps away from super intelligent AGI technology at a scale we had not previously dreamed of. And it's happening much faster than we can conceive of. And in a way, in a sense, it's an inevitability. Like it's happening.
The genie is kind of out of the bottle in many ways. What do you think about the perspective that humanity may very well serve the purpose of the transition between carbon-based to silicon-based life? Like taking out our own, I guess, egocentric human desire to live forever. What do you think about that transition and that perspective?
Sure. When I released the early copies of the book, Pure Human, for review, I had feedback from some scientists and technologists about this very topic. For our viewers at this time, as we're having this conversation, the book is not available commercially right now. So these are review copies.
The book is a celebration of our humanness and hopefully the invitation to develop a deeper appreciation for just what it means to be human so that maybe we're not so fast to relinquish our humanists, at least not before we know what it is that we're giving away. When I got those reviews from some of the technologists, what they believe is that this is the next step in human evolution.
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Chapter 6: How does technology affect our neurons and biology?
I disagree with that because this is an artificial evolution. It's a forced evolution, and it is at the expense of relinquishing the extraordinary biology that allows us to be who we are in place of the technology. In other words, replacing us with the technology rather than taking that biology and developing it to another level. So it is a form of evolution. It's not a natural evolution.
It's an artificial evolution. And I talk about this in the book a little bit. I'm going to say this right now. It's not good for us.
When you look at where the technological revolution that we're seeing right now, where it's leading, and what the logical outcome is within the context of all the other things that are happening in the world, we are geoengineering this planet in a way that is not good for us, pushing the carbon dioxide levels down to dangerous, dangerous levels that are near extinction levels in the geologic past.
That's not good for us. pushing the temperatures down an average of 10 degrees Fahrenheit from 59 to actually more than that, about 46 degrees Fahrenheit, that's not good for us. We are creating wars between the superpowers, expending weapons and manpower, depleting our abilities as a planet to defend ourselves. That's not good for us.
Now we are in the process of being indoctrinated to accept technology into our bodies, relinquishing our biology and our divinity, our divine qualities of empathy, sympathy, emotion, compassion, forgiveness, creativity, innovation, imagination. Those are all facets of human divinity that are lost when we replace our biology with technology. That's not good for us. So is it a form of evolution?
It's an artificial or a forced evolution. It's not a natural evolution. And in my opinion, and in defense of our humanness, this is why I wrote the book, at least to bring an awareness to what it is that we're about to give away before we give it away. Because once again, once we do, we cannot go back.
You know, one of the beautiful things, I worked in the high-tech industry from 1979 till mid-90s. And I saw amazing technology. Someone was here in California during the Cold War years. I worked on Norton Air Force Base, Vandenberg Air Force Base, not far from here. Amazing technology. I mean, laser technology and communications and radar.
And as sophisticated as they all were, Andre, I never, to this day, I've never seen any technology built in the world around us that doesn't mimic what we already do in ourselves, except we do it better
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of cloning in science?
And the beauty of this inner technology, one of the things I learned when I was in the industry is that the more complex, the more sophisticated the system is behind the scenes, the simpler the user interface. We are so complex. We are such an advanced form of soft technology that the user interface is deceptively simple. Thought, feeling, emotion, breath, focus, movement, nutrition.
the core of our most ancient and cherished spiritual traditions. They didn't know the science, but they were helping us to make the best of our humanness and to develop it in extraordinary ways. Now the science has forgotten that. So I'm just going to say this is a very different way of thinking of the human body.
because we're conditioned, I went to school in 1950s, 60s, early 1970s, and I was conditioned to think of the human body as a frail, vulnerable, biological system, sticky, wet, gooey stuff inside the cells. And here's the revolution. Now, scientists all over the world are beginning to think of the human body from the perspective of IT, information technology.
And so people say, why don't we know about these new discoveries? The answer is because the discoveries are published in engineering journals. They're not published in biological textbooks, like IEEE, for example, and the Journal of Advanced Computing Systems, things like that.
And they're looking at the human body from an information technology perspective, and they're blown away by what they're seeing. We talked about this in a previous interview. The circuits, every one of the 50 trillion cells in our body is an electrical circuit. Transistors, resistors, those equivalents are in the body.
The DNA are literally, and this is directly from an engineering journal, the DNA is being called a resonant fractal antennae. What that means is that we are picking up information across the broad spectrum of information sources, rather than you think of an antenna zeroing in on one station somewhere.
We're picking it up from everywhere simultaneously, and we're processing it from the DNA into the nervous system, through the body, into the brain. And when they begin looking at us from an IT perspective, I mean, they're... Engineers are clamoring to recreate in a laboratory what we do in our bodies, and they cannot do it.
And the reason they cannot do that is because of our humanness and our divinity that allows us as resin antenna to tune to information that's not in our physical bodies, but it permeates the world that we live in. There's a big conversation there.
So yeah, as a natural form of evolution, we would lose access to all of that if we replace the membranes of our cells, the neurons in our brain, and the DNA in our bodies with synthetics and artificial components, we lose that. So I guess maybe the question, Andre, is what kind of evolution do we want?
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Chapter 8: What is the battle between good and evil on Earth?
would you not say it's a small sect of these transhumanists who are really pushing for the complete either or of, you know, like on 2045, which is Ray Kurzweil's Singularity kind of website, says by 2030 to 2035, an avatar with an artificial brain in which a human personality is transferred at the end of one's life by 2045, a hologram-like avatar.
And so there are these, in the sect of kind of materialist, Silicon Valley juggernauts. You know, there are some people that are pioneering this, but there's also many other people that are not as hastily excited to embrace, like, swap human life.
Here's the... I agree with you. And here's the problem. Not all the changes are by choice. There is a relatively small number of people that view themselves as technological elite that know better... than everyone else what is good for us, what's good for our world, what's good for our human species. And it's always been that way, even before we had the technology we have today.
And I've never had any problem with any of that. Where this gets concerning is those thinkers, for example, the World Economic Forum, WEF, developed 1971. They get together every year. Davos, Switzerland, we all hear about it. We see it on the news, you know, the private jets going in and... and the mysterious meetings and all of that.
And they have every right to get together and think about the world that they want. These are elite business leaders, CEOs of major corporations, major financial institutions, government leaders, things like that.
What changed is in 2019, they formalized an agreement with the United Nations through what is now called the UN SDG 2030, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2030, 17 goals that are intended to be implemented within five years now, because we're now almost 2025. That's not very long. The goals are beautiful goals when you look at them by title.
Things like food security and child health, planetary global child health. I mean, who doesn't want that? We all want that. Now, you look at the fine print. And you say, how are they going to achieve those goals in such a brief period of time? And the level of social engineering that has to happen if they are going to achieve those goals is staggering. It is nothing short of a social revolution.
I personally don't want to live in the world that they're proposing, a world... where everything is digitized, everything is controlled, everything is run by AI. AI is making decisions for our health, AI is making decisions for all these things. So yes, a relatively small number of people have these visions. Most people
In life, if I go to my... I live in a rural area in northern New Mexico, beautiful part of the world. And when I'm home, I go to my local food co-op. That's where I get to connect with my neighbors. Really good people, Andre. You know, most of them are so... Their lives are so full with raising their children, working two or three jobs, trying to put food on the table, keeping things together.
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Chapter 9: What should we know about the Year 2030 and the future of humanity?
Let me give you an example. I mean, this is a beautiful thing. A Neuralink chip for a man or woman who have given their lives in service to the battlefield of Afghanistan or Iraq and been blown to pieces, but are still alive to do that. And if they come home with only one arm or one leg or no legs, what a beautiful thing to take a robotic technology
and hook that to a chip in the brain that allows them to have arms and legs again, to hold their babies and to love their children and to feed themselves and wash and comb their own hair. I mean, what a beautiful thing. This is good technology. So it's not the tech. It's the thinking underlying the tech, the thinking that we are indoctrinated to accept.
And the hastily reckless embracing of it without fully knowing what the potential consequences are.
This is it. We are led to believe that we are a flawed species. And they keep saying, and ultimately, the ultimate goal for much of this, you mentioned without saying the word, is immortality. They're afraid of dying. And they believe that if we can develop the technology to download consciousness onto a chip, which I believe is I know how deep you want to get in this. I believe it's not possible.
Yeah, we also had Federico Faggin on a podcast who created one of the world's first microprocessor. And he tried actually for many, many years to create consciousness in that way and could not. And that's what led him on.
You can't. And the reason is because we are more than ones and zeros. And the scientific community is reluctant to accept that. So they are searching. I remember I was a kid in northern Missouri when Einstein left this world, and they took his brain and gave it to University of Kansas right across the state line.
And they dried it and thin sliced it so they could look into his brain and say, what makes Einstein so different from everyone else? They didn't find anything with the exception of one small feature. His brain had way more folds. than most brains do. Well, what that means is when you take that fold and you stretch it out, it means he's got more surface area, which means he's got more neurons.
They were looking for the information in his brain. The neurons are the antenna that tune us to the place in the field where our memories live. Studies are very clear on this, where our divinity lives. where our imagination, our creativity, our ability to love, all of those things are part of our divinity.
And the neurons are the antennae that tune us to our localized places in the field, which is why it makes perfect sense. If you give away your humanness to synthetics, to silicon organs, or the equivalent, silicon brains, You're not going to be able to tune to that.
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