Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Tue, 01 Aug 2023
Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Numerai: https://numer.ai/lex - Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings - MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off - AG1: https://drinkag1.com/lex to get 1 month supply of fish oil Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/joscha-bach-3-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Joscha's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Plinz Joscha's Website: http://bach.ai Joscha's Substack: https://substack.com/@joscha PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (06:26) - Stages of life (18:48) - Identity (25:24) - Enlightenment (31:55) - Adaptive Resonance Theory (38:42) - Panpsychism (48:42) - How to think (56:36) - Plants communication (1:14:31) - Fame (1:40:09) - Happiness (1:47:26) - Artificial consciousness (1:59:35) - Suffering (2:04:19) - Eliezer Yudkowsky (2:11:55) - e/acc (Effective Accelerationism) (2:17:33) - Mind uploading (2:28:22) - Vision Pro (2:32:36) - Open source AI (2:45:29) - Twitter (2:52:44) - Advice for young people (2:55:40) - Meaning of life
The following is a conversation with Josje Bak, his third time on this podcast. Josje is one of the most brilliant and fascinating minds in the world, exploring the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and computation. And he's one of my favorite humans to talk to about pretty much anything and everything. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
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In a scorching Texas heat, the thing I go to to escape, to escape nature or the external harsh conditions of nature and going to the nature of my own mind, wherever that weird and beautiful dream world is, the place that has no rules, no boundaries, no limits. No physics. No constraints on what is possible and what is impossible. The dream world that we go to, what is that world?
It's the same world as imagination. It's such a fascinating world. The human mind, its capabilities are just so incredibly fascinating. And one of the ways to explore that is to dream. But it's the return from the dream world that is the most refreshing to me. That's why I love naps. It's a quick stroll through the dream world and you're back.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Josje Bak. You wrote a post about levels of lucidity. Quote, as we grow older, it becomes apparent that our self-reflexive mind is not just gradually accumulating ideas about itself, but that it progresses in somewhat distinct stages. So there's seven of the stages.
Stage one, reactive survival, infant. Stage two, personal self, young child. Stage three, social self, adolescence, domesticated adult. Stage four is rational agency, self-direction. Stage five is self-authoring. That's full adult. You've achieved wisdom, but there's two more stages. Stage six is enlightenment. Stage seven is transcendence.
Can you explain each or the interesting parts of each of these stages? And what's your sense why there are stages of lucidity as we progress through life in this too short life?
This model is derived from a concept by the psychologist Robert Keegan, and he talks about the development of the self as a process that happens in principle by some kind of reverse engineering of the mind, where you gradually become aware of yourself and thereby build structure that allows you to interact deeper with the world and yourself.
And I found myself using this model not so much as a developmental model. I'm not even sure if it's a very good developmental model because I saw my children not progressing exactly like that. And I also suspect that you don't go through the stages necessarily in succession. And it's not that you work through one stage and then you get into the next one. Sometimes you revisit them.
Sometimes stuff is happening in parallel. But it's, I think, a useful framework to look at what's present in the structure of a person and how they interact with the world and how they relate to themselves. So it's more like a philosophical framework that allows you to talk about how minds work. And at first, when we are born, we don't have a personal self yet, I think.
Instead, we have an attentional self. And this attentional self is initially in the infant tasked with building a world model and also an initial model of the self. But mostly it's building a game engine in the brain that is tracking sensory data and uses it to explain it. And in some sense, you could compare it to a game engine like Minecraft or so, so it colors and sounds differently.
People are all not physical objects. They are creation of our mind at a certain level of core screening. Models that are mathematical, that use geometry and that use manipulation of objects and so on to create scenes in which we can find ourselves and interact with them.
So Minecraft.
Yeah. And this personal self is something that is more or less created after the world is finished, after it's trained into the system, after it has been constructed. And this personal self is an agent that interacts with the outside world. And the outside world is not the world of quantum mechanics, not the physical universe, but it's the model that has been generated in our own mind.
And this is us. And we experience ourselves interacting with that outside world that is created outside of our own mind. Outside of ourselves, there are feelings, and they present our interface to this outside world. They pose problems to us.
These feelings are basically attitudes that our mind is computing that tell us what's needed in the world, the things that we are drawn to, the things that we are afraid of. And we are tasked with solving this problem of satisfying the needs, avoiding the aversions, following on our inner commitments and so on, and also modeling ourselves and building the next stage.
So after we have this personal self in stage two online, many people form a social self. And this social self allows the individual to experience themselves as part of a group. It's basically this thing that when you are playing in a team, for instance, you don't notice yourself just as a single note that is reaching out into the world, but you're also looking down.
You're looking down from this entire group and you see how this group is looking at this individual. And everybody in the group is, in some sense, emulating this group spirit to some degree. And in this state, people are forming their opinions by assimilating them from this group mind. They basically gain the ability to act a little bit like a hive mind.
But are you also modeling the interaction of jalapeno and shapes and forms through the interaction of the individual nodes within the group?
Yeah, it's basically the way in which people do it in this stage is that they experience what are the opinions of my environment. They experience the relationship that I have to their environment and they resonate with people around them and get more opinions through this interaction, through the way in which they relate to others.
And at stage four, you basically understand that stuff is true and false independently of what other people believe. And you have agency over your own beliefs in that stage. You basically discover epistemology, the rules about determining what's true and false.
So you start to learn how to think. Yes.
I mean, at some level, you're always thinking, you are constructing things. And I believe that this ability to reason about your mental representation is what we mean by thinking. It's an intrinsically reflexive process that requires consciousness. Without consciousness, you cannot think. You can generate the content of feelings and so on outside of consciousness.
It's very hard to be conscious of how your feelings emerge, at least in the early stages of development. But thoughts is something that you always control. And if you are a nerd like me, You often have to skip stage three because you lack the intuitive empathy with others. Because in order to resonate with a group, you need to have a quite similar architecture.
And if people are wired differently, then it's hard for them to resonate with other people and basically have empathy. Empathy, which is not the same as compassion, but it is a shared perceptual mental state. Empathy happens not just via inference about the mental states of others, but it's a perception of what other people feel and where they're at.
Can't you not have empathy while also not having a similar architecture, cognitive architecture, as the others in the group?
I think, yes, but I experienced that too. But you need to build something that is like a meta-architecture. You need to be able to embrace the architecture of the other to some degree or find some shared common ground. And it's also this issue that if you are inert, normally often neurotypical people have difficulty to resonate with you.
And as a result, they have difficulty understanding you unless they have enough wisdom to feel what's going on there.
Well, isn't the whole process of the stage three is to figure out the API to the other humans that have different architecture and you yourself publish public documentation for the API that people can interact with for you? Isn't this the whole process of socializing?
My experience as a child growing up was that I did not find any way to interface with the stage three people. And they didn't do that with me. So it took me- Did you try? Yeah, of course. I tried it very hard. But it was only when I entered a mathematics school at ninth grade, lots of other nerds were present.
that I found people that I could deeply resonate with and had the impression that, yes, I have friends now, I found my own people. And before that, I felt extremely lonely in the world. There was basically nobody I could connect to.
I remember there was one moment in all these years where I was in, there was a school exchange and it was a Russian boy, kid from the Russian garrison stationed in Eastern Germany who visited our school. And we played a game of chess against each other. And we looked into each other's eyes and we sat there for two hours playing this game of chess. And I had the impression, this is a human being.
He understands what I understand. We didn't even speak the same language.
I wonder if your life could have been different if you knew that it's okay to be different, to have a different architecture. Whether accepting that the interface is hard to figure out, takes a long time to figure out, and it's okay to be different. In fact, it's beautiful to be different.
It was not my main concern. My main concern was mostly that I was alone. It was not so much the question, is it okay to be the way I am? I couldn't do much about it, so I had to deal with it. But my main issue was that I was not sure if I would ever meet anybody growing up that I would connect to at such a deep level that I would feel that I could belong.
So there's a visceral, undeniable feeling of being alone.
Yes. And I noticed the same thing when I came into the math school, that I think at least half, probably two-thirds of these kids were severely traumatized as children growing up, and in large part due to being alone, because they couldn't find anybody to relate to.
Don't you think everybody's alone, deep down?
No.
Oh.
I'm not alone anymore. It took me some time to update and to get over the trauma and so on, but I felt that in my twenties, I had lots of friends and I had my place in the world and I had no longer doubts that I would never be alone again.
Is there some aspect to which we're alone together? You don't see a deep loneliness inside yourself still?
No. Sorry.
Okay, so that's the nonlinear progression through the stages, I suppose. You caught up on stage three at some point?
So we were at stage four. And so basically I find that many nerds jump straight into stage four, bypassing stage three.
Do they return to it then later?
Yeah, of course. Sometimes they do, not always. The question is basically, do you stay a little bit autistic or do you catch up? And I believe you can catch up. You can build this missing structure. And basically,
basically experience yourself as part of a group learn intuitive empathy and develop the sense this percept perceptual sense of feeling what other people feel and before that i could only basically feel this when i was deeply in love with somebody and succinct or so there's a lot of friction to feeling that way like it take to only with certain people as opposed to it comes naturally yeah it's frictionless but um this is something that basically later i felt started to resolve itself for me to a large degree what was the trick
In many ways, growing up and paying attention. Meditation did help. I had some very crucial experiences in getting close to people, building connections, cuddling a lot in my student years.
So really paying attention to the, what is it, to the feeling another human being fully.
loving other people and being loved by other people and building a space in which you can be safe and can experiment and touch a lot and be close to somebody a lot. And over time, basically at some point you realize, oh, it's no longer... that I feel locked out, but I feel connected and I experience where somebody else is at.
And normally my mind is racing very fast at a high frequency, so it's not always working like this. Sometimes it works better, sometimes it works less. But I also don't see this as a pressure. It's interesting to observe myself, which frequency I'm at and at which mode somebody else is at.
Yeah, man, the mind is so beautiful in that way. Sometimes it comes so natural to me, so easy to pay attention, pay attention to the world fully, to other people fully. And sometimes the stress over silly things is overwhelming. It's so interesting that the mind is that rollercoaster in that way.
At stage five, you discover how identity is constructed. You realize that your values are not terminal, but they are instrumental to achieving a world that you like and aesthetics that you prefer. And the more you understand this, the more you get agency over how your identity is constructed. And you realize that identity and interpersonal interaction is a costume.
And you should be able to have agency over that costume. It's useful to be a costume. It tells something to others and allows to interface in roles. But being locked into this is a big limitation.
The word costume kind of implies that it's fraudulent in some way. Is costume a good word for you? Like we present ourselves to the world.
In some sense, I learned a lot about costumes at Burning Man. Before that, I did not really appreciate costumes and saw them more as uniforms. Like, wearing a suit, if you are working in a bank or if you are trying to get startup funding from a VC in Switzerland, then you dress up in a particular way.
And this is mostly to show the other side that you are willing to play by the rules and you understand what the rules are. But there is something deeper. When you are at Burning Man, your costume becomes self-expression and there is no boundary to the self-expression.
You're basically free to wear what you want, to express other people what you feel like this day and what kind of interactions you want to have.
Is the costume a kind of projection of who you are?
That's very hard to say because the costume also depends on what other people see in the costume. And this depends on the context that the other people understand. And you have to create something, if you want to, that is legible to the other side. And that means something to yourself.
Do we become prisoners of the costume? Because everybody expects us to.
Some people do, but I think that once you realize that you wear a costume at Burning Man, a variety of costumes, realize that you cannot not wear a costume. Basically, everything that you hear and present to others is something that is to some degree an addition to what you are deep inside.
So this stage, in parentheses, you put full adult, wisdom. Why is this full adult? Why would you say this is full? And why is it wisdom?
It does allow you to understand why other people have different identities from yours. And it allows you to understand that the difference between people who vote for different parties and might have very different opinions and different value systems is often the accident of where they are born and what happened after that to them and what traits they got before they were born.
And at some point you realize the perspective where you understand that everybody could be you in a different timeline if you just flip those bits. How many costumes do you have?
I don't count. More than one?
Yeah, of course.
How easy is it to do costume changes throughout the day?
It's just a matter of energy and interest. When you are wearing your pajamas and you switch out of your pajamas into, say, a work shirt and pants, you're making a costume change, right? And if you are putting on a gown, you're making a costume change.
And you could do the same with personality?
You could, if that's what you're into. There are people which have multiple personalities for interaction in multiple worlds, right? So if somebody works in a store and you put up a storekeeper personality when you're presenting yourself at work, you develop a sub-personality for this. And the social persona for many people is in some sense a puppet that they're playing like a marionette.
And if they play this all the time, they might forget that there is something behind this. There's something what it feels like to be in your skin. And I guess it's very helpful if you're able to get back into this. And for me, the other way around is relatively hard. For me, it's pretty hard to learn how to play consistent social roles. For me, it's much easier just to be real.
Or not real, but to have one costume.
No, it's not quite the same. So basically, when you are wearing a costume at Burning Man and say you are an extraterrestrial prince, there's something where you are expressing, in some sense, something that's closer to yourself than the way in which you hide yourself behind standard clothing when you go out in the city, in the default world.
And so this costume that you're wearing at Burning Man allows you to express more of yourself. And you have a shorter distance of advertising to people what kind of person you are, what kind of interaction you would want to have with them. And so you get much earlier into media stress.
And I believe it's regrettable that we do not use the opportunities that we have with custom-made clothing now to wear costumes that are much more
uh stylish that are much more custom-made that are not necessarily part of a fashion in which you express which milieu you're part of and how up-to-date you are but you also express how you are as an individual and what you want to do today and how you feel today and what you intend to do about it well isn't it easier now with in the digital world to um
to explore different costumes. I mean, that's the kind of idea with virtual reality. That's the idea even with Twitter in two-dimensional screens. You can swap all costumes. You can be as weird as you want. It's easier. For Burning Man, you have to like order things. You have to make things. You have to, it's more effort to put on.
It's even better if you make them yourself.
Sure, but it's just easier to do digitally, right?
It's not about easy. It's about how to get it right. And for me, the first Burning Man experience, I got adopted by a bunch of people in Boston who dragged me to Burning Man. And we spent a few weekends doing costumes together. And that was an important part of the experience where the camp bonded, that people got to know each other.
And we basically grew into the experience that we would have later.
So the extraterrestrial prince is based on a true story.
Yeah.
I can only imagine what that looks like, Josje. Stage six.
Stage six. At some point, you can collapse the division between a personal self and world generator again. And a lot of people get there via meditation, or some of them get there via psychedelics, some of them by accident. And you suddenly notice that you are not actually a person, but you are a vessel that can create a person. And the person is still there.
You observe that personal self, but you observe the personal self from the outside. And you notice it's a representation. And you might also notice that the world that is being created is a representation. If not, then you might experience that I am the universe. I am the thing that is creating everything. And of course, what you're creating is not quantum mechanics and the physical universe.
What you're creating is this game engine that is updating the world, and you're creating your valence, your feelings, and all the people inside of that world, including the person that you identify with yourself in this world.
Are you creating the game engine, or are you noticing the game engine?
You noticed how you're generating the game engine. And I mean, when you are dreaming at night, you can, if you have a lucid dream, you can learn how to do this deliberately. And in principle, you can also do it during the day.
And the reason why we don't get to do this from the beginning and why we don't have agency of our feelings right away is because we would game it before they have the necessary amount of wisdom to deal with creating this dream that we are in.
You don't want to get access to cheat codes too quickly. Otherwise, you won't enjoy the game.
So stage five is already pretty rare. And stage six is even more rare. You basically find this mostly with advanced Buddhist meditators and so on that are dropping into the stage and can induce it at will and spend time in it.
So stage five requires a good therapist. Stage six requires a good Buddhist spiritual leader.
Yes, for instance, could be that is the right thing to do. But it's not that these stages give you scores or levels that you need to advance to. It's not that the next stage is better. You live your life in a mode that works best at any given moment. And when your mind decides that you should have a different configuration, then it's building that configuration.
And for many people, they stay happily at state three and experience themselves as part of groups. And there's nothing wrong with this. And for some people, this doesn't work and they're forced to build more agency over their rational beliefs than this and construct their norms rationally. And so they go to this level. And stage seven is something that is more or less hypothetical.
That would be the stage in which it's basically a transhumanist stage in which you understand how you work, in which the mind fully realizes how it's implemented and can also, in principle, enter different modes in which it could be implemented. And that's the stage that, as far as I understand, is not open to people yet.
Oh, but it is possible through the process of technology.
Yes, and who knows if there are biological agents that are working at different timescales than us that basically become aware of the way in which they're implemented on ecosystems and can change that implementation and have agency over how they're implemented in the world. And what I find interesting about the discussion about AI alignment, that it seems to be following these stages very much.
Most people seem to be in stage three, also according to Robert Keegan. I think he says that about 85% of people are in stage three and stay there. And if you're in stage three and your opinions are the result of social assimilation, then what you're mostly worried about in the AI is that the AI might have the wrong opinions.
So if the AI says something racist or sexist, we are all lost because we will assimilate the wrong opinions from the AI. And so we need to make sure that the AI has the right opinions and the right values and the right structure. And If you're at stage four, that's not your main concern.
And so most nerds don't really worry about the algorithmic bias and the model that it picks up, because if there's something wrong with this bias, the AI ultimately will prove it. At some point, we'll get it there that it makes mathematical proofs about reality, and then it will figure out what's true and what's false.
But you're still worried that AI might turn you into paperclips because it might have the wrong values, right? So if it's set up with the wrong function that controls its direction in the world, then it might do something that is completely horrible and there's no easy way to fix it.
So that's more like a stage four rationalist kind of thing.
And if you are at stage five, you're mostly worried that the AI is not going to be enlightened fast enough. Because you realize that the game is not so much about intelligence, but about agency, about the ability to control the future. And the identity is instrumental to this. And if you are a human being, I think at some level you ought to choose your own identity.
You should not have somebody else pick the costume for you and then wear it. But instead, you should be mindful about what you want to be in this world. And I think if you are an agent that is fully malleable, that can provide its own source code, like an AI might do at some point, then the identity that you will have is whatever you can be. And
In this way, the AI will maybe become everything, like a planetary control system. And if it does that, then if we want to coexist with it, it means that it will have to share purposes with us. So it cannot be a transactional relationship. We will not be able to use reinforcement learning with human feedback. to hardwire its values into it.
But what has to happen is probably that it's conscious, so it can relate to our own mode of existence, where an observer is observing itself in real time within certain temporal frames.
And the other thing is that it probably needs to have some kind of transcendental orientation, building shared agency, in the same way as we do when we are able to enter with each other into non-transactional relationships. And I find that something that, because the stage five is so rare, is missing in much of the discourse.
And I think that we need, in some sense, focus on how to formalize love, how to understand love, and how to build it into the machines that we are currently building and that are about to become smarter than us.
Well, I think this is a good opportunity to try to sneak up to the idea of enlightenment. So you wrote a series of good tweets about consciousness and panpsychism. So let's break it down.
First you say, I suspect the experience that leads to the panpsychism syndrome of some philosophers and other consciousness enthusiasts represents the realization that we don't end at the self, but share a resonant universe representation with every other observer coupled to the same universe. This actually eventually leads us to a lot of interesting questions about AI and AGI.
But let's start with this representation. What is this resonant universe representation? And what do you think? Do we share such a representation?
The neuroscientist Grossberg has come up with the cognitive architecture that he calls the adaptive resonance theory. And his perspective is that our neurons can be understood as oscillators that are resonating with each other and with outside phenomena. So the coarse-grained model of the universe that we are building in some sense is a resonance with objects outside of us in the world.
So basically we take up patterns of the universe that we are coupled with and our brain is not so much
understood as circuitry, even though this perspective is valid, but it's almost an ether in which the individual neurons are passing on chemoelectrical signals or arbitrary signals across all modalities that can be transmitted between cells, simulate each other in this way, and produce patterns that they modulate while passing them on.
And this speed of signal progression in the brain is roughly at the speed of sound, incidentally, because the time that it takes for the signals to hop from cell to cell, which means it's relatively slow with respect to the world. It takes an appreciable fraction of a second for a signal to go through the entire neocortex, something like a few hundred milliseconds.
And so there's a lot of stuff happening in that time where the signal is passing through your brain, including in the brain itself. So nothing in the brain is assuming that stuff happens simultaneously. Everything in the brain is working in a paradigm where the world has already moved on when you are ready to do the next thing to your signal. including the signal processing system itself.
It's quite a different paradigm than the one in our digital computers, where we currently assume that your GPU or CPU is pretty much globally in the same state.
So you mentioned there the non-dual state, and say that some people confuse it for enlightenment. What's the non-dual state?
There is a state in which you notice that you are no longer a person and instead you are one with the universe.
So that speaks to the resonance.
Yes, but this one with the universe is of course not accurately modeling that you are indeed some God entity or indeed the universe becoming aware of itself, even though you get this experience. I believe that you get this experience because your mind is modeling the fact that you are no longer identified with the personal self in that state.
but you have transcended this division between the self model and the world model. And you're experiencing yourself as your mind, as something that is representing a universe.
But that's still part of the model.
Yes. So it's inside of the model still. You're still inside of patterns that are generated in your brain and in your organism. And what you are now experiencing is that you're no longer this personal self in there, but you are the entirety of the mind and its contents.
Why is it so hard to get there?
A lot of people who get into the state think this is associated with enlightenment. I suspect it's a favorite training goal for a number of meditators. But I think that enlightenment is in some sense more mundane. And it's a step further or sideways. It's the state where you realize that everything is a representation.
Yeah, you say enlightenment is a realization of how experience is implemented.
Yes. Basically, you notice at some point that your qualia can be deconstructed.
Reverse engineered? Almost like a schematic of it?
You can start with looking at a face. Maybe look at your own face in a mirror. Look at your face for a few hours in a mirror or for a few minutes. At some point, it will look very weird because you notice that there's actually no face. You basically start unseeing the face. What you see is the geometry.
And then you can disassemble the geometry and realize how that geometry is being constructed in your mind. and you can learn to modify this. So basically you can change these generators in your own mind to shift the face around or to change the construction of the face, to change the way in which the features are being assembled.
Why don't we do that more often? Why don't we start really messing with reality without the use of drugs or anything else? Why don't we get good at this kind of thing, like intentionally? Why should we? Because you can morph reality into something more pleasant for yourself. Just have fun with it.
Yeah, that is probably what you shouldn't be doing, right? Because outside of your personal self, this outer mind is probably a relatively smart agent. And what you often notice is that you have thoughts about how you should live, but you observe yourself doing different things and have different feelings.
And that's because your outer mind doesn't believe you and doesn't believe your rational thoughts.
Well, can't you just silence the outer mind?
The thing is that the outer mind is usually smarter than you are. Rational thinking is very brittle. It's very hard to use logic and symbolic thinking to have an accurate model of the world. So there is often an underlying system that is looking at your rational thoughts and then tells you, no, you're still missing something. your gut feeling is still facing something else.
And this can be, for instance, you find a partner that looks perfect or you find a deal and you build a company or whatever that looks perfect to you. And yet at some level, you feel something is off and you cannot put your finger on it. And the more you reason about it, the better it looks to you. But the system that is outside still tells you, no, no, you're missing something.
And that system is powerful.
People call this intuition, right? Intuition is this unreflected part of your attitude composition and computation where you produce a model of how you relate to the world and what you need to do in it and what you can do in it and what's going to happen that is usually deeper and often more accurate than your reason.
So if we look at this as you write in the tweet, if we look at this more rigorously as a sort of take the panpsychist idea more seriously, almost as a scientific discipline, you write that quote, fascinatingly, the panpsychist interpretation seems to lead to observations of practical results to a degree that physics fundamentalists might call superstitious.
Reports of long distance telepathy and remote causation are ubiquitous in the general population.
"'I am not convinced,' says Joschabach, "'that establishing the empirical reality of telepathy "'would force an update "'of any part of serious academic physics, "'but it could trigger an important revolution "'in both neuroscience and AI "'from a circuit perspective "'to a coupled complex resonator paradigm.'"
Are you suggesting that there could be some rigorous mathematical wisdom to panpsychist perspective on the world?
So first of all, panpsychism is the perspective that consciousness is inseparable from matter in the universe. And I find panpsychism quite unsatisfying because it does not explain consciousness. It does not explain how this aspect of matter produces it.
It's also when I try to formalize panpsychism and write down what it actually means with a more formal mathematical language, it's very difficult to distinguish it from reality. saying that there is a software side to the world in the same way as there is a software side to what the transistors are doing in your computer.
So basically there is a pattern at a certain core screening of the universe that in some reasons of the universe leads to observers that are observing themselves. So panpsychism maybe is not even when I write it down a position that is distinct from functionalism. But intuitively, a lot of people feel that the activity of matter itself, of mechanisms in the world, is insufficient to explain it.
So it's something that needs to be intrinsic to matter itself. And you can, apart from this abstract idea, have an experience in which you...
experience yourself as being the universe which i suspect is basically happening because you manage to dissolve the division between personal self and mind that you establish as an infant when you construct a personal self and transcend it again and understand how it works but there is something deeper that is that you feel that you're also sharing a state with other people that you um
have an experience in which you notice that your personal self is moving into everything else, that you basically look out of the eyes of another person, that every agent in the world that is an observer is in some sense you. And we forget that we are the same agent.
So is it that we feel that or do we actually accomplish it? So is telepathy possible? Is it real?
For me, that's a question that I don't really know the answer to. In Turing's famous 1950 paper in which he describes the Turing test, he does speculate about telepathy, interestingly, and asks himself if telepathy is real, and he thinks that it very well might be.
what would be the implication for AI systems that try to be intelligent, because he didn't see a mechanism by which a computer program would become telepathic. And I suspect if telepathy would exist, or if all the reports that you get from people when you ask the normal person on the street
I find that very often they say, I have experiences with telepathy, the scientists might not be interested in this and might not have a theory about this, but I have difficulty explaining it away. And so you could say maybe this is a superstition, maybe it's a false memory, or maybe it's a little bit of psychosis, who knows?
Maybe somebody wants to make their own life more interesting or misremember something. But a lot of people report I noticed something terrible happened to my partner and I know this is exactly the moment it happened where my child had an accident and I knew that was happening and the child was in a different town.
So maybe it's a false memory where this is later on mistakenly attributed, but a lot of people think that this is not the correct explanation. So if something like this was real, what would it mean?
It probably would mean that either your body is an antenna that is sending information over all sorts of channels, like maybe just electromagnetic radio signals that you're sending over long distances, and you get attuned to another person that you spend enough time with to get a few bits out of the ether to figure out what this person is doing.
Or maybe it's also when you are very close to somebody and you become empathetic with them. What happens is that you go into a resonance state with them, right? Similar to when people go into a seance and they go into a trance state and they start shifting a video board around on the table.
I think what happens is that their minds go by their nervous systems into a resonance state in which they basically create something like a shared dream between them.
Physical closeness or closeness broadly defined?
With physical closeness, it's much easier to experience empathy with someone, right? I suspect it would be difficult for me to have empathy for you if you were in a different town also. How would that work? But if you are very close to someone, you'd pick up all sorts of signals from their body, not just via your eyes, but with your entire body.
And if the nervous system sits on the other side and the intercellular communication sits on the other side and is integrating over all these signals, you can make inferences about the state of the other. And it's not just the personal self that does this via reasoning, but your perceptual system. And what basically happens is that your representations are directly interacting.
The physical resonant models of the universe that exist in your nervous system and in your body might go into resonance with others and start sharing some of their states. So you basically, by being next to somebody, you pick up some of their vibes and feel without looking at them what they're feeling in this moment.
And it's difficult for you, if you're very empathetic, to detach yourself from it and have an emotional state that is completely independent from your environment. People who are highly empathetic are describing this. And now imagine that a lot of organisms on this planet have representations of the environment and operate like this, and they are adjacent to each other and overlapping.
So there's going to be some degree in which there is basically some chained interaction, and we are forming some slightly shared representation. And relatively few neuroscientists who consider this possibility. I think a big rarity in this regard is Michael Levin, who is considering these things in earnest. And I stumbled on this train of thought mostly by noticing that
The tasks of a neuron can be fulfilled by other cells as well. They can send different types of chemical messages and physical messages to their adjacent cells and learn when to do this and when not, make this conditional and become universal function approximators. The only thing that they cannot do is telegraph information over axons very quickly over long distances.
So neurons in this perspective are a specially adapted kind of telegraph cell. that has evolved so we can move our muscles very fast. But our body is, in principle, able to also make models of the world, just much, much slower.
It's interesting, though, that at this time, at least in human history, there seems to be a gap between the tools of science and the subjective experience that people report, like you're talking about with telepathy. It seems like... We're not quite there?
No, I think that there is no gap between the tools of science and telepathy. Either it's there or it's not, and it's an empirical question. And if it's there, we should be able to detect it in a lab.
So why is there not a lot of Michael Levins walking around?
I don't think that Michael Levin is specifically focused on telepathy very much. He is focused on self-organization in living organisms and in brains, both as a paradigm for development and as a paradigm for information processing.
And when you think about how organization processing works in organisms, there is first of all radical locality, which means everything is decided locally from the perspective of an individual cell. The individual cell is the agent. And the other one is coherence.
Basically, there needs to be some criterion that determines how these cells are interacting in such a way that order emerges on the next level of structure. And this principle of coherence, of imposing constraints that are not validated by the individual parts,
and lead to coherent structure to basically transcend the agency where you form an agent on the next level of organization is crucial in this perspective.
It's so cool that radical locality leads to the emergence of complexity at the higher layers.
And I think what Mike Levin is looking at is nothing that is outside of the realm of science in any way. It's just that he is a paradigmatic thinker who develops his own paradigm. And most of the neuroscientists are using a different paradigm at this point.
And this often happens in science that a field has a few paradigms in which people try to understand reality and build concepts and make experiments.
You're kind of one of those type of paradigmatic thinkers. Actually, if we can take a tangent on that. Once again, returning to the biblical verses of your tweets. You write, my public explorations are not driven by audience service. but by my lack of ability for discovering, understanding, or following the relevant authorities. So I have to develop my own thoughts.
Since I think autonomously, these thoughts cannot always be very good. That's you apologizing for the chaos of your thoughts. Or perhaps not apologizing, just identifying. But let me ask the question. Since we talked about Michael Levin and yourself, who I think are very kind of radical, big, independent thinkers, can we reverse engineer your process of thinking autonomously? How do you do it?
How can humans do it? How can you avoid being influenced by, what is it, stage three?
Well, why would you want to do that? You see what is working for you and if it's not working for you, you build another structure that works better for you, right? And so I found myself when I was thrown into this world in a state where my intuitions were not working for me. I was not able to
understand how I would be able to survive in this world and build the things that I was interested in, build the kinds of relationship I needed to build, work on the topics that I wanted to make progress on. And so I had to learn. And for me, Twitter is not some tool of publication. It's not something where I put stuff that I entirely believe to be true and provable.
It's an interactive notebook in which I explore possibilities. And I found that when I tried to understand how the mind and how consciousness works, I was quite optimistic. I thought there needs to be a big body of knowledge that I can just study and that works. And so I entered studies in philosophy and computer science. and later psychology and a bit of neuroscience and so on.
And I was disappointed by what I found, because I found that the questions of how consciousness and so on works, how emotion works, how it's possible that the system can experience anything, how motivation emerges in the mind, were not being answered by the authorities that I met and the schools that were around.
And instead, I found that it was individual thinkers that had useful ideas that sometimes were good, sometimes were not so good, sometimes were adopted by a large group of people, sometimes were rejected by large groups of people. But for me, it was much more interesting to see these minds as individuals. And in my perspective, thinking is still something that is done not in groups.
That has to be done by individuals.
So that motivated you to become an individual thinker yourself?
I didn't have a choice. I didn't find a group that thought in a way where I felt, okay, I can just adopt everything that everybody thinks here, and now I understand how consciousness works. Or how the mind works, or how thinking works, or what thinking even is, or what feelings are, and how they're implemented, and so on.
To figure all this out, I had to take a lot of ideas from individuals and then try to put them together in something that works for myself.
And on one hand, I think it helps if you try to go down and find first principles on which you can recreate how thinking works, how languages work, what representation is, whether representation is necessary, how the relationship between a representing agent and the world works in general.
But how do you escape the influence? Once again, the pressure of the crowd. Whether it's you in responding to the pressure or you being swept up by the pressure? If you even just look at Twitter, the opinions of the crowd.
I don't feel pressure from the crowd. I'm completely immune to that. In the same sense, I don't have respect for authority. I have respect for what an individual is accomplishing or have respect for mental firepower. But it's not that I meet somebody and get slack-jawed and unable to speak.
Or when a large group of people has a certain idea that is different from mine, I don't necessarily feel intimidated, which has often been a problem for me in my life because I lack instincts that other people develop at a very young age and that help with their self-preservation in a social environment. So I had to learn a lot of things the hard way.
Yeah. Yeah. So is there a practical advice you can give on how to think paradigmatically, how to think independently? Or, you know, because you've kind of said, I had no choice. But I think to a degree you have a choice because you said you want to be productive. And I think thinking independently is productive if what you're curious about is understanding the world.
especially when the problems are very kind of new and open. And so it seems like this is an active process, like we can choose to do that, we can practice it.
Well, it's a very basic question when you read a theory that you find convincing or interesting. How do you know? It's very interesting to figure out what are the sources of that other person, not which authority can they refer to that is then taking off the burden of being truthful. But how did this authority in turn know? What is the epistemic chain to observables?
What are the first principles from which the whole thing is derived? And when I was young, I was not blessed with a lot of people around myself who knew how to make proofs from first principles. And I think mathematicians do this quite naturally. But most of the great mathematicians do not become mathematicians in school, but they tend to be self-taught.
Because school teachers tend not to be mathematicians, right? They tend not to be people who derive things from first principles. So when you ask your school teacher, why does two plus two equal four? Does your school teacher give you the right answer? It's a simple game and there are many simple games that you could play.
And most of those games that you could just take different rules would not lead to an interesting arithmetic. And so it's just an exploration, but you can try what happens if you take different axioms. And here is how you build axioms and derive addition from them. And a build addition is some basically syntactic sugar in it.
And so I wish that somebody would have opened me this vista and explained to me how I can build a language in my own mind from which I can derive what I'm seeing and which I can make predictions. geometry and counting and all the number games that we are playing in our life. And on the other hand, I felt that I learned a lot of this while I was programming as a child.
When you start out with a computer like a Commodore 64, which doesn't have a lot of functionality, It's relatively easy to see how a bunch of relatively simple circuits are just basically performing hashes between bit patterns and how you can build the entirety of mathematics and computation on top of this and all the representational languages that you need.
Man, Commodore 64 could be one of the sexiest machines ever built, if I say so myself. If we can return to this really interesting idea that we started to talk about with panpsychism. and the complex resonated paradigm and the verses of your tweets.
You write, instead of treating eyes, ears, and skin as separate sensory systems with fundamentally different modalities, we might understand them as overlapping aspects of the same universe, coupled at the same temporal resolution and almost inseparable from a single shared resonant model. Instead of treating mental representations as fully isolated between minds,
The representations of physically adjacent observers might directly interact and produce causal effects through the coordination of the perception and behavior of world modeling observers. So the modalities, the distinction between modalities, let's throw that away. The distinction between the individuals, let's throw that away. So what does this interaction representations look like?
And you think about how you represent the interaction of us in this room. At some level, the modalities are quite distinct. They're not completely distinct, but you can see this as vision. You can close your eyes and then you don't see a lot anymore. But you still imagine how my mouth is moving when you hear something.
And you know that it's very close to the sound, that you can just open your eyes and you get back into this shared, merged space. And we also have these experiments where we notice that the way in which our lips are moving are affecting how you hear the sound. And also vice versa, the sounds that you're hearing have an influence on how you interpret some of the visual features.
And so these modalities are not separate in your mind. They are merged at some fundamental level where you are interpreting the entire scene that you're in. And your own interactions in the scene are also not completely separate from the interactions of the other individual in the scene.
But there is some resonance that is going on where we also have a degree of shared mental representations and shared empathy due to being in the same space and having vibes between each other.
Vibes. So the question, though, is how deeply interbind is this multi-modality, multi-agent system? Like how, I mean, this is going to the telepathy question without the woo-woo meaning of the word telepathy. It's like how, like what's going on here in this room right now?
So if telepathy would work, how could it work? So imagine that all the cells in your body are sending signals in a similar way as neurons are doing. Just by touching the other cells and sending chemicals to them, the other cells interpreting them, learning how to react to them. And they learn how to approximate functions in this way and compute behavior for the organisms.
And this is something that is open to plants as well. So plants probably have software running on them that is controlling how the plant is working in a similar way as you have a mind that is controlling how you are behaving in the world. And this spirit of plants, which is something that has been very well described by our ancestors, and they found this quite normal,
But for some reason, since the Enlightenment, we are treating this notion that there are spirits in nature and that plants have spirits as a superstition. And I think we probably have to rediscover that, that plants have software running on them. And we already did, right?
You notice that there is a control system in the plant that connects every part of the plant to every other part of the plant and produces coherent behavior in the plant. That is, of course, much, much slower than the coherent behavior in an animal like us that has a nervous system where everything is synchronized much, much faster by the neurons.
But what you also notice is that if a plant is sitting next to another plant, like you have a very old tree and this tree is building some kind of information highway along its cells so it can send information from its leaves to its roots and from some part of the root to another part of the roots,
And as the fungus living next to the tree, the fungus can probably piggyback on the communication between the cells of the tree and send its own signals to the tree. And vice versa, the tree might be able to send information to the fungus. Because after all, how would they build a viable firewall if that other organism is sitting next to them all the time and it's never moving away?
So they will have to get along. And over a long enough time frame, the networks of roots in the forest and all the other plants that are there and the fungi that are there might be forming something like a biological internet.
But the question there is, do they have to be touching? Is biology at a distance possible?
Of course, you can use any kind of physical signal. You can use sounds, you can use electromagnetic waves that are integrated over many cells. It's conceivable that across distances there are many kinds of information pathways. But also our planetary surface is pretty full of organisms, full of cells.
So everything is touching everything else.
Yeah, and it's been doing this for many millions and even billions of years. So there was enough time for information processing networks to form. And if you think about how a mind is self-organizing, basically it needs to, in some sense, reward the cells for computing the mind, for building the necessary dynamics between the cells that allow the mind to stabilize itself and remain on there.
But if you look at these spirits of plants that are growing very close to each other in the forwards, they might be almost growing into each other, these spirits might be able even to move to some degree, not to become somewhat dislocated. and shift around in that ecosystem.
So if you think about what the mind is, it's a bunch of activation waves that form coherent patterns and process information in a way that are colonizing an environment well enough to allow the continuous sustenance of the mind, the continuous stability and self-stabilization of the mind.
then it's conceivable that we can link into this biological internet, not necessarily at the speed of our nervous system, but maybe at the speed of our body, and make some kind of subconscious connection to the world where we use our body as an antenna into biological information processing. Now, these ideas are completely speculative. I don't know if any of that is true.
But if that was true, and if you want to explain telepathy, I think it's much more likely that telepathy could be explained using such mechanisms rather than undiscovered quantum processes that would break the standard model of physics.
Could there be undiscovered processes that don't break telepathy?
Yeah, so if you think about something like an internet in the forest, that is something that is borderline discovered. Basically, a lot of scientists would point out that they do observe that plants are communicating the forest through wood networks and send information, for instance, warn each other about new pests entering the forest and things are happening like this.
So basically, there is communication between plants and fungi that has been observed.
Well, it's been observed, but we haven't plugged into it. So it's like if you observe humans, they seem to be communicating with a smartphone thing, but you don't understand how a smartphone works and how the mechanism of the internet works. But maybe it's possible to really understand the full richness of the biological internet that connects us.
An interesting question is whether the communication and the organization principles of biological information processing are as complicated as the technology that we've built. They set up on very different principles, right? The simultaneously works very differently in biological systems and the entire thing needs to be stochastic.
And instead of being fully deterministic or almost fully deterministic as our digital computers are, so there is a different base protocol layer that would emerge over the biological structure if such a thing would be happening.
And again, I'm not saying here that telepathy works and not saying that this is not Wu, but what I'm saying is I think I'm open to a possibility that we see that a few bits can be traveling long distance between organisms using biological information processing in ways that we are not completely aware of right now and that are more similar to many of the stories that were completely normal for our ancestors.
Well, this kind of interacting, intertwined representations takes us to the big ending of your tweet series. You write, quote, I wonder if self-improving AGI might end up saturating physical environments with intelligence.
to such a degree that isolation of individual mental states becomes almost impossible, and the representations of all complex self-organizing agents merge permanently with each other. So that's a really interesting idea. This biological network, life network, gets so dense that it might as well be seen as one. That's an interesting, what do you think that looks like?
What do you think that saturation looks like? What does it feel like?
I think it's a possibility. It's just a vague possibility. And I like to explain, but what this looks like, I think that the end game of AGI is substrate agnostic. That means that AGI ultimately, if it is being built, is going to be smart enough to understand how AGI works.