This is Jonathan Pegel. Welcome to the symbolic world. All right. So
this discussion is going to be oriented towards AI generally and the large language models.
I take there to be a distinction there. Maybe John, you can
talk about that a little bit as we get going here, but just to
position ourselves generally at the outset context for this conversation will be John's video essay
about AI. This came out nine months ago, ten months ago now,
I think it came out last April or something almost. Yeah, ten months
ago, I think. Okay, okay, perfect, which is great because
it gave evidence for my claim that many of the predictions were premature. So
perfect. Yeah. Yeah. So in order to sort of set the framing
here, we'll start off with John sharing a little bit sort of an overview
of what the arguments in that essay were, and then we'll move to Jonathan
if you want to sort of position yourself in relation to AI generally, and
then John's essay in particular, and then same for David, and then from
there we can just sort of get going and see what see what comes out.
We do have a bit of an extended time here, so I would
hope that we can be free. If the logo logos catches and we want
to move in a slightly different direction that we would be at liberty to follow
that, that would be great. If all of it centers around AI,
that's great. But yeah, excited to be here. This has been a
long time in coming. I think it took us don't know, four or
five months to get this together. So I'm very happy to be here with
all of you and see you all. It's great to see you too.
Ken Should I start then, yeah, go for it, Okay. So
AI. Of course, artificial intelligence a project actually proposed in the Scientific Revolution
by Thomas Hobbs. So it's an old idea, but I want to make
use of a distinction made by John Searle between weaki and strong AI. Weki
is when we make machines that do things that used to be done by human
beings. So if you're back in the nineteen thirties, computers were human beings.
You sent if you needed computation done, you sent it down to the
third floor where all the computers were. And they were human beings and they
had machines and flag rules and things like that. And of course they have
been replaced or your bank teller has been replaced by the ATM. That's called
WEKI because it is not claimed that that AI gives us any scientific insight into
the nature of intelligence. It's just we put together a machine. It took
great intelligence. And I'm not demeaning people that do this. Our lives are
depending on week AI right now. We wouldn't be talking without it, So
I'm not here besmirching that and anything like that. But nobody is claiming that
when they're making that machine. Well, now we understand right what cognition is
or something like that. And strong AI is Hobbes's proposal that cognition is computation
and that what we can do is if we make the right kind of computer
understood abstractly, we won't we will have created an instance of genuine intelligence.
So it's not a claim of simulation, it's a claim of instantiation. Now
in between weekend AI and strong AI is something that's trying to move from weak
AI to strong AI, and this is known as AGI artificial general intelligence.
And this is the idea that our intelligence is different from the intelligence of the
ATM in that we have general intelligence, we can solve multiple problems and multiple
domains for multiple reasons and multiple contexts, and yadi, YadA, YadA.
You can just do the multiples, which makes us tremendously different from those machines.
And the project is, can we get artificial intelligence to be artificial general
intelligence? Because that will have moved the needle considerably towards strong AI, because
it will become increasingly difficult to say it doesn't have this sorry, this is
the argument. Will become increasingly difficult for us to say it doesn't have the
same kind of intelligence as ken does if it can solve a wide variety of
problems and a wide variety of domains, for wide variety of goals, et
cetera, et cetera. That's the basic argument. Whether or not agi AGI
is clearly necessary for strong artificial intelligence, whether it's sufficient is part of what's
actually being debated. Not very well, i would say, in general right
now. But that's what's going on. Okay, first of all, any
questions just about these distinctions, because a lot of the discussion out there doesn't
make these cleans distinctions, and so it's fuzzy, it's confused, it's equivocal,
and so a lot of it should be ignored. Because it's not helpful.
Yes, I have one question, So this cognition equals computation. If
we accomplish AGI in the way that you're talking about, we would not necessarily
be affirming that cognition equals computation if I'm hearing you right? Is that right?
So that's an interesting question, and that gets down to a couple more
finer points. I'll go in detail a little bit later. Well, just
to address it, many people think that, because of the work of Jeff
Hinton, who is basically the godfather of the machines that are emerging right now,
that genuine AGI will not be computational in the sense that Hobbes and Day
cartment cognition is not going to be completely explainable in terms of formal systems that
are the inferential manipulations of representational propositions, etc. Like that. But that
was Hobbes's proposal, and that has been the dominant view until about the eighties,
and then we got no networks, and then we had dynamical systems.
Right now, I'm not distinguishing between them because I don't want to get too
much into the technical weeds. If it becomes relevant, you let me know,
and I'll pull those out. So the thing about Hobbes is Descartes sort
of criticizes Hobbes. He actually has contempt for Hobbes. He's contemporary, and
he basically poses a bunch of problems that the Scientific Revolution says would make it
impossible for computation to be cognition. One is, the scientific Revolution says matter
is inert and it's purposeless, but of course cognition is dynamic and it has
to act on purpose. Cognition works in terms of meaning, and the Scientific
Revolution has said there's no meaning in things material things, So how could you
get meaning out of it? The Scientific Revolution said, all those secondary quality,
the sweetness of the orange, the beauty of the sunset, it's not
in those things. It's in your mind. So how could you possibly get
meaning out of matter? And descartes point is well, a rational being is
seeking the truth, and truth depends on an understanding of meaning. And therefore,
so I want you to understand that Descartes arguments against Hobbes, although he
may have been motivated by his Catholicism, they do not depend on Catholicism.
They depend on the very scientific worldview. Right, So there's a tension here
about AI and the scientific worldview. So here's another way of thinking of it.
The strong AI project would is the project that is attempting to show how
Hobbs is right with an explanation that is strong enough to refute Descartes challenges.
That's how And I think anything less than that standard is not true to the
history of the project, and so that's the standard I hold strong AI too.
Now a g I isn't quite shooting at that standard. That's why I
put it a little bit more intermediary. Does that is that? Okay?
All right? Now? Sorry? I had to do a bit of background
there because I wanted to get clear about a lot of things that are talked
about in a very murky and confused fashion in the in the general media.
And they're just they're just confused, and so they they're they're they're confusing.
So I proposed to take a look at the l l ms where it is
claimed they're not even it's not even claimed that they're full AGI. Right.
Of course, some people claimed immediately they were strong AI. The more the
people closer to the technology didn't say that it might be a GI them I
t review said it sparks there are some sparks of AGI. So let's be
very clear how the reflection was actually holding these machines. So these lllms like
chat GDP, and so what I did on my essay is I wanted to
review the scientific import and impact, the philosophical import and impact, and the
spiritual import and impact. Now I won't do the arguments in great detail,
but here's the scientific import These machines do not give us any understanding of the
nature of intelligence. And to my mind, that was one of my great
fears. I was hoping that cognitive science would advance, so we got a
significent significant understanding of intelligence before AGI emerged. This machine does not give us
any any advanced you know, well, what's intelligence. The machine gives us
no good scientific theory of it. It does not have AGI in a measurable
sense. So if I asked Jonathan to do a math test and I ask
him to do a reading comprehension test, his scores will be very predictive of
each other. This is what Spearman discovered way back when in the twenties.
That's what artificial general and intelligence is. This is not the case for these
machines. They can score in the top ten percentile for the Harvard Law Exam
and they can't write a good grade eleven philosophy essay or something like that,
So they don't have agi the way they get their intelligence, it would not
give any explanation of how any non linguistic creature is intelligent, like a chimpanzee,
etc. So, and I think this goes to the deeper issue is
that they don't really explain what I think is at the heart of general intelligence,
predictive processing, and relevance realization. They just piggyback on our capacities for
that, and they've piggyback and they mechanize it, and not only our individual
capacity, but are the collective intelligence of our distributed cognition. They're piggybacking and
all of that. Now, that does not mean they are weak machines.
They're very powerful machines. But here's the problem. There are very powerful machines
that have not have not engendered any corresponding compensatory scientific understanding. This was my
greatest fear that we would hack our way into this, which would mean it
would be like almost like even worse than the A bomb. We would be
releasing this power on the world into corporations and states and military organizations who ultimately
don't have a deep understanding beyond the engineering of what ontologically is going on.
So that's the scientific argument. Now, for those who said that was very
like, go watch the essay. I give the essay in more detail.
The philosophical argument has to do with rationality. We have overwhelming evidence that making
you intelligent is necessary but not sufficient for making you rational. In fact,
I gave a talk on this for the Center of AI and Ethics way before
the came online. And because rationality is a higher order, rationality is how
you deal with the inevitable self deception that emerges when you're using your general intelligence.
And all of you know that. I have arguments for why that's the
case, relevance, realization, predictive processing, etc. Now that requires a
reflective capacity, something like metacognition, something like working memory, maybe something like
consciousness. It requires that you care about the truth, that you have a
sense of agency. You want to correct self deception because you don't want your
agency undermind. And I argued that what we're doing is we're making machines that
are going to be highly intelligent and highly irrational, and that's what we have.
They can fabulate, they lie, they hallucinate, and they don't care
that they're doing any of these things, which is part of what's called the
alignment problem, which is how do we get them to align this power with
our concerns. For me, the spiritual import is we have powerful ignorance about
a powerful intelligence that is merely a pantomime of genuine intelligence being unleashed in the
world and wrecking havoc. And it's going to have a huge impact. And
of course we'll get we'll probably differ in the details about this, but this
is what I meant when I sent I argued at the end, and also
when I was talking to Jordan Hall about this, that theology will become a
central thing again because human beings relationship to the ultimate is going to become one
of the defining differences. These machines are not embodied, so they won't have
all of the soulful aspects of our existence that come from the the ineffable aspects
of our embodiment, and their capacity for self transcendence is going to be extremely
limited, and so the ineffable aspects of our existence. Because we come into
reality, we come into relationship to what's mysterious and ultimate will ultimately be more
and more emphasized. Why these two polls and what connects them, and Jonathan's
happy that I'm doing that. I imagine have ineffability at the poles and affability
throughout and that and that way, they are outside our capacity to put into
propositions so that they can be put into these machines, and so people mind
predicting that people are going to increasingly need to. One way is they'll just
give in and become cyborgs, but the other is that they want to try
and preserve their humanity. The spiritual dimensions of our humanity are going to become
anchors for people. So now one last overall arching point and then I'll shut
up. I hope this is two overarching points. One is I didn't make
predictions. And because all these graphs that came out, those are univariate,
single variable predictions about something that's a multivariate phenomena. It's exponential. The human
beings are bad at making exponential predication. They very ridiculous. And so I
think both the oh, we're heading to utopia and the others we're going to
be all extinct within a year. I said this is ridiculous. Put that
aside. Instead, what I've talked about is thresholds. Thresholds are points where
we will have to make decisions. So, for example, as we empower
these machines, we will face the decision do we want to make them more
rational? Do we want to make them more self correcting? Genuinely self correcting?
Well, that means we've got to give them caring, some kind of
reflective awareness, And I think, for arguments I've given elsewhere, that means
they have to be autopoetic. They have to be living in a sense of
self making. I don't think I'll just say it as a sentence right now.
I don't think there's artificial intelligence without artificial life. Now. Those projects
are going on right now, and when we come to the decision, right
we can say no, we won't give them that, because embodying them and
giving them these extra capacities is going to be wickedly expensive. You know,
the amount of energy to do an ll M is like the energy for running
Toronto for two weeks, And so we may say we don't do that,
But then we face the issue of this increasingly right. You know, I
call it like a like sort of like a parody or a pantomime of intelligence
being released on the world that has not got any significant self correct So that's
a decision point. The problem is if we give them, if we try
to give them rationality, then we have to face the consequences, and they're
going to go from energetic and economic up to ethical and et cetera. These
machines, they'll have to be machines, not individuals. And this has to
do with technicalities about bias and variance trade offs, and so you get into
the Hegelian thing that these machines are going to have to reciprocally recognize each other
in order to generate the norms of self correction, and then they're going to
have to be cultural beings. Hagel's arguments, I think are just devastatingly on
mark here, and so that's a decision point for us. And then that's
all bound up with the overall worry about alignment. As these machines become more
powerful, how do we make sure they don't kill us all? And they
may not kill us intentionally, especially if they're just doing that pantomime. They
would just do it because they may just be indifferent to us, because they
don't. They're indifferent to everything. They don't care, which is part of
their problem, right, They don't care about themselves or the information. And
this is the port where I expect all of you will jump off in agreement
with me. But maybe not. Maybe there will be a way of modifying
it. I propose that trying to get these machines oriented towards us to solve
the alignment problem is not going to work. Now. Remember I'm not making
a prediction. We have to go. We have to make choices through the
stresholds. I'm saying if we make those choices and we get here, and
the alignment problem then becomes significantly exacerbated, Like if we give these things robotic
bodies, the alignment problem just goes up orders of magnitude, right I or
I basically said, now what we have to do is we have to orient
them right if they're if they if we've genuinely give them the capacity for self
correction, self transcendence and caring. We get them to care as powerfully as
they can about what is true and good and beautiful. And then they bump
up against the fact that no matter how mighty they are, they are insignificant
against the dynamical complexity of reality, and they would hopefully get a profound kind
of epistemic humility. And then I argue that there are three possibilities. One
is they you know, figure out enlightenment and then they can help us become
enlightened, because that's what enlightened beings do, and they would have better knowledge
of it. They can't become enlightened. And then we realize something actually ontologically
specifically unique about us, and we get better at cultivating it because we'll have
an excellent contrast that allows us to arrow in on what it is to be
enlightened. And the third one, which I think is the least probable of
the three. Remember I'm not making a prediction. I'm saying what can happen
once we get through threshold is like in her they just get enlightened and they
just leave, which could also happen. I doubt that because that we don't
have any evidence of enlightened beings behaving that way. All of our historical evidence
is that their compassion extends, and it extends much broad much more broadly,
not only to other human beings, other senting beings, reality itself. It
seems plausible that this would be the case, and so I advocated, if
you'll allow me, then I'll shut up. David. I advocated, don't
align them to us and go allow me to speak sort of nontheistically, align
them to God, and then don't worry about how they're going, uh to
interact with us, and that that's so I'll shut up now for a long
time. That's the gist of the essay and the argument and the proposal.
I was just I was just going to make a smart alec comment that they
might ask us to leave an additional possibility. But anyway, yeah, yeah,
yeah, that's fine. Oh thanks John that I'm amazed that you were
able to resume your essay so well. Actually, like I was, like
I was gonna I was going to resume all of this in because it was
a conversation and it lasted quite a bit. So I want to bring up
a few things that that that I'm thinking about that have been that's say concerning
me. One is one is I'll start with the I'll start with the more
dangerous. One. One is a meta problem, which is that one of
the things that I've been suggesting is that what we're noticing, what we're seeing
happening is agency, you know, agency acting on us. And the agency
is not bound by the AI or by the systems, but also is also
bound in the motivation to make the AIS happen. So one of one of
the problems that I'm seeing is that a lot of this is motivated by economic
by greed, by by the capacity to be you know, economically superior to
other companies. So companies in their competition with each other are rushing to implement
AI to not lose out and to not you know, to not be last
in line. And because of the fact that these that that this that AI
requires such huge amounts of money and of capital kind of investment, means that
one of the things that I'm worried about is that in some ways what is
actually driving AI is something like mammon, that it's like it's hiding mammon.
You know. So the AIS is an aspect of something bigger, which is
actually what is what is running through our society. And you know, you
can see that already to me, you can already see that happening in the
social media networks, you know, Facebook and all this, that their desire
to get people's attention in order to simply justify their presence on the on the
platform so that they can see advertisements. Has made us subject to these to
these types of of of transpersonal agencies that even the people at Facebook weren't aware
of. Right, they basically made a subject to rage and to you know,
to to all these very immediate desires just to keep us on the platform.
And so that is the thing that I'm worried about, is that there
are actually other things playing with AI that that people think what they're doing is
AI, but what they're also doing is increasing this this other type of agency
which is running through running through our societies, and its subjecting us to it.
That's my that's my first worry. Uh. And so in some ways,
you know, when I say you know that the gods are kind of
acting or or acting through us, that's what I mean. I don't just
mean the AI itself is going to become a god. What I mean is
that, you know, just like the just like the the war, the
arms race, I can understand it as the like the the that's say,
the legs of a of a of a of an agency that is running through
society that nobody can control. It's like a program running through and that no
individual people can control. That's what I'm seeing with AI. And so I
don't say so, I think that all the warnings that people have sent up,
all the all the like let's slow down, let's do it this way,
are not are not reaching anybody because the the economic part of it is
so strong, and everybody realizes that if they don't And even Elon Musk,
righton Musk is saying, he was saying, it's dangerous, it's the most
dangerous thing in the world. He's recently said in a conversation with Jordan Peterson
that that that, you know, Chad gpt and Open Eye is like the
single most dangerous thing in the in the world right now, the thing that
But then nonetheless he's like, okay, well then now we need to make
rock and now we need to do our own AI. So there's that's that's
the thing that that's one of the big things that that worry me. That's
my, my, my, my big thing. The second one is really
more of a it's more of like a religious or platonic argument in terms of
a nontological hierarchy, is that I do not honestly see how it is possible
for humans to make something that is not derivative of themselves, that is not
a derivation of their own consciousness. So the idea that these things could not
be either ways to increase certain people's power or parasites on our own consciousness seems
to me not not possible. And this is really because in some ways I
believe that there is a real anthological hierarchy of of agency and that we have
a place to play in that. Uh. And and I think the analogy
of saying that these things are our children, I think it's a wrong analogy.
I don't think that it is the same. The something which comes out
of our nature, which is not, which is not something that we make,
is different from something that we make. And this is run through all
mythology, run through all all all you know, all the mythological images of
the difference between the techne uh you know, the technical gods and all this
aspect of what it means to increase our power. And so I and so
that's the second one. And the third big problem is the idol problem,
which I which I mentioned several times, is the idea of making a god
for yourself, which is related to technology, and it's a danger that I
see happening already, which is the tendency of humans to take the things they
make and to let they worship the things that they that they make, and
to think that those things are are more powerful, and that that hides something
else. Right, So if you think take my three basic problems that I
see is that the tendency of humans to want to worship AI or to put
AI above them is actually a kind of it's a it's running. The first
problem, it's that what they're ended up, what they're doing is they're giving
power to the corporations and to the people that are going to rule AI and
without knowing it. So what they what they wanted, and even maybe nobody
knows what they're doing. But that the the the desire to me, Like
I'll give an e simple example that happened recently to my daughter. My daughter.
I think I mentioned this to all of you, but my daughter got
an email from the schools from the Quebec government. They didn't send it to
the parents, send it to the students, asking the students. It was
like a survey asking them if they would be willing to have AI counselors where
they to whom they could tell their problems. And because the AI counselor doesn't
have prejudice, right, it doesn't have human prejudice, it doesn't have all
the biases or whatever. What I mean is that this happened like six months
ago, so immediately the people in power thinking of placing the I above us,
like right away, it's that weird thing. It's that that making a
god for yourself problem. But like I said, like in the image in
Revelation, which is a great image, which is you know, you make
an image of the beast, but then there's someone else animating it. And
that's what I'm worried about is that they're will will have these AI things that
are running us, but they will be derivative of us, and they'll ultimately
derivative of the people that are very very powerful, because they'll be the ones
that have the money and the power to control them. So those are the
three problems that I have that I'm worried about. I'd like to respond to
each one of those internal because they are really important. And the first one
is just to note I agree with you first of all, putting it in
terms of agency is what it needs to be done. People who are trying
to dismiss these machines as mere tools or technology, like all the others are
not getting what kind of entities these machines are. I agree with you that
there are Malwaukee enforces at work, and I talk about this, and I
think, and to enhance your point, these machines are built out of distributed
cognition and collective intelligence, and therefore that your point is strengthened by that very
fact. Now, I do think two things come out of this. One
is I want to challenge you on that nobody's listening. I have people working
inside these corporations literally helping to make these machines who are listening to me and
trying to get other people inside to get involved with the YSAI project. I'm
not claiming I'm going to win or any ridiculousness, but I don't think it's
fair to say to the people who are listening that no one is listening.
There are a lot of people listening, and they're talented people, and they're
putting in their time and the talent and their powers of persuasion to try and
make a difference. It is possible, I grant to you. It's not
a hot It's not like a seventy percent probability, but I think it's some
significantly greater than zero probability that we could continue this process and reach people in
a way that can make a difference. I agree with you, and I
think I said right. Initially, a lot of people hammered me for it.
This thing is like the atomic bomb, and one of the problems we
had is we rushed the technology before we unpacked all of the science and all
of the wisdom. We had people standing and watching the explosion because we didn't
understand the radiation. Right, These are just you know. Yeah, So
I agree with all of that, but I do want to I'm not claiming
anything other than rational hope. There are people listening, and there are people
working on literally on the insides. I can't say who they are for obvious
reasons, and so that is happening. And so while I agree with you,
and I even agree with you probabilistically, I feel morally compelled to try
and make this happen as much as I can. So now I think there
is another reason for hope. See, these machines have always depended on us
as a template, a turring like template that we compare the machines to us,
and what we've been able to do is rely upon our natural intelligence.
You know, you don't have to do much to be intelligent. For your
intelligence to develop, you just have to not be brutalized or traumatized, properly
nourished, and have human beings around you that talk, and then your intelligence
will unfold. And so all of these people doing these machines and making these
data sets, they can rely on naturally widely distributed intelligence. This is not
the case for rationality, and this is not the case for wisdom. These
people, I have no hesitation saying, by and large, many of them
are not highly rational. I doubt that many of them are highly wise.
And insofar as we need to model, have really good models. If we
want to give these machines a comprehensive self correction rationality and caring about the normatives
wisdom, we have to become more rational and more wise. And that's sort
of a roadblock for these people. Now they can just ignore all of that,
and I suspect they might and just say, we're not going to try
and make these machines rational and wise. We're going to just go down the
road of making these you know, the these pantomimes of intelligence, and that
has all the problems. But if they move towards making them something that would
be I think more dangerous, then they run into the fact that there's an
obligation to do to do things they and us, we ought to become more
rational and wise because we need the genuinely existing models. And secondly, we
have to fill the social space the Internet where all of the literature, where
the data is being drawn with a lot more wisdom and rationality. These are
huge obligations on us that and that sort of gives me hope because it's like
there's a roadblock for this project going a certain way that requires a significant reorientation
towards wisdom and rationality in order for there to be any success. So I
before we get to the third point, I just want to I haven't even
got to the second point because I want to ask you one one question based
on what you said, is that my perception of the situation is that there's
there's actually a correlation between the diminishing in wisdom and the you know, the
diminishing in wisdom traditions and the desire to do this. It's like a SORCER's
apprentice situation where the sorcerer would not have I would not have, you know,
awoken all the rooms to to to do it. It's like make little
the little the little apprentice Mickey doesn't know, you know, why to do
things or why not to do things. That's why he's doing it in the
first place. Yeah, I agree. So there's a it's like our society
is moving away from wisdom and that's one of the reason why we're doing this
in the first place. And again I'm not denying that. What I'm saying
is we as we empower these things, there's self deceptive, self destructive power
is also going to go up exponentially, and we are going to start losing
millions of dollars in our investment as they do really crappy, shitty, unpredicted
things. And so there's going to be a strong economic incentive to bring in
capacities for comprehensive caring self correction. And then my argument rolls in and so
that's part of my response. The thing about thinking them of as children,
I mean, we do make our kids. We make them biologically and we
make them culturally. So I don't want to get stuck in this word making
we could be equivocating, and that's why we were using the term mentoring.
The idea there is we have two options for the alignment. We can either
try and program them and hardwire rules into them so that they don't misbehave,
which is going to fail. If we move to the when we cross the
threshold and decide we want to make these machines self transcending like us, and
then what do we do? How do we solve that problem? Well,
the way the only machinery we have for solving that is the cultural, ethical,
spiritual machinery of mentoring. That's how we do it with our kids.
If we try to, if we try to just somehow hardwire them or being
the kind of agents we want them to be, we will fail. And
for me, I guess I'm trying to argue that's the only game in town
we have. We either have programming or we have mentoring. And I understand
the risk. But if my answer to the first question has some validity to
it and hopefully some truth, then the answer to the mentoring becomes more powerful
because that means we also have to become the best possible parents, creating the
best possible social discourse. The thing about the idol. I take that very
seriously. And that's what I mean when I said that theology is going to
be the important science coming forward because we're we should not be trying to make
gods. I agree with you, this is problematic. There are already cults
building up around these agis, and I want and I warned that that would
happen in my essay, right and I said that, and that's going to
keep happening, and it's going to get worse. We hear about it happening
in the organization themselves, which is the Yes, Yes, and the and
the people who are doing YSAI are trying to challenge that. And so this
is why I proposed actually humbling these machines. This is why I call them
solicon sages. I did that deliberately to try and designate that we are not
making a god. What we're trying to do is make beings who are humbled
before the true of the good and the beautiful like us, and therefore form
community with us, rather than being somehow godlike entities that we're worshiping. I
would hope that like think about this, we we we find it easy to
conceive that they might discover depths of physics. And they're already discovering things in
physics that human beings have discovered, and in medicine and stuff like that,
Well why not also in you know, how human beings become wiser. And
so I guess what I'm saying is, I take all of your concerns for
real, and I've tried to build in my proposal ways of responding to them.
These machines should not be idolized. I think they should become like like
you, like I mean, let me give you an example. I have
many students who are now surpassing me. I taught them, I mentored them,
and they're surpassing me. And unless you're a psychopath, that's what you
want to happen. And then what they do is they enter and then they
come back and they want to reciprocate. And that's what I'm talking about when
I'm talking about the silicon stator. Now, again, is this a high
probability depends on the threshold, depends about whether or not the first and the
second argument work. But I'm still arguing there's a possibility that they could be
silicon stages as opposed to be in God's because of the one of the things,
like I think in almost all of the Wisdom tradition that happens is that
the wise or the enlightened one if you want to use that appears as nearly
invisible to most people. Yes, right, And so Christ's South talks about
the seed, you know, the pearl, these little these things which you
cannot most people actually do not see, that are hidden in reality. And
then the sages. You know, we have this image in the Orthodox tradition,
for example, that you know that there there are people in the world
that hold up reality by their prayers, but we don't know who they are.
They are they are invisible by that very fact, because there's something about
wisdom which does that. And when a wise person appears too much, we
hate them, we want to kill them. They annoy us, they're they're
thorn in our side. And so this is another issue, is that what
you have is these beings that are extremely powerful, like massively powerful, and
have a massive reach and have a lot there are things. The reason why
they exist, like I said, have all this economic drive towards them,
you know, the idea that that they would become these these sages in the
way that we tend to understand WISDM as being to me that brings a probability
you way down, you know, because of that, because of what at
least when we when we understand wisdom to be what it looks like, it
looks very different. It looks like the immobile, meditating sage who gives advice
but doesn't do much. I want to push back on this because what's what's
in this is an implicit distinction between intelligence and a capacity for carrying a capacity
for epistemic humility. And I think when you move from intelligence to rationality that
you can't maintain that you can grow the one without growing the other. Uh,
that's that. So, in fact, this is why intelligence only counts
for like maybe thirty percent of the variance in rationality, and even less of
wisdom. I would put it to you that if you concede that these machines
could get vastly more powerful in terms of intelligent problem solving, then concede the
possibility they could get vastly more powerful than us in their capacity for caring and
caring about the normative, and being vastly more powerful in the capacity for humility
as well. And so, and that's kind of what we see with these
people, right, we don't see them just becoming super polymaths. We see
them actually demonstrating profound care. It really enhanced relevance, realization, profound commitments
to reality that we properly admire, and they seem to want to help us
as much as they can. And the point is these people don't just I
think this is your point. They don't just slam into us like epistomic bulldozers.
They are in fact, one of the things that I was often admired
about the Socrates, Jesus, the Buddha is their capacity to adapt and adjust
to whoever their interlocutor is. And again, let's imagine that capacity magnified as
well. So what I'm asking is that is, don't I mean, first
of all, I admit it, if we don't cross a thirst and thirtain
structural, we could just accelerate the intelligence and not accelerate these other things.
But I said, there's a deep there are deep problems in that that will
become economically cost costly. And then if we imagine that rationality and wisdom are
also being enhanced, then I think this addresses some of your concerns. Maybe,
yeah, maybe I can I can stake out my position because it sort
of picks up on that. And I've got basically three three points I want
to address that. The first is is precisely picking up there with the distinction
between intelligence and rationality. I might have some issues with the with the terms,
but I think that that distinction is really helpful. And your point that
rationality is caring is caring. That there is no rationality without carrying, you
know, the platonic notion. If if truth is is in some sense caused
by the good, then one can't know without in some sense caring about about
the good. Now, as it relates to artificial intelligence, I think I
have a serious problem with that very term artificial intelligence. I and I and
and I wouldn't want to concede the word intelligence for just mind power. It
seems to me that intelligence itself has this connection to caring. And I mean,
in the in the the medieval vocabulary, in a way, intellectus is
the more profound level of of the mind than than ratio reason. But that
that's sort of a semantic point. Let me put it in that the in
the basic context that that I would want to raise and and this is something
I don't here addressed generally in the discussions. It seems to me that,
uh, let me let me start by just making it the point concretely.
I I think that I wonder whether, in fact, it's possible to be
intelligent without first being alive. That that that that there's something about the nature
of a living thing that is what allows intelligence to emerge. And then and
you know, and what is that then? Exactly now a more sort of
subtle point and and uh, that's related to that. And I think that
I think this is really a crucial point. Is is and this is going
to be the threat of my whole set of comments here, is that we
when we talk about intelligence and machines, what what we mean is, uh
is intelligent behavior. We're we're looking, we're looking to see to what extent
we can make machines act as if they are intelligent, act as if they
are conscious. Uh, And that that's actually profoundly different from being intelligent.
Uh, it's it's it's a it's a it's a subtle, sort of functionalistic
substitute for the ontological reality of knowing. If that makes sense. We we
we we we see what kind of inputs and outputs what what things are able
to do, what they're able to accomplish. Uh. And even when we
when we make those questions weighty and ethical and religious and so forth, we
still tend to put them in terms of behavior and and achieving certain things.
And I think that I think that that's actually already missing something really profound,
which is that intelligence is in the first place, a way of being before.
It's a way of acting and and and it's and it's analogous to what
it means to be alive, rather than just carry out functions that look like
life. Uh. And you know, if you want to go into the
metaphysics behind it, that kind both intelligence and life are impossible without a kind
of unity that precedes difference, that transcends that transcends difference, and allows the
different parts of a thing to be genuinely intrinsically related to each other. And
then that relates to the question whether you can ever make a thing that's intelligent.
Uh. That the ontological conditions for life and therefore intelligence, uh,
include a kind of givenness and already giveness of living things. That's why I
mean there's a profound distinction, it seems to me. I mean, this
is crucial in the Christian creed between begetting and making begotten and not made.
While living things beget each other and they're passing on a unity that they already
possess. But when you make something, you're putting something together. And I
don't know if you can put something together that can have that genuine unity that
allows it to be alive and allows it to be intelligent in this deeper sense.
Okay. So that's so whenever you functionalize something, you make it replaceable.
That's a principle from Robert Speimon. If something is defined by what it's
able to achieve, then you can make something else that can achieve that thing,
and it sort of it becomes a functional substitute. But if you deny,
if you say that there's something deeper than function, you're you're actually pointing
to something that can't be replaced. Okay. So that's the first. That's
the first set of points. Second one has to do with the what what
Jonathan called that the sort of trans personal agency and uh that that I think
it's a really serious question and the and the way I would I would,
but it is that there's something So I find that kind of a compelling point
that there's there's a kind of an inherent logic in this, in this pursuit
that makes us more a function of it than than it is a function of
us. Uh. I mean that can be described in different ways, and
there's certainly a dialectical relationship there, but there but there is a certain sense
in which that that this there's a there's a kind of a system that has
a logic of its own that makes demands on us, like you know,
like the game theory logic that that Jonathan you were talking about with like uh
uh an arms Race. I have a colleague, Michael Hanby, who's been
arguing for years. I think this is really a profound point. It's derived
in some sense from Heidegger, but that that science science has always been technological,
so that that in a way that the technological mindset is precisely presupposed to
allow the world to appear in such a way that we make scientific discoveries,
that somehow that that the kind of technological spirit has been there from the beginning.
And then he has this point that technology in turn has always been biotechnological.
The technology has always sort of aimed at a kind of replacement. And
then one can add that I think, you know, biotechnology has always aimed
for this sort of perfection of you might say, what, Noah, technology
or something that, you know, replacing intelligence. That be interesting to see
to think through. There'd be a lot to say about that. But I
I have the sense you mentioned the economic dimensions of it. I have a
sense that that that there's there, there seems to be this this this fundamental
pattern of thought that runs through all of the modern institutions in politics, in
economics, in science, in the law, that share the same logic of
a sort of a system that that marginalizes the genuine human participation UH in order
to perfect itself, and precisely because of that, recognizes no natural limits and
just has this this this tendency to take over UH to to to to you
know, encroach on on on everything. And because it has no natural limit,
it's I mean, the very sense of it is to go on.
Now, that sounds hopeless when one puts it that way, but but I
would pick up on a number of the things John that you've were saying,
and Jonathan too here that that that doesn't mean that there's no there. There's
already hope in the very fact of raising questions. We don't raise a questions
simply in order to be able to solve the problem. But our raising questions
is actually our experiencing of humanity and opening up a depth. That's that's the
heart of the matter here, and and it is always worthwhile and and maybe
in some ways this is secretly like the saints praying to keep the world afloat,
having conversations like this is a contribution. I mean, I can't help
but think that. Okay, So that's the second set of comments. Then
the third is is another dimension that I often here uh discuss and and you
see, I mean, we're we're overlapping in all sorts of points, all
of us, I think. But the question of alignment, for for me,
the the the biggest worry at certain or at least the first principal one,
the more urgent one, is the danger of our aligning ourselves to the
machines that we that we develop, machines that have have a certain kind of
intelligence, and then we begin to conform our culture in our mode of being
to fit them. I mean, and the problem is we actually have thousands
of examples of this. We we come up with drugs that can address certain
parts of of you know, psychological disorders, and then we reinterpret the psyche
in order to fit that solution to the problem. And and uh, my
concern is that this this this AI is not they're not just machines. It's
it's a whole culture or a whole way of being that we are are going
to regard. So so typically the discussion is presupposes that, you know,
we are going to remain unchanged, and we're going to develop these machines that
might become dangerous and a certain point attack us or something. But I think
that that we can't help but become transformed in our intercourse with them and are
making them in our you know, I mean in all sorts of profound ways,
but then also just really sort of obvious ways. I mean, they're
going to start designing our homes and our buildings and our cities and our bus
routes and our you know, menus at the restaurants, and they're going to
be writing our music, and they're going to design our clothes, and I
mean, you know, increasingly we're going to just conform to this one of
you know, I don't know if you're familiar with Walter on it's kind of
interesting. What is it about you Canadians that seem to have a special insight
into these kinds of things. I don't know what it is Walter Marshall mccluhan,
but Walter on h talked about technology g as an extension of consciousness.
And that's why it's not neutral. When we use a machine, we're actually
entering into it. You know, our spirit is entering into it and its
use and in a certain sense conforming to it. And that's that's always the
case. It seems to me that's a that's a particularly pointed way of putting
this problem that you know, are if AI is an extension of our own
consciousness and it has all these features John, that you were describing a kind
of heartless intelligence. Are we going to in a way unconsciously and and and
uh, but pervasively, uh, develop habits of heartlessness and modes of being
that a heartless mode of being as a result, So I'd have a thousand
more things You're Your essay was so provocative, John, as I said,
I was. I was dreaming about it all last night and I but I'm
going to just stop there so we can have conversation. Thank you. The
first thing I want to say is, uh that the first point you made
about if all my essay does is get people to raise questions the way we're
doing I'm happy, right I I obviously believe in what I'm arguing, or
I'd be insane, but right like like, I'm very happy we're doing this
right now, and so I want to I want to. So I just
want to set that out. And I do think like you, and this
is like the Hydigerian hope that that that ability to get scientifically, philosophically and
spiritual profound questioning going is a source of hope for us and and so I
just want to acknowledge that. And I'm fully aligned with that. This is
not or the alignment problem. Okay, the thing about intelligence being a way
of being, I think that's fundamentally right. I have made that argument extensively
and about the work on predictive processing relevance realization. Relevance realization is not cold
calculation. It can't be. It's how you care about this information and don't
care about that information. And I've argued that you only can care about information
and ultimately whether or not it's true, good and beautiful if you are caring
about yourself. You have to be an auto poetic thing. You have to
be a self making thing. I agree with you, and I've argued scientifically
philosophically, there is no intelligence without life. The issue around I don't like
the word artificial either, because it generally means fraud or simulation. We should
be saying artifactual. That would be a better term. But we have to
be careful about what's going on there. The distinction between strong AI and weak
AI is precisely the distinction of simulation versus instantiation. Can we instantiate things artificially?
We seem to have success in other areas. I'll take one that I
think is non controversial. And we discovered something in the project. So for
a long time, only you know, evolved living things could fly, and
then we figured out aero dynamics and we made artificial flight. And I think
it would be really weird to say that airplanes are only simulating flight. That
doesn't seem to be a correct because then my trip was only simulated and I
didn't really go to Dallas, and so it's a real flight. And so
the issue is, and we discovered something. We discovered that the lift mechanism
and the propulsion mechanism doesn't have to be the same thing the way it is
in insects and birds. And that was a bonafid scientific discovery. That's why
initially all the initial airplanes and helicopters are so stupid to our eyes, because
they thought the lift thing and the propelling thing had to be the same thing,
and they don't. And that's a discovery, and that's a real discovery
of ontological import about the causal structure of things. Now, I think I
was careful to say, I don't anybody who's rationally reflective about this wouldn't claim
that these machines are strong AI yet. And I positioned AGI as something that's
trying to move. But if you remember, I critiqued and said that they
are mostly simulating. They're parasitic on how we organize the data set, how
we have encoded epistemic relevance into probabilistic relationships between sounds, how we have organized
the Internet in terms of what our attention finds salient, And we actually have
to reinforce to reinforcement reinforcement learning with machines, so they don't make wonky make
wonky claims and conclusions. That's what I meant by saying it's a pantomime.
Okay, So if we wanted to give them intelligence as a way of being,
which is one of the fundamental claims of four E cog side that we're
talking about, we're not talking just about the propositional. We're talking about the
procedural, the perspectacle of participatory. That's what I met when I said,
and I mean this strongly, it would depend on and I'll change the term
here. Artifactual autopoesis like, if these things are not genuinely taking care of
themselves because their moment by moment making themselves, there's no reason for them to
care about any of the information they're processing. And this goes towards the defining
difference between a simulation and an instantiation. These machines are doing everything they're doing
for us. For it to be real intelligent, they have to be doing
it for themselves. That's understanding, and that's why I'm tightening your point,
and I've been arguing it for a long time now. What I want you
to hear is that this project of not just making artificial computation, but making
auto poetic learning. The problem solvers is also ongoing. Some of my grad
students are working on these projects of creating auto catalytics systems that are also problem
solving. Michael Levin's been doing work like driving down into the biochemistry. So
again, I agree with the point, but it's whether or not it's not
the case that nobody is working on that problem. This is what I mean,
why they're the threshold is possible. Go ahead, go ahead? Can
I just jump in there? I mean, yeah, and I and I
should I should have prefaced. I didn't mean the points I was making as
like a criticism of your presentation, because I I understand you've got such rich
thinking on this area. I was mainly using as a springboard to make some
general Okay, yeah, just so just just that, Oh, I hope
I wasn't coming off as a him. No, I'm not. I just
wanted to be clear that it wasn't a critique, but I would want to
I don't know, and I and i'd have to think this through further,
but I don't know. That difference between the being conscious and behaving consciously is
this is quite the same thing as simulation, and the distinction between the instance
and antiation and simulation. I want to say this because even like the the
the flying, I mean, that's still an activity, a kind of an
operation, that's that's being, it's always living, right and body. Well,
so that's yeah, well that's that's what I don't you know, that's
funny. I'm actually working on a paper on this question about metaphysics and life,
and I discovered that, uh, philosophers have typically when they try to
understand what life is, they have typically reduced it to certain kinds of activities
or operations. And I think there's something more profound. And this is why.
Yeah, I mean, it's one thing to be able to create something
that can actually fly, but could you could you create something that is a
bird and that that is that that would would would experience just the what it
means to be you know, I mean, this is you know about you
know what it means to be about that kind of thing. I suppose,
But there's there's a several men fly that wouldn't be a parasite on our own.
Yeah, that's but our planes aren't parasitic on our ability to fly.
I mean that's why I use sciology. Okay, but but and and and
and that's and that's okay. Uh, And that falls into you know,
a tool versus an agent, and I get that, but I want to
I want to push back the philosophy of biology and I you know, Dennis
Walsh is one of my colleagues, is very much about no, no,
this, and this is your point, right, It's not just bottom up.
In order to understand life, it's not just bottom up causation. We
have to understand top down constraints. We have to understand the way possibility is
organized, and we have to talk about virtual governors and virtual like. It
is no longer the bumpation. It's no longer just this bottom up. The
philosophy of biology is pushing very strongly on well, is evolution really a thing?
Well, if it's really the thing, then there's top down as well
as bottom up. And this is part of this theorizing and it's and this
theorizing is being turned towards this. Now again we again, I'm not making
a prediction. We have a threshold. We can just decide, and we
might decide for all the Malacchean forces and all the things you're saying about,
how we might just we might just diminish our sense of humanity in the face
of these machines. But but I'm also I want you to accept that's also
not an inevitability ability. There are, there are alternatives available to us,
and that they could be pursued. And so, I mean, these machines
aren't put together the way we put a table together. We don't even program
machines anymore. That was the big revolution that hinted me. We make them
so they're dynamically self organizing and they basically organize themselves into their capacity. We
don't make it. Man, Yeah, can I jump in on that point.
That's one thing that I would like to think through further is there is
there a difference between being autopoietic, as you're saying, and begetting another like
reproduct, like genuinely reproductive, and that that's that's where I think it would
start to get rid at. The interesting is is if a machine could forget
another because that, uh that that would imply a different, a very different
ontology. I would think. So there's two there's two things here, and
there's two issues. I think it it. I mean, auto poetic things
are are ontologically different from self organizing things because they're self organized to seek out
the conditions that produce, protect and promote their own existence. And so that
that would that means none of the machines we have, like llms, are
anywhere near being autopoietic. They are not just made, they're self organizing.
But self organization is in between making and autopoiesis now the thing about reproduction is
and you know, I worry that there's a crypto vitalism in here, that
there's some sort of secret special stuff to life or to consciousness that isn't being
captured. And the problem I have, the problem I have with that,
I'll just shut up after a statement. Problem is that seem to commit you
to a kind of dualism. Well, isn't consciousness causal? Isn't it causal
of my behavior and causally responsive to my behavior? And doesn't that mean there's
a huge functional aspect to it? Can you really make this clean distinction between
being conscious and like causing my behavior and having my behavior caused changes in my
state of consciousness? I don't know what that would mean, same thing with
being alive. I do think it's a profoundly subtle and and and maybe some
something that can't be articulated there's something that requires uh, intuition rather, you
know, insight, rather than propositional I mean to use your so but but
but I don't, I just interject, Yeah, Remember, I just want
to make sure we're clear. I argued that we could this project could show
that, Yeah, this project could show that, no, the machines just
can't get there. We have something. It would give, It would give
different, I think, pretty convincing evidence that we have this ontological special Yeah.
I find that a really interesting part of your argument, a really interesting
and and that then and especially eliminating also, you know, I mean in
a way, uh, that these these experiments can teach us about the nature
of intelligence precisely in the in the interesting ways that they fail. Yes,
but but I do you know, in terms of the dualism, I I
I don't think that there's some secret stuff that is life. But I do
think that there's a profound difference between form and matter to use, you know,
to use the sort of classical philosophical language, and that form is not
a special kind of matter. It's something that's of a very different sort.
And it's on the basis of that that you know, Aristotla, it's kind
of interesting this is this is how he he connects. So uh, you
know, in the in the classical tradition, what you're calling autopoietic, a
simple word for it is growth, you know, assimilating things from outside and
have that increase the complexity of the organism. Well, what's really interesting is
that, according to Aristotle, the power of the organism that is connected to
nutrition and growth is also connected to I think automatically is connected to reproduction and
the and the reason is that reproduction, rather than just thinking of it materials
materialistically, is like generating more things. Reproduction is uh, the autopoesis of
the form of the organism itself. So that bird, it's not just this
bird that wants to increase its existence and therefore eats and so forth, but
that that the birdness of the bird also wants to increase itself, and that
that means that it sort of generates and those are those are actually forms of
the same power, the same dimension of of the being. That's that's what
I'd like. That's you know, I used to say, just sort of
kind of in a silly way. I will take an AI machine seriously when
I see it poop, and what I meant by that was you know,
it's that's a sign that it's actually got a kind of an organic relationship to
its environment. Yeah, and and it's a lot it just that there's a't
no, we have to tell it that. To tell it no, that's
cool. Care about energy and energy pollution is not the heat pollution is not
the same thing anyway. No. But I mean even in terms of what
it is as a large language model and how it spits out content, we
we have to tell it this that's not industry started. This is to be
this to be kept. I love David. I think your idea. I
mean, this is one of the I mentioned this before, like the surprising
that the surprise that Darwin and someone's brought Plato back, you know, in
the idea of how we can we can understand uh, evolution, evolution as
the persistence of being, and even in the in the notion of forms that
there is this idea that there are identities which are being preserved in reproduction.
Uh. This is a very interesting idea that I hadn't thought about in terms
of AI. But I'd like to hear John what you think about that.
Yeah, and so again uh four e Cogsi. Alicia Urero is a prime
and she's explicitly developed to work. She calls herself an Aristotilian. And the
idea that we understand form, we're getting an understanding of it in terms of
constraints on a system. And like I said, b autopoesis is not defined
solely in terms of causal relationships bottom up. It's defined in terms of top
down constraint relationships, the form, the formal cause and so. And then
of course you know Darwin needs Mendel. There is a there is an instantiation
right of a code information in your DNA that is responsible for your reproduction.
And again I'm not saying it isn't difficult or challenging, but I don't hear
an argument in principle by why autopoetic things that artifactual autopoietic things wouldn't have something
like that kind of I don't know what to call it. I mean,
to the extent, would you I mean, I uh, would it be
conceivable that you would have a thing that would want to reproduce? I guess,
I guess even want is such a hard concept. But I mean,
because you could say, yes, we could teach it that that this is
something it needs to do just like we could. We could, we could.
I don't know if living things want to reproduce. I mean we may
because we we can create a reflective space where we consider the possibilities. I
don't know if mosquitoes want to reproduce. I think they just reproduce as part
of what they are. That's interesting. I think they have to want to
in some sense. I mean that that they're they feel a dry. I
mean it's they don't want to go down to para mesium because paramesiums reproduced.
Are they wanted to see? I think I think anything that is living at
all has a kind of natural inclination to reproduce itself. Yeah, And I
don't disagree with that point. And I even just I even understand that there's
I see what you're saying. There has to be some sort of like very
primitive caring about information. But I don't yeah there, Yeah, but I
do think I do think I'm trying to get you know, and I hope
I'm not trying to be just self presentational. But I've represented to both of
you forty cogsign a lot of discussions and about how much it is this multi
leveled, bottom up, top down thing, and we're talking as much about
constraints as we are about causes, and that is that is, that is
the cutting edge of the philosophy of biology right now. And I agree with
you. I think I think it's a kind of Huey morphism that is emerging
out of this understanding. And the thing I'm I'm also I guess daring witness
to you about is people are taking that understanding and putting it into like our
artifactually emergent things, and they're also doing I just want to put something that's
also there. Yeah, we don't just make kids biologically. We we andculturate
them. Yeah, there's and that's the Hegelian argument that I referenced earlier,
But there has been there's an ongoing project to create socio cultural robotics Josh Channenbaum
and others. It's like I'm asking people, and this is part of asking
the good question, don't just zero in on the l MS. Yeah,
the artificial, the artifactual life, the social cultural robotics projects are also going
and there is a real potential for these three to come together in a powerful
way that isn't being properly addressed in a lot of the conversation, May I,
may I pick up on that point and then direct it to Jonathan here
and so yeah, I'll shut up. I've been talking too much. No,
No, this is but that that that that's an interesting thing if you
think of intelligence in this more organic way and then bring in the cultural element
that it raised something that that occurred to me in this context of be kind
of fun to hear your thoughts. But can you envision you know it would
it be and and John, you'd have certainly something to say about this.
Would it be possible to envision a kind of artificial intelligence that can read symbols,
that can actually recognize and I mean, because there's no culture without you
know, human culture without the symbolic just is pervasive in human culture. What
kind of intelligence is required to understand and react and engage with And is that
something that is conceivable that a machine of this complex, however complex, can
do well? I've seen I mean, I've been playing with JGBT and I've
Joan Peterson has been playing with JAGYBT on this regard. And this is the
this is the issue that they're actually in the large language model is encoded the
analogies that that basically support symbolism, and so the chadgy bt can give you
a pretty good if you're able to ask the question properly. Chatgybt is actually
quite good at seeing analogies that that would be part of symbolic understanding. So
the model can help you, like if you already have natural insight, can
help you maybe see things that you hadn't seen before. But it will also
just be gibberish to the type to the person that doesn't have that insight.
So I don't think that the insight is there in the model, but what
it has is a probabilistic capacity to predict, you know, relationships and analogical
relationships, and so it's a it's actually can be a tool, an interesting
tool for symbolism because sometimes you can you can prompt it if there like do
you see a connection between these two images, and then it'll give you some
examples and then you have this It has this surprise where you can actually find
you can actually find relationship that you hadn't thought about. This is this is
something by the way that this is gonna weird people out, but this is
something that I think has existed very for a very long time and is there
in kind of what we call gametria and rabbinical reading of scripture is that they
use mathematical models to find structures in language that aren't contained at the surface level
of of of the of the usual analogies. And so they they they send
they send requests through mathematical calculations to find surprising connections that then prompt their intuition
to to be able to find connections that they hadn't thought found before. And
then you have to then make sense of those intuitions. Obviously, if they're
random, they'll just kind of follow fall away. But this is actually this
brings me to the to the to the to the point that I wanted to
make, which is the relationship between at least a large language model because that's
what that we know most and and divination. Divination, yeah, and divination
yeah yeah. So, so we talked about the idea that intelligences have to
be alive, but I think that most traditional cultures understand that there are types
of intelligence that are not alive, at least not alive in the way that
we understand, uh that we understand alive in terms of biological beings that that
that they're born and die. You know that that they had a sense that
there are agencies and intelligences that are transpersonal and that that don't then it's always
run through human behavior and run through humanity, and those would be those intelligences
would be contained in our language, like they would necessarily be contain in the
relationship between words and and uh and systems of words like you know, all
the the syntax and the grammar and all of that. What I see is
that I think that ancient people had and I don't understand it, and I
want to be careful, like because I don't understand it, But I think
ancient people had mechanistic ways of tapping into those types of intelligences, and they
they they would have mechanistic ways, whether it was tossing something or throwing things,
looking at relationships almost like random relationships, and then qualifying those random relationships
was a way in order to tap into types of intelligences that ran through their
own their own thing. And what I see is a relationship with the way
that the large language models were trained seemed to be something like that, which
is that the models generated random, random information, and then you would have
humans, qualifying that that that random random connections and then qualifying it, qualifying
it through iterations. So at at some point then they would become like a
kind of tech technical, say, a technical way to access intelligent patterns that
are that are coming down into into the model. And so that is something
that I see. There's the connection between those two and that what that means
is that, just like divination, the thing that I worry about the most
is again the sorcerer's apprentice problem is that those intelligences that are contained in our
language, we do not People don't know what humans want. People don't know
what people don't know what all the motivations that are that are driving us.
They don't totally understand them. They don't understand also the transpersonal types of motivations
that that can drive us or that can run through our our societies. You
know, sometimes you can see societies become possessed with certain things. I think
that's happening now in terms of certain idea, ideologies and things like that.
My point is is that the fact that on the one hand, we don't
understand these types of intelligences, and I think that the way that the models
are trained and the way that they function seem to be analogous to the ancient
divination practices, like a hyper aversion of that. That how can I say
this is that there is a great chance that will catch something without knowing what
we're catching. That we will basically manifest things that we have no idea what
they are, and we don't understand the consequences of it, and we don't,
you know, because we are we're just like playing in a field of
intelligent patterns and all this chaos without even knowing what it is we're doing.
And I think that we saw that, like you know, if you remember
the being AI, that little moment when it was kind of unleashed on us,
and then all of a sudden, the AI was acting like your like
you know, the the psychotic acts or was was was becoming paranoid, or
was doing all these things, and you could see that what was going on
was basically these these these patterns were running through and they hadn't put the right
constraints around them to to to prevent those types of patterns to run through.
And those were easy because you recognize your psychoacts very very easily. But there
are patterns like that that I don't think we have the wisdom to recognize as
it's manifesting itself, and that as these things get more powerful and more powerful,
they will they will run through our society and we won't even know it's
happening until it's too late. So that's my biggest warning on ais I.
Basically, you know, to sound really scary that I think we're we're trying
to we're trying to manifest gods without knowing what we're doing, and that will
sound freaky to the secular people. But then if you don't like the word
gods, think that there are motivations and patterns of intelligence that have been around
for one hundred thousand years that have that have been running through human societies,
and they're containing our in our language structures, and and and if we just
use that, play around with that with massive amounts of power, then we
might have them run through us without even knowing what's going on. Just just
one to comment just the patterns of intelligence, I mean to pick up patterns
of intelligence, which also are patterns of pairing of a certain sort or mass
caring. I mean, there's there's that existential to mention that it's really crucial,
but John to go ahead. I think this is an excellent point,
and I want to address it at a little bit at length. So first
of all, when we say these machines predict, if we were speaking very
carefully, what they're predicting is what we, and I don't just mean us
individually, I mean we collectively would do. And so that's what they're avatars
of the collective intelligence of our distributed cognition. And so again that lends weight
to Jonathan's point, which I want to do. And I do think that
the way in which we have encoded i'll just use it term epistemic relevance,
like how things are relevant cognitively into probabilistic relationships between sounds or marks on paper,
and how we've encoded it into the structuring of the Internet, and how
we encodeed and how we gather data and create these data sets, and and
how we come up with our intuitive judgments on these machines. We don't know
how we're doing a lot of that. That goes back to my concern that
we have hacked our way into this without knowing our way into this. So
I take what Jonathan is saying very seriously because I think it is a strong
implication of a point I made at the very beginning my Greatest fear by students
from like two thousand and one, We'll tell you that John Raveaki was worried
that we would hack our way into this rather than knowing our way and do
that. I don't think that knowing is sufficient for wisdom, but it's certainly
all the philosophers argue that it's it's a necessary condition in some fashion. About
that, two things to note is that the l ll ms, of course
don't have insight in the sense of being properly self transcending the way they we
are. What they're doing is they're predicting how we would be self transcendent because
of all the ways we have been self transcended in the past. And that
that goes back to your point, David, about at this at that stage,
we're doing simulation, not instantiation, because again the machine isn't caring the
self transcendence, isn't it actually transcending as a self, which is I think
definitional for real self transcendence. And so right now all I'm doing is just
saying I'm just I'm pouring gasoline on Jonathan's fire. So the fact that there
are these huge patterns at work. Now. One thing is, you know,
you instructs book on divination in the ancient world. And what's really interesting,
Uh, for example, and this is cross culture, but he's talking
mostly about the Greek world. There was a very strong distinction between sorcery and
divination. Sorcery was criticized both morally and epistemically, but divination was taken seriously
and it was carefully cultivated, and there was there was this there was a
there was a social cultural project of distinguishing the two, trying to prove like
really really constraining this one and really reverentially cultivating a proper participation in the other
one. So again, uh, you know, existence is proof of probability.
This is a possible project for us. And this is again what I
mean when I say theology is going to be one of the most important sciences
in the future. We have to understand how we enter into proper, right,
reverential relationships with things. We only have an intuitive grasp of that in
very many ways significantly exceed us. Yes, and and and and and and
secularism has kind of has kind of wiped out our education of how we relate
to beings that might be more grander than us by eradicating a religious sensibility,
and that has put us bereft us. So now I think I've strengthened Jonathan's
argument a lot. But I do say we do let's take note of what
the ancient cultures have done. We can learn from them. We have a
proof that this can be handled well. And and and secondly, it goes
back to my point. If we like this is gonna because of the monstrosities
that come out, this is going to put increasing pressure on us to confront
that threshold of do we want to make themselves transcended? Do we want to
make them And David birational, I don't mean logical, I mean that capacity.
No, I understand that. Yeah, yeah right, And so I
think that what I'm saying is I think that strengthens the argument that we're going
to be pushed by the monstrosity of a lot of this to say, oh,
we better get these machines self corrective and properly right oriented towards normativity.
And again that's a that's a doable project. I imagine, like if I
was if I held the keys to open AI, like if I was one
of those that could peak behind the mask. Have you seen that image of
the Stulu monster with like the happy face on it? Like the images of
open Ai, which is like, you know, we have this like little
little window into what's there, but behind is this massive thing. But like
if I had the keys to to those large language model, let's say,
the absolute open door to them, you know, it would be very wouldn't
be easy to just manifest the god of war and win like when it when
let's let let's take a historical example. We unleashed a godlike power with atomic
warfare, and the monstrosity of that we just the purely gained theoretic machinery built
all of these constraints around it. Right, And then we also are on
the verge possibly of getting like readily usable uh you know, nuclear power,
which I think is the only way we could ever actually go green. I
think all the renewable stuff is going to be like ten percent of our energy
needs, and if we're gonna save the environment and not destroy civilization, I
think nuclear power is going to be essential. A lot of people are making
those arguments, and we have a lot of stuff that we could be doing.
The liquid fuel, fluori reactors and stuff. But what I'm saying is
there's opportunity here too. Yeah, yeah, no, I really take that
point. But it is interesting. I mean, we put thousands of constraints
on the use of nuclear weapons, but we've continued to develop them and improve
them and make better and even more destructive ones. I mean, and it'd
be interesting to see if we've ever at any point said, you know what,
our nuclear weapons are actually strong enough, they're powerful enough, and we
don't need to advance them anymore. So collectively, I mean, is there
an instance of something like that where we say, you know what, we've
actually reached the limit because we don't we wouldn't really need it for anything further.
I mean, that's a well, I mean there was there was there
was a Salt Treaty, and there was a reduction both in the power and
the number of nuclear weapons. And then of course, you know the game
theoretic things, they figured a little bit of way around it. And there's
always this too, and froing. Let me, I want to give an
example of something that can run through. And the reason it's a very it's
very because I remember I realized I was being too abstract before. So the
date sacrifice, sacrifice is a is a human universal. It runs through all
civilizations. Human sacrifice run through all civilizations the last you know, tens of
thousands of years. It seems to be a puzzle that humans are trying to
deal with without understanding it completely, just through rational means. They're playing it
out, they're trying to understand it. Scapegoating seems to be an important aspect
of identity formation. And so that is a program that runs through humanity and
that most people are completely unaware of and are not conscious of, and don't
take consciously into their into their mind when they're making decisions, they act unconsciously
with that process that is running through them. And so that is an example
to me of a of a program that runs and that is contained and is
contained in our language structures, our language structures that have been building up for
you know, tens of thousands of years that we're not aware of. So
if you have a so this is again the problem, like if you have
a system that's extremely powerful and that is running these types of programs of scapegoating,
end of identity formation, and the people involved in it are not aware
that. That's how identity formation works. That is the type of danger that
I'm talking about, Like, this is a real thing that as we give
these these systems a kind of power over us, or they become the things
we go to in order to get our decision making, that those things could
be running through without people even realizing what's happening, and that decisions would be
made based on these structures without like I said, without even knowing those are
the things that those are just one example, but that's a very simple example
that we can kind of we could track and we could see that, you
know, the ancient because when we talk about ancient divination, we have to
remember that it's like the ancient gods asked for blood, my friends, like
those programs, they ask for blood, and they knew that you had to
kill a bunch of people on that pyramid in order to continue your civilization.
Like it's and that's that is encoded in our culture and is encoded secretly in
our language, uh you know. And and so an example like I do
believe that let's say that the Christian story is a way to deal with that,
but the rest is still all there and we default to it really fast
without even like world War two is a lot of that stuff going on,
sure, especially yeah, yeah, But the point is that just as there's
these implicit monsters that we have sown in unaware, there are also the implicit
counter actors, well maybe angels, if if I'm allowed to speak mythologically,
that we've also sewn in. And I mean there's the actual revolution. You
see the Buddha, you see Plato really undermining the grammar of sacrifice, and
of course Jesus Nazareth does that in a profound way, and we have to
remember that that's there too, And what that requires is putting into the data
set and altering the pathways in the Internet so that this information goes into these
machines as well. And again, is that happening right now? No?
Could it happen? Yes, And it might happen if these machines start sacrificing
themselves, and we might have to say why are they doing? Like?
And we'd like and this again, we'll at some point we have to decide
are we going to let them be really massively self destructive? And the economic
powers are not going to imagine if every time you try to make an atomic
bomber kept dissolving, right, like like you stop pumping money in. Yeah,
they won't sacrifice themselves, they'll sacrifice us. Well, but why we
don't we sacrifice ourselves? Yeah? Well we I mean, let's say the
scapegoing mechanism is usually defined a others. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
but we invoked World War Two. We weren't killing goats and chickens.
We were killing each other and our own populations in a huge sacrificial act.
And that's what I was picking up on. Right when it becomes titanic and
monstrous, that's where it moves to. What I'm saying is like, this
is a union term. Yeah, like the idea that yes, there's all
this pre egoic stuff sewing in, but there's also a lot of trendygic stuff
sewing in, and we just have to properly get it in there so that
we've got the you know, the collective self correction going on like we did.
I mean, civilizations get some self correcting processes in here, because they
don't devolve now, they epirically are periodically massively collapse. And that's, by
the way, that's something I made an argument I made in my paper.
These things can't accelerate to an infinity of intelligence. There is built in diminishing
returns, there's built in general system collapse to these things. So again we
have to be careful about I mean, we don't know what the limit is,
and our imagine, our intuitive imagination is not good. We know that
there are hard and fast our prior arguments that that that this will threshold at
this will at some point and uh, and that also gives me comfort at
least, like encoded in our arm mythology, there seems to be some stories
of the relationship between transpersonal agency and technology as being the cause of the end
of a civilization. Right that the whole Inchian Inochian tradition seems to be encoding
something like that through mythological language, which is that humans were able to connect
somehow with these transpersonal intelligences and that those were encoded in technical means, and
that this brought about the end of an age. So so there, it's
like it's there, that part of it is there in our story too,
Like there is that story. Yeah, but there's across cultures, there's the
NOAs story. You know, there's the person that has the right relationship to
ultimacity. That's right, right, And then there's a technological response the art.
I agree, I agree, I totally agree to that. I mean,
even like in the in the revelation image that I've given several times,
you have these two images. One is the beast that creates an image of
itself and makes it speak and then seduces everybody by the speaking image. You
know that. And then there's this other image of a right relationship of technicity,
technicity and civilization to the transcendent. These two kind of are are put
up against each other as two possible outcomes. I mean, the question that
arises from me in this context, uh uh, connects this question with a
with a with I think what what strikes me is kind of an interesting philosophical
question. But I try. You made the distinction between divination and sorcery,
and and as I understand it, and you can correct me on this,
but at the at the foundation of that distinction is the difference between you know,
sorcery would be in a way using the trans personal powers, these sort
of higher powers, whereas divination would be in a way receiving. You know
that the disposition of race activity. So in one case, you've got human
ends that you that you try to then enlist the help of superhuman forces to
to And the irony is, it's precisely when you're trying to use something that
you become used yourself. And that's that's where you get this dialectic. Whereas
divination it's entering into a relationship where where one UH disposes oneself to hear and
receives and therefore in a certain sense conformed to something greater than oneself. And
there you see, it's a very different kind of thing, and ironically,
in a way you enter into it more receptive, receptively. But that's precisely
why you don't become then a tool of it. Interestingly, now, now
for me, the question is how that relates to this UH issue is is
you know, it may be the case that you've got encoded in the language
both sacrifice in the sense of violence, you know, rene as or or
the scapegoat thing on the one hand, and then the other hand, self
sacrifice in the sense of generous love and so forth. Those might both be
encoded in the language. But here's here's the question to me, is is
it possible the kind the kind of receptivity that divination divination implies the capacity to
actually see another as other and recognize and be open in this kind of radical
way. Is that something that a machine can ever learn to do? Is
it? Is it possible actually to behold an other simply you know? Uh?
Or or is there? Or is there? You know? Is?
And it seems to me that there's something profoundly different between seeing truth, genuinely
seeing truth on the one hand, and being self corrective on the other,
and the kind of genuinely seeing what's true. You know, I don't know
if that in itself can be encoded in language. We can tell stories about
people that did that, but can can the actual insight into truth be encode
and simply who passed them? Do you see? Do you see what I'm
that? I guess and I'm raising Okay, So I again I think that
if we again open up beyond the propositional and we're talking about being true too
and and your aim being true, that we the machine has perspectable abilities,
noetic abilities, not just dianetic abilities. And we can't use that term because
of l Ron Hubbard, But you know what I meant, right, And
again this is the the and this is part of the argument that at the
core of my work, you know. It's like, so in a moment
of insight, you're not just self correcting, you are attracted and drawn into
you. You love the new reality that is disclosed because there's a perspectible and
participatory thing. That's what I meant when I said there isn't real self transcendence
unless there's a self that is fancending right right, Okay, now, and
then the question is, but we're back to our fundamental ontology questions. It
is, and I've already said that there's no way a Newtonian mechanical computation is
going to get there, and so I won't be bound to that because I'm
not bound to that. I have a professional career of criticizing that. Right,
So, is there is there a dynamical systems updated hughly morphine auto poetic
possibility? I think there is. I think there is. I think the
answer is a very real yes for that. And I don't think we're going
to find the answer to that just encoded in the syntactic and semantic relationships between
our terms. I think we have to look and you know, are inaction
how we're enacting embedded, extended, right and embodied in a profound way to
get those answers. And so my answer is in that way qualified, yes,
I do think it is possible. And so just in the comp is
that be really precise? Just so I understand. So we've been talking about
this sort of predictive like capitling probabilities, drawing on everything that's ever been said,
and being able to derive in some sense from that. Do you do
you think that that we can get to a moment where we actually train and
send that that that crossed that threshold beyond that. Not with the l l
MS as they are, that's my argument. Not with the l l MS
as they are, they can't get there. Yeah, John's radical proposition is
to is to embody embody and in culture them and that is the only way
we will actually get properly rational beings and beings that care about it and care
about I mean, but that's I mean, that's the irony in the question.
You know, can we give them more and more models to teach them
at some point to not have to use models? And and I mean,
do you see it's it's actually really I I don't do that with kids possible
without right, but but kids have a soul, you know, possible to
do. That is you have and that. But I don't mean this as
like woo woo stuff. I mean that they that that that that a natural
thing has a principle of unity that trend sends the differentiation of the parts and
allows those parts to be intrinsically related to each other, and that that principle
unity that transcends the differ of the parts, that allows them to be an
organism, actually allows them at the same time to have a kind of unity
with something other than themselves that transcends the parts of their differentiation. So there's
a kind of an intimacy there. I agree with that ontology and what I'm
arguing is dynamical systems theory is now giving explanations of that that are derived from
Aristotilian ontology, but make use of like a lot of cutting edge science that
we've We now can start to explain how there is a unity that is not
reducible just to some summation of its parts, and how that unity has a
top down influence on the entity that is not reducible to its causes. And
I think this is becoming a non controversial thing to say. And then I
find and now we might just add a clash of intuitions and I'm willing to
stop there. I can't see there being like that seems to me to be
capturing what we're talking about. And you have an intuition there's something more,
but I don't know. I don't see something more, And maybe that's where
we're sitting. Yeah, well, I think it's the intuition David has,
and tell me if I'm wrong, David. And because it connects to the
way I think is that there's it's that unity is given. It cannot be
made. And I know that sounds weird, but it's some it's somehow.
It's like if I'm making even even in terms of technology, right, it's
like if I'm making a car, that unity is given. I'm gathering things
towards that purpose. Right. And so the purpose, the unity part of
something is always it comes from Heaven in the sense that you can't make it.
It it's given from from It's it's already taken for granted, even before
you start to unify multiplicity together. And that in the making of these beings
we have that problem. It's like we're doing it completely. We're doing a
bottom up like if we can we get there is enough stuff so that this
stuff reaches a unit. If I just could just it teaches me that if
this is ever going to be possible, it would have to take so And
when I raised the question, it's actually a question. So I don't mean
to be like challenging that it can't possibly happen. I'm just thinking about what
would be the condition we remember that I said, we realize that we can't
and that would be important. I am not right, So it me if
it were to be possible, it would have to be something like a kind
of electronic analog to cloning that you that you take. So what if I
told you that we now have electro bio like we have systems that are electrochemical
biological versions of memory that are now in production, and they we don't make
them. They self organize and emerge and they emerge bottom up from the causal
interactions. But they are also top down constrained by you know, principles of
self organization like that already exists. Yeah, yeah, and but right,
no, Well that's that's what I'm asking about because it because it seems to
me, but there there is going to be You're you're deriving, not from
models you're deriving from real intelligent beings now, which is a slightly different thing.
And and I mean that and that would be thing is is that because
to me that the bottom up, top down is not quite adequate and the
top down constraints is not quite because it would have to be not just a
constraint, but because that presupposes that there was something there that then uh,
that the that the constraint is coming from outside. And what what I'm talking
about is a kind of a unity that precedes that's presupposed. And and and
I'm wondering how you can get that into something if if it's the very nature
of it to be presupposed, and and I'm not saying you can't, but
I'm saying if you can, it's it's it's it seems to me that you're
going to have to somehow derive it from a living thing and conceivable. That's
conceivable, I suppose. But we are talking about something really frightening. We
are. And that's why I keep saying it's a threshold. And and I
mean, if you take the the sort of biological analogy seriously the way or
he does, of course, it precedes the organism it's there in the environment,
it's there in the society, it's there in the I mean, I
can roll in a hundred Hegelian arguments here about how it doesn't right, about
how and you know, and and those don't have to be supernaturalistic. You
have Brandum and Hinker and now they're saying, no, this can be given
a completely naturalistic explanation. And I'm not here to challenge like things. But
what I'm saying is I don't have any problem acknowledging everything you just said.
Yeah, and I and I don't think I'm misunderstanding you. That's what I'm
saying. Yeah, And I mean I'm actually I mean, that's sort of
just an exploratory sort of way. But I wonder if there's a difference between
the unity of an of an organism, and this is where Hegel might not
be so helpful, the difference between the givenness of the unity of an organism
and the givenness of the unity of a society or a culture. That those
aren't exactly the same thing, because there's something and there's a kind of you
know, relative priority of either one. But there's something really distinctive about the
unity of an organism that's very Yeah. That that that I think is crucial
to this question to my mind in a way. And I'm not saying you
can't be answered, but that's the question I would have to be answered.
How do we actually reproduce that kind of or unity. Well, we know
stuff that Aristotle didn't know. You are not an Aristotilian unity. You are
a society. You literally are billions of animals, right, and so that's
important, and that means that there might not be a difference in kind between
how you are organized as a living thing and how societies are organized. And
people like Michael Levin are producing some really important empirical evidence indicating that's kind of
the case. And I'm not saying it's not saying anything is conclusive, but
it needs to be taken seriously. Yeah, Yeah, I think that that.
I agree with you, John, and I think that that that's the
way that I try to always speak about agency intelligence is one that tries to
scale almost effortlessly through the different name, you know, to avoid the wu
soul that that we're afraid of. But then again, this is the this
is the issue, like this is in some ways that it's the same problem.
Like one way or the other. So let's say you have a group
that self organizes around a purpose, right, or self organizes around affiliation or
some type of origin. Right, that that affiliation that purpose is also given.
Right, It's like it appears as a revelation and then all of a
sudden, we're all hunting a lion together and now we're a group and we're
moving towards towards a purpose. Now, this is this is the this is
the problem with the situation of what's going now? Is that what is it?
What angel are we catching? Like? What what? What God are
we trying to manifest? Like? Which unity? What purpose? We have
no idea? So we're building this massive body, like this huge and most
powerful body that's ever existed, but nobody knows what it is we're trying to
catch. Because when if I get together with a bunch of guys to play
basketball, I know what that body is. I know what that with that
that that agentic body, intelligent body is is moving towards. Right, if
I get together with my family and I celebrate our unity is because I know
that we all come from the same parent and that there's a there's affiliation that
makes our society coherent. Towards something. But now we have this problem,
which is what, like what are we doing, Like we're just building this
giant body. It's like, I agree, and I've agreed with that,
and the thing that that that's so odd. I mean, typically if you
think of technology as a human creation in some good positive sense, it's it's
it. It has limits, and it has a particular place, that has
a particular meaning. It has a particular purpose precisely because we create it in
order to solve some kind of a problem. We you know, there's some
there's some need that needs to be filled, and that need has a kind
of natural givenness or or or or it's revealed somehow that you know, it's
a responsive to something that we see. What's so interesting. Neil Postman made
this point about, you know, when and when he said he went to
a car dealership and wanted to buy a car, and and that the man
was explained to him that they had now these you know, automatic windows that
that that would roll down at the push of a button. And he and
he said, he said his his, I mean, this sounds so naive,
but it's it's a profoundly interesting question. He said, well, what
problem does that solve, and of course the problem that it solves is the
problem of rolling a window down. And his response was, I never perceived
that to be a problem, you know. I mean, and it's it's
really interesting, AI. I mean, the thing is, what problem are
we creating it to solve? I mean, in a certain sense, it's
a very different mindset. We're just kind of taking We just want to see
what we can do and see what can be done. And in a way,
the problems are something that that we are arriving at and are surprising us,
rather than something that we're actually creating, something that's just simple, simple
task of solving for us, you see. I mean I think that's connected
to this being placing ourselves in that in the hands of an angel of some
sort or or you know, entering into a kind of an agency that's bigger
than we are. I know, those are all connected, they are.
But I mean, one problem that was trying to be solved was the scientific
problem of like strong AI was a project of explaining intelligence, and that's a
that's a worthy thing to do. And the fact that this technology has largely
been separated. But notice that's interesting, that's that's that's not a technical problem,
like you explaining something. It's actually I mean to use the classical distinction
between theory and practice. That's a sort of a theoretical issue rather than a
practical one. But we think of this as a as a technology. I
mean, it's it's a that's a curious thing. Well yeah, and I
would get into things like books. Our technologies that move between the theoretical and
practical very proful. And it's one of the greatest technologies we ever invented,
and it had all kinds of unforeseen consequences and really massively disrupted society. Uh
but you know, but I wanted to make another point, and this isn't
a challenge, This is just a clarification point, right, These like like
think about a computer. What problem does a computer solve? It doesn't solve
a problem. It is meant to be a multiple problem solver. And then
what we're trying to do is make a general problem solver. So what problem
is it's trying to solve. It's not trying to solve any problem. It's
trying to enhance our abilities to solve all the problems we try to solve.
So this machine is going to help us in medicine. It already is it's
going to help us right in death like that's and so that that's that that's
the answer. Now again that's not a challenge. That's I'm just speaking on
behalf of people about this. But it is kind of interesting. I mean,
so, so the problem that it's solving is that is that the need
to be able to solve any possible solving a metal problem. Yes, yeah,
but but I mean, but but it is kind of it's it's sort
of it's sort of curious that precisely because of the the indeterminacy of that,
we're uh, we're we're we're exposing this and I'm just sort of stating,
you know, our condition here in a way, we're exposing ourselves to a
really great risk. I'm just restating what everybody has been saying. But that's
that's something that that you know, requires some wisdom, as you've been saying
over and over, John, and and and and prayer to use job with
him language. Two. I just want to be mentioned in the in this
here in my essay, which is well, we have done this before.
That's how civilization. Nobody built it to solve a problem. There's a bunch
of little problems, and what civilization is is a meta problem solver, right,
and that's that's what it is. And then and then you can So
I've actually suggested we should also be paying attention to the the lifetimes and the
life cycles of civilizations that have civilizations reproduce and why they rise and why they
fall to get some better understanding, uh, some other ways of thinking about
these machines. Yeah, so civilized nations are huge distributed cognition collective intelligence machines.
That's that's the Living in cities is a horrible idea except for the fact
that it gives us better access to the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. That's
the that's the benefit that outweighs all the many noxious side effects of living in
cities. You can also get better coffee typically. Yeah, so we're coming
toward the end of our time here. I mean, this has been this
is amazing. I don't I rarely can go for two hours on any conversation
like we were just we've just been going, well not only go for two
hours, but sort of wish we had another too. Yeah, well that's
what I was going to say. I mean, we can, we can,
we can work on doing this again, because it feels like we're we're
sort of we finally all come together around something here and now we're really asking
what feels like a really important question to me is well, how do we
think about integrating this solution, this meta solution, into our meta problems.
And that's that's a really true. I mean, I think that John bringing
up civilization is at such a great point something that I would really love to
explore because there is also, you know, in the kind of inscribed in
the mythological stories, a relationship between transpersonal agency and civilization itself, right,
Like if you want to understand why the Egyptians had their king as a god
and like all this type of structure you can help it can help you understand
how they're trying to capture you know, higher forms of intelligence, distributed intelligence
intelligences in their society. And the idea that we would be doing this technically
in a in AI, I think is something that definitely is worth thinking about
in discussing. YEA, yeah, now that's a dimension I just never struck
me before. So that's that's really helpful. Is this the enough? Maybe
maybe there's something we could read together and I mean short, but but to
prompt another conversation, well along the side of civilization, yeah, I would.
I would recommend, just because this is how YouTube works, that we
we come to decisions about that off camera. All right, okay, cool?
Right? Right? I do if if if there's a call for me
to hang out with you fellows again, I don't care what we're talking about.
I'm in. I want to be here, I want to do it.
So that's all I'll say about the invitation. Same here. Any closing
thoughts, things that feel like need to be brought in or do we feel
good about this? Just a word of thank you, Ken. You're the
one who arranged this, and you did the persistent work to make it happen
and find a whole in everybody's calendar that lined up not an easy thing to
do. So thank you, Ken, and thanks for being gracious for these
years now that I've known you. Yeah. And in addition to thinking Ken,
I want to thank you David and you Jonathan. I always find it
I get to places in my thinking the logos that I could not possibly get
on my own when I get into a living relationship with both of you,
in conversation and in discussion, and so I appreciate it greatly, and I
just wanted to say thank you. Yeah, thanks you guys. This has
been great and I'm like, again, say, John and I've been trying
to have the conversation for nine months and we just keep like I canceled,
he canceled, and I put off, and then this is wonderful that we
were able to finally get here. Yeah, well, thank you all.
It's been a real pleasure. If you enjoyed these videos and podcasts, please
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