Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction | Lex Fridman Podcast #191

The following is a conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger, a founding member of the Consilience Project that is aimed at improving public sense making and dialogue. He's interested in understanding how we humans can be the best version of ourselves as individuals and as collectives at all scales. Quick mention of our sponsors Ground News, NetSuite 4, Sigmatic, Magic Spoon, and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I got a chance to talk to Daniel on and off the mic for a couple of days. We took a long walk the day before our conversation. I really enjoyed meeting him just on a basic human level. We talked about the world around us with words that carried hope for us individual ants actually contributing something of value to the colony. These conversations are the reasons I love human beings, our insatiable striving to lessen the suffering in the world. But more than that, there's a simple magic to two strangers meeting for the first time and sharing ideas, becoming fast friends and creating something that is far greater than the sum of our parts. I've gotten to experience some of that same magic here in Austin with a few new friends and in random bars in my travels across this country, where a conversation leaves me with a big stupid smile on my face and a new appreciation of this too short to beautiful life. This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger. If aliens were observing Earth through the entire history, just watching us, and were tasked with summarizing what happened until now, what do you think they would say? What do you think they would write up in that summary? Like, it has to be pretty short, less than a page, like in Hitchhiker's Guide. There's I think like a paragraph or a couple sentences. How would you summarize how? Sorry, how would the alien summarize, do you think? All of human civilization?

My first thoughts take more than a page. They'd probably distill it because if they watched, well, I mean, first, I have no idea if their senses are even attuned to similar stuff to what our senses are attuned to, or what the nature of their consciousness is like relative to ours. And so let's assume that they're kind of like us, just technologically more advanced to get here from wherever they are. That's the first kind of constraint on the thought experiment. And then if they've watched throughout all of history, they saw the burning of Alexandria. They saw that 2,000 years ago in Greece we were producing things like clocks, the antikythera mechanism. And then that technology got lost. They saw that there wasn't just a steady dialectic of progress.

So every once in a while there's a giant fire that destroys a lot of things. There's a giant like commotion that destroys a lot of things.

Yeah. And it's usually self induced. They would have seen, seen that. And so as they're looking at us now, as we move past the nuclear weapons age into the full globalization Anthropocene exponential tech age, still making our decisions relatively similarly to how we did in the Stone Age as far as rivalry, game theory type stuff. I think they would think that this is probably most likely one of the planets that is not going to make it to being intergalactic because we blow ourselves up in the technological adolescence. And if we are going to, we're going to need some major progress rapidly in the social technologies that can guide and bind and direct the physical technologies so that we are safe vessels for the amount of power we're getting.

Actually Hitchhiker's Guide has estimation about how, how much of a risk this particular thing poses to the rest of the galaxy. And I think I forget what it was. I think it was medium or low. So, so their estimation was, would be that this, this species of ant like creatures is not going to survive long. There's ups and downs in terms of technological innovation. The fundamental nature of their behavior from a game theory perspective hasn't really changed. They have not learned in any fundamental way how to control, properly incentivize or properly do the mechanism design of games to ensure long term survival. And then they move on to another planet. Do you think there is in a more slightly more serious question, do you think there's some number or perhaps a very, very large number of intelligent alien civilizations out there?

Yes. Would be hard to think otherwise. I know. I think Bostrom had a new article not that long ago on why that might not be the case, that the Drake equation might not be the kind of in story on it. But when I look at the total number of Kepler planets, just that we're aware of just galactically and also like when that when those life forms were discovered in Mono Lake that didn't have the same six primary atoms. I think it had arsenic replacing phosphorus as one of the primary aspects of its energy metabolism. We get to think about that the building blocks might be more different. So the physical constraints even that the planets have to have might be more different. It seems really unlikely not, not to mention interesting things that we've observed that are still unexplained as you had guests on your show discussing Tic Tac and.

Oh, the ones that have visited. Yeah, well, let's dive right into that. What do you make sense of the rich human psychology of there being hundreds of thousands, probably millions of witnesses of UFOs of different kinds on Earth, most of which I presume are conjured up by the human mind through the perception system? Some number might be true, some number might be reflective of actual physical objects, whether it's, you know, drones or testing military technology that's secret or otherworldly technology. What do you make sense of all that? Because it's gained quite a bit of popularity recently. There is some sense in which that's us humans being hopeful and dreaming of otherworldly creatures as a way to escape the dreariness of the human condition. But in another sense it really could be something truly exciting that a science should turn its eye towards. So where do you place it?

Speaking of turning eye towards, this is one of those super fascinating, actually super consequential possibly topics that I wish I had more time to study and just haven't allocated. So I don't have firm beliefs on this because I haven't got to study it as much as I want. So what I'm going to say comes from a superficial assessment. While we know there are plenty of things that people thought of as UFO sightings that we can fully write off, we have other better explanations for them. What we're interested in is the ones that we don't have better explanations for. And then not just immediately jumping to a theory of what it is, but holding it as unidentified and being, being curious and earnest. I think the, the Tic Tac one is quite interesting and made it in major media recently. But I don't know if you ever saw the Disclosure Project. Guy named Steven Greer organized a bunch of mostly US military and some commercial flight people who had direct observation and classified information disclosing it at a CNN briefing. And so you saw high ranking generals, admirals, fighter pilots, all describing things that they saw on radar, with visual, with their own eyes or cameras and also describing some phenomena that had some consistency across different people. And I find this interesting enough that I think it would be silly to just dismiss it and specifically like we can ask the question how much of it is natural phenomena, ball lightning or something like that. And this is why I'm more interested in what fighter pilots and astronauts and people who are trained in being able to identify flying objects and atmospheric phenomena have to say about it? I think the thing then you could say, well, are they more advanced military craft? Is it some kind of, you know, human craft? The interesting thing that a number of them describe is something that's kind of like right angles at speed, or if not right angles, acute angles at speed, but something that looks like a different relationship to inertia than physics makes sense for us. I don't think that there are any human technologies that are doing that. Even in really deep underground black projects now. One could say, okay, well, could it be a hologram? Well, would it show up on radar if radar is also seeing it? And so I don't know. I think there's enough. I mean, and for that to be a massive coordinated psyop is as interesting and ridiculous in a way as the idea that it's UFOs from some extra planetary source. So it's, it's up there on the interesting topics to me.

There is, if it is at all alien technology. It is the dumbest version of alien technology. It's so far away. It's like the old, old crappy VHS tapes of alien. These are like crappy drones that just floated or even like space to the level of like space junk. Because it is so close to our human technology we talk about, it moves in ways that's. That's unlike what we understand about physics, but it still has very similar kind of geometric notions and something that we humans can perceive with our eyes, all those kinds of things. I feel like alien technology, we most likely would be something that we would not be able to perceive, not because they're hiding, but because it's so far advanced that it would be much. It would be beyond the cognitive capabilities of us humans. Just as you were saying, as per your answer for aliens summarizing Earth, it's the starting assumption is they have similar perception systems, they have similar cognitive capabilities, and that very well may not be the case. Let me ask you about staying in aliens for just a little longer, because I think it's. It's a good transition. Talking about governments and human societies.

Do.

You think if a U.S. government or any government was in possession of an alien spacecraft or of information related to alien spacecraft, they would have the capacity structurally, would they have the processes? Would they be able to communicate that to the public effectively, or would they keep it secret in a room and do nothing with it, both to try to preserve military secrets, but also because of the incompetence that's inherent to bureaucracies? Or either?

Well, we can certainly see when certain things become declassified 25 or 50 years later that there were things that the public might have wanted to know that were kept secret for a very long time for reasons of at least supposedly national security. Which is also a nice source of plausible deniability for people covering their ass for doing things that would be problematic and other purposes. There are. There's a scientist at Stanford who supposedly got some material that was recovered from Area 51 type area, did analysis on it using I believe electron microscopy and a couple other methods and came to the idea that it was a nanotech alloy that was something we didn't currently have the ability to do, was not naturally occurring. So there. I've heard some things and again like I said, I'm. I'm not going to stand behind any of these because I haven't done the level of study to have high confidence. I think what you said also about would it be super low tech alien craft like would they necessarily move their atoms around in space or might they do something more interesting than that? Might they be able to have a different relationship to the concept of space or information or consciousness or one of the things that the craft supposedly do is not only accelerate and turn in a way that looks non inertial, but also disappear. So there's a question as to like the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive and it could be possible to some people run a hypothesis that they create intentional amounts of exposure as an invitation of a particular kind. Who knows.

Interesting field we tend to assume like seti that's listening out for aliens out there. I've just been recently reading more and more about gravitational waves and you have orbiting black holes that orbit each other. They generate ripples in space time. On my. For fun at night when I lay in bed, I think about what it would be like to ride those waves when they not not the low magnitude they are as it. When they reach Earth but get closer to the black holes because they'll basically be shrinking and expanding us in all dimensions including time. So it's actually ripples through space time that they generate. Why is it that you couldn't use that? It travels at the speed of light. It travels at speed, which is a very weird thing to say when you're, when you're morphing space time, you could argue it's faster than the speed of light. So if you're able to communicate by, to summon enough energy to generate black holes and to orbit the. To force them to orbit each other, why not travel as the ripples in space time whatever the Hell, that means somehow combined with wormholes. So if you're able to communicate through like we don't think of gravitational waves as something you can communicate with because the, the radio will be, have to be the very large size and very dense. But perhaps that's it, you know, perhaps that's one way to communicate. It's a very effective way. And that would explain like we wouldn't even be able to make sense of that, of the physics that results in an alien species that's able to control gravity at that scale.

I think you just jumped up the Kardashev scale so far that you're not just harnessing the power of a star, but harnessing the power of mutually rotating black holes. I, that's way above my physics pay grade to think about including even non rotating black hole versions of transwarp travel. I think, you know, you can talk with Eric more about that. I think he has better ideas on it than I do. My hope for the future of humanity mostly does not rest in the near term on our ability to get to other habitable planets in time.

And even more than that, in the list of possible solutions of how to improve human civilization. Orbiting black holes is not in the, on the first page for you.

Not on the first page.

Okay. I bet you did not expect us to start this conversation here, but I'm glad the places it went. I am excited. On a much smaller scale of Mars, Europa, Titan, Venus, potentially having very like bacteria like life forms, just on a, on a small human level, it's a little bit scary, but mostly really exciting that there might be life elsewhere in the volcanoes and the oceans all around us, teeming, having little societies and, and whether there's properties about that kind of life that's somehow different than ours. I don't know what would be more exciting if those colonies of single cell type organisms, what would be more exciting if they're different or they're the same? If they're the same, that means through the rest of the universe there's life forms like us, something like us, everywhere. If they're different, that's also really exciting because there's life forms everywhere. They're not like us. That's a little bit scary. I don't know what's scarier actually. I think both scary and exciting no matter what. Right.

The idea that they could be very different is philosophically very interesting for us to open our aperture on what life and consciousness and, and self replicating possibilities could look like. The question on are they different or the same? Obviously there's lots of life here that is the same in some ways and different in other ways. When you take the thing that we call an invasive species is something that's still pretty the same hydrocarbon based thing, but co evolved with co selective pressures in a certain environment, we move it to another environment, it might be devastating to that whole ecosystem because it's just different enough that it's messes up the self stabilizing dynamics of that ecosystem. So the question of are they, would they be different in ways where we could still figure out a way to inhabit a biosphere together or fundamentally? Not fundamentally. The nature of how they operate and the nature of how we operate would be incommensurable is a deep question.

Well, we offline talked about mimetic theory, right? It seems like if there were sufficiently different where we would not even we can coexist on different planes. It seems like a good thing if we're close enough together to where we'd be competing. Then it's. You're getting into the world of viruses and pathogens and all those kinds of things to where we would, one of us would die off quickly through basically.

Mass murder without even even accidentally.

Even accidentally if we just had a.

Self replicating single celled kind of creature that happened to not work well for the hydrocarbon life that was here that got introduced because it either output something that was toxic or utilized up the same resource too quickly and it just replicated faster and mutated faster. It wouldn't be a memetic theory, conflict theory kind of harm. It would just be a von Neumann machine, a self replicating machine that was fundamentally incompatible with these kinds of self replicating systems with faster OODA loops.

For one final time, putting your alien God hat on and you look at human civilization. Do you think about the 7.8 billion people on Earth as individual little creatures, individual little organisms, or do you think of us as one organism with the collective intelligence? What's the proper framework through which to analyze it? Again, as an alien, so that I.

Know where you're coming from, would you have asked the question the same way before the industrial revolution, before the agricultural revolution, when there were half a billion people and no telecommunications connecting them?

I would indeed ask the question the same way, but I would be less confident about about your conclusions. It would be an actually more interesting way to ask the question at that time. But I was nevertheless asked it the same way. Yes.

Well, let's go back further and smaller then. Rather than just a single human or the entire human species, let's look at. In a relatively isolated tribe. Yes, in the relatively isolated, probably sub Dunbar number, sub kind of 150 people tribe. Do I look at that as one entity where evolution is selecting for it based on group selection? Or do I think of it as 150 individuals that are interacting in some way? Well, could those individuals exist without the group? No. The evolutionary adaptiveness of humans was involved critically group selection and individual humans alone trying to figure out stone tools and protection and whatever aren't what was selected for. And so I think the or is the wrong frame. I think it's individuals are affecting the group that they're a part of. They're also dependent upon and being affected by the group that they're part of. And so this now starts to get in deep into political theories also, which is theories that orients towards the collective at different scales, whether a tribal scale or an empire or nation state or something. And ones that orient towards the individual liberalism and stuff like that. And I think there's very obvious failure modes on both sides. And so the relationship between them is more interesting to me than either of them. The relationship between the individual and the collective and the question around how to have a virtuous process between those. So a good social system would be one where the organism of the individual and the organism of the group of individuals is. They're both synergistic to each other. So what is best for the individuals and what's best for the whole is aligned.

But there is nevertheless an individual. They're not. It's. It's a matter of degrees, I suppose. But what is what defines a human more? The. The social network within the. Which they've been brought up through which they've developed their intelligence? Or is it their own sovereign individual self? Like what's your intuition of how much. Not just for evolutionary survival, but as intellectual beings, how much do we need others for our development?

Yeah, I think we have a weird sense of this today relative to most previous periods of Sapien history. I think the vast majority of Sapien history is tribal. Like depending upon your early human model, two or three hundred thousand years of Homo sapiens in little tribes where they depended upon that tribe for survival and excommunication from the tribe was fatal. I think they. And our whole evolutionary genetic history is in that environment. And the amount of time we've been out of it is relatively so tiny. And then we still depended upon extended families and local communities more. And the big kind of giant market complex where I can provide something to the market to get money to be able to get other things from the market where it seems like I don't need anyone. It's almost like disintermediating our sense of need. Even though. Even though your and my ability to talk to each other using these mics and the phones that we coordinated on took millions of people over six continents to be able to run the supply chains that made all the stuff that we depend on. But we don't notice that we depend upon them. They all seem fungible. If you take a baby, obviously that you didn't even get to a baby without a mom, was it dependent? Are we dependent upon each other? Right. Without two parents at minimum. And they depended upon other people. But if we take that baby and we put it out in the wild, it obviously dies. So if we let it grow up for a little while the minimum amount of time where it starts to have some autonomy and then we put it out in the wild and this has happened a few times. It doesn't learn language and it doesn't learn the artic. The small motor articulation that we learn. It doesn't learn the type of consciousness that we end up having that is socialized. So I think we take for granted how much conditioning affects us.

Is it possible that it affects basically 99.9 or maybe the whole thing? The whole thing is the connection between us humans and that we're. We're no better than apes without our human connections. Because that. That thinking of it that way forces us to think very differently about human society and how to progress forward if the connections are fundamental.

I just have to object to the know better than apes because better here I think you mean a specific thing which means have capacities that are fundamentally different. Then I think apes also depend upon troops.

Yes.

And I. I think the idea of humans as better than nature in some kind of ethical sense ends up having heaps of problems. We'll table that. We can come back to it. But when we say what is unique about Homo sapien capacity relative to the other animals we currently inhabit the biosphere with, and I'm saying it that way because there were other early hominids that had some of these capacities. We believe our tool creation and our language creation and our coordination are all kind of the results of a certain type of capacity for abstraction. And other animals will use tools, but they don't evolve the tools they use. They keep using the same types of tools that they basically can find. So a chimp will notice that a rock can cut a vine that it wants to and it'll even notice that a sharper rock will cut it better. And experientially it'll use the sharper rock. And if you even give it a knife, it'll probably use the knife because it's experiencing the effectiveness. But it doesn't make stone tools because that requires understanding why one is sharper than the other. What is the abstract principle called sharpness to then be able to invent a sharper thing. That same abstraction makes language and the ability for abstract representation which makes the ability to coordinate in a more advanced set of ways. So I do think our ability to coordinate with each other is pretty fundamental to the selection of what we are. And as a species.

I wonder if that coordination, that connection is actually the thing that gives birth to consciousness. That gives birth to. Well, let's start with self awareness.

It's more like theory of mind.

Theory of mind? Yeah. You know, I suppose there's experiments that show that there's other mammals that have a very crude theory of mind. Not sure, maybe dogs, something like that. But actually dogs probably has to do with that they co evolved with humans. See, it'd be interesting if that theory of mind is what leads to consciousness in the way we think about it is the richness of the subjective experience that is consciousness. I have a inkling sense that that only exists because we're social creatures that doesn't come with the hardware and the software in the beginning. That's like. That's learned as an effective tool for communication almost. I think we think that consciousness is fundamental and maybe it's not. There's a bunch of folks kind of criticize the idea that the illusion of consciousness is consciousness. That it is just a facade we use to. To help us construct theories of mind. You almost put yourself in the world as a subjective being in that experience. You want to richly experience it as an individual person so that I could empathize with your experience. I find that notion compelling mostly because it allows you to then create robots that become conscious not by being conscious, but by just learning to fake it till they make it is present a facade of consciousness with the task of making that facade very convincing to us humans. And thereby it will become conscious. I have a sense that in some way that will make them conscious if they're sufficiently convincing to humans. Is there some element of that that you. That you find convincing?

This is a much harder set of questions and deep end of the pool than starting with the aliens was.

We went from aliens to consciousness. This is not the trajectory I was expecting Nor you, but let us walk a while.

We can walk a while and I don't think we will do it justice. So what do we mean by consciousness versus conscious self reflective awareness? What do we mean by awareness? Qualia, theory of mind. There's a lot of terms that we think of as slightly different things and subjectivity. First person, I don't remember exactly the quote, but I remember when reading when Sam Harris wrote the book Free Will and then Dennett critiqued it and then there was some writing back and forth between the two because normally they're on the same side of kind of arguing for critical thinking and logical fallacies and philosophy of science against supernatural ideas. And here Dennett believed there is something like free will. He is a determinist, compatibilist, but no consciousness and ex a radical limitivist. And Sam was saying no, there is consciousness but there's no free will. And that's like the most fundamental kinds of axiomatic senses they disagreed on but neither of them could say it was because the other one didn't understand the philosophy of science or logical fallacies. And. And they kind of spoke past each other. And at the end, if I remember correctly, Sam said something that I thought was quite insightful which was to the effect of, it seems because they weren't making any progress in shared understanding. It seems that we simply have different intuitions about this. And what you could see was that what the words meant right at the level of symbol grounding might be quite different. One of them might have had deeply different enough life experiences that what is being referenced and then also different associations of what the words mean. This is why when trying to address these things, Charles Sanders Purse said the first philosophy has to be semiotics because if you don't get semiotics right, we end up importing different ideas and bad ideas right into the nature of the language that we're using. And then it's very hard to do epistemology or ontology together. So I'm saying this to say why I don't think we're going to get very far is I think we would have to go very slowly in terms of defining what we mean by words and fundamental concepts.

Well and also allowing our minds to drift together for time should our definitions of these terms align. I think there's some. There's a beauty that some people enjoy with Sam that he is quite stubborn on his definitions of terms without often clearly revealing that definition. So in his mind he can, like you could sense that he can deeply understand what he means exactly by term, like free will and consciousness. And you're right, he's very specific in fascinating ways that not only does he think that free will is an illusion, he thinks he's able not thinks. He says he's able to just remove himself from the experience of free will and just be like, for minutes at a time, hours at a time, like, really experience as if he has no free will. Like he's a. A leaf flowing down the river. And given that, he's very sure that consciousness is fundamental. So here's a. This conscious leaf that's subjectively experiencing the floating and yet is no ability to control and make any decisions for its. For itself. It's only a. The decisions have all been made. There's some aspect to which the terminology there perhaps is the problem.

So that's a particular kind of meditative experience. And the people in the Vedantic tradition and some of the Buddhist traditions thousands of years ago described similar experiences and somewhat similar conclusions, some slightly different. There are other types of phenomenal experience that are the phenomenal experience of pure agency. And, you know, like the Catholic theologian, but evolutionary theorist Teilhard de Chardon describes this and that rather than a creator, agent, God, in the beginning, there's a creative impulse or a creative process. And he would go into a type of meditation that identified as the pure essence of that kind of creative process. And I think the types of experiences we've had and then one, the types of experience we've had make a big deal to the nature of how we do symbol grounding. The other thing is the types of experiences we have can't not be interpreted through our existing interpretive frames. And most of the time our interpretive frames are unknown even to us, some of them. And so this is a tricky topic. So I guess there's a bunch of directions we could go with it. But I want to come back to what the impulse was that was interesting. Around what is consciousness and how does it relate to us as social beings? And how does it relate to the possibility of consciousness with AI's right.

You're keeping us on track, which is wonderful. You're a wonderful hiking partner. Okay. Yes. Let's go back to the initial impulse of what is consciousness and how does the social impulse connect to consciousness? Is consciousness a consequence of that social connection?

I'm going to state a position and not argue it because it's honestly like it's a long, hard thing to argue. And we can totally do it another time if you want. I don't subscribe to Consciousness as an emergent property of biology or neural networks. Obviously a lot of people do. Obviously the, the philosophy of science orients towards that in. Not absolutely, but largely. I think of the nature of first person, the universe of first person, of. Of qualia as experience, sensation, desire, emotion, phenomenology. But the, the felt sense, not the. We. We say emotion and we think of a neurochemical pattern or an endocrine pattern, but all of the physical stuff, the third person stuff has position and momentum and charge and stuff like that. That is measurable, repeatable. I think of the nature of first person and third person as ontologically orthogonal to each other, not reducible to each other. They're different kinds of stuff. And so I think about the evolution of third person that we're quite used to thinking about. From subatomic particles to atoms to molecules to on and on. I think about a similar kind of. And corresponding evolution in the domain of first person from the way Whitehead talked about kind of prehension or proto qualia in earlier phases of self organization into higher orders of it. And that there's correspondence, but that neither like the. Like the idealists. Do we reduce third person to first person, which is what idealists do, or neither like the physicalists or do we reduce first person to third person? Obviously Bohm talked about an implicate order that was deeper than and gave rise to the explicate order of both. Nagel talks about something like that. I have a slightly different sense of that. But again I'll just kind of not argue how that occurs for a moment and say so rather than say does consciousness emerge from. I'll talk about do higher capacities of consciousness emerge in relationship with. So it's not first person as a category emerging from third person, but increased complexity within the nature of first person and third person co evolving. Do I think that it seems relatively likely that more advanced neural networks have deeper phenomenology more complex where it goes just from basic sensation to emotion to social awareness to abstract cognition to self reflexive abstract cognition. Yeah, but I wouldn't say that's the emergence of consciousness. I would say it's increased complexity within the domain of first person corresponding to increased complexity. And the correspondence should not automatically be seen as causal. We can get into the arguments for why that often is the case. So would I say that obviously the sapien brain is pretty unique and a single sapien now has that right. Even if it took sapiens evolving in tribes based on group selection to make that brain. So the group made it now that brain is there. Now if I take a single person with that brain out of the group and try to raise them in a box, they'll still not be very interesting even with the brain. But the brain does give hardware capacities that if conditioned in relationship can have interesting things emerge. So do I think that the, the human biology, types of human consciousness and types of social interaction all co emerged and co evolved. Yes.

As a small aside, as you're talking about the biology, let me comment that I spent. This is what I do, this is what I do with my life. This is why I will never accomplish anything is I spend much of the morning trying to calc, trying to do research on how many computations the brain performs and how many, how much energy uses versus the state of the R CPUs and GPUs arriving at about 20 quadrillion. So that's 2 to the 10 to the 16 computations. So synaptic firings per second that the brain does and that's about a million times faster than the, the let's say the 20 thread state of the art Intel CPU the, the 10th generation and then there's similar calculation for the, for the, for the GPU and all ended up also trying to compute that it takes 10 watts to run the brain about. And then what does that mean in terms of calories per day? Kilocalories, that's about two for an average human brain, that's 250 to 300 calories a day. And so it ended up being a calculation where you're doing about 20 quadrillion calculations that are fueled by something like depending on your diet, three bananas. So three bananas results in computation that's about a million times more powerful than the current state of the art computers.

Now let's take that one step further. There's some assumptions built in there. The assumption is that one, what the brain is doing is just computation. Two, the, the relevant computations are synaptic firings and that there's nothing other than synaptic firings that we have to, to factor. So I'm forgetting his name right now. There's a very famous neuroscientist at Stanford just passed away recently who did a lot of the pioneering work on glial cells and showed that his assessment, glial cells did a huge amount of the thinking, not just neurons. And it opened up this entirely different field of like what the brain is and what consciousness is. You look at Damasio's work on embodied cognition and how much of what we would consider consciousness or feeling is happening outside of the nervous system, completely happening in endocrine process involving lots of other cells and signal communication. You talk to somebody like Penrose who you've had on the show, and even though the Penrose Hamerhoff conjecture is probably not right, is there something like that? That might be the case where we're actually having to look at stuff happening at the level of quantum computation of microtubules. I'm not arguing for any of those. I'm arguing that we don't know how big the unknown, unknown set is.

Well, at the very least, this has become like an infomercial for the human brain. At the very. But wait, there's more. At the very least, the three bananas buys you a million times.

At the very least.

At the very least. And then you could have. And then the synaptic firings we're referring to is strictly the electrical signals that could be the mechanical transmission of information. That there's chemical transmission of information, there's all kinds of other stuff going on. And then there's memory that's built in that's also all tied in, not to mention which I'm learning more and more about. It's not just about the neurons. It's also about the immune system that's somehow helping with the computation. So it's the entirety. And the entire body is helping with the computation. So the three bananas, it could buy you a lot. It could buy you a lot. But on the topic of sort of the greater degrees of complexity emerging in consciousness, I think few things are as beautiful and inspiring as taking a step outside of the human brain. Just looking at systems or simple rules create incredible complexity. Not create incredible complexity emerges. So one of the simplest things to do that with is cellular automata. And there's. I don't know what it is. And maybe you can speak to it. We can certainly, we will certainly talk about the implications of this. But there's so few things that are as awe inspiring to me as knowing the rules of a system and not being able to predict what the heck it looks like. And it creates incredibly beautiful complexity that when zoomed out on, looks like there's actual organisms doing things that are much that operate on a scale much higher than the underlying mechanism. So with cellular automata, that's cells that are born and die, born or die, and they only know about each other's neighbors. And there's simple rules that govern that interaction of birth and death. And then they create at scale organisms that look like they take up hundreds or thousands of cells and they're moving, they're moving around, they're communicating, they're sending signals to each other. And you forget at moments at a time before you remember that the simple rules on cells is all that it took to create that. It's sad in that we can't come up with a simple description of that system. That generalizes the behavior of the large organisms. We can only come up, we can only hope to come up with the thing, the fundamental physics or the fundamental rules of that system. I suppose it's sad that we can't predict everything we know about the mathematics of those systems. It seems like we can't really, in a nice way, like economics tries to do, to predict how this whole thing will unroll. But it's beautiful because of how simple it is underneath it all. So what do you make of the emergence of complexity from simple rules? What the hell is that about?

Yeah, well, we can see that something like flocking behavior, the murmuration can be computer coded. It's not a very hard set of rules to be able to see some of those really amazing types of complexity. And the whole field of complexity science and some of the sub disciplines like Stigmergy are studying how, following fairly simple responses to a pheromone signal, do ant colonies do this amazing thing where what you might describe as the organizational or computational capacity of the colony is so profound relative to what each individual ant is doing. I am not anywhere near as well versed in the cutting edge of cellular automata as I would like, unfortunately. I. In terms of topics that I would like to get to and haven't like ETs more Wolfram's a New Kind of Science I have only skimmed and read reviews of and not read the whole thing or his newer work since. But his idea of the four basic kind of categories of emergent phenomena that can come from cellular automata and that one of them is kind of interesting and looks a lot like complexity rather than just chaos or homogeneity or self termination or whatever. I think this is very interesting. It does not instantly make me think that biology is operating on a similarly small set of rules and, or that human consciousness is. I'm, I'm not that reductionistly oriented. And. So if you look at say, Santa Fe Institute, one of the co founders, Stuart Kaufman, his work, you should really get him on your show. So a lot of the questions that you like. One of Kaufman's more recent books, After Investigations and some of the real fundamental stuff was called Reinventing the Sacred and it had to do with some of these exact questions in kind of non reductionist approach. But that is not just silly hippieism. And he was very interested in highly non ergodic systems where you couldn't take a lot of behavior over a small period of time and predict what the behavior of subsets over a longer period of time would do. And then going further, someone who spent some time at Santa Fe Institute and then kind of made a whole new field that you should have on Dave Snowden, who some people call the father of anthro complexity or what is the complexity unique to humans. He says something to the effect of that modeling humans as termites really doesn't cut it. Like we don't respond exactly identically to the same pheromone stimulus using stigmargy. Like it works for flows of traffic and some very simple human behaviors, but it really doesn't work for trying to make sense of the Sistine Chapel and Picasso and general relativity creation and stuff like that. And it's because the termites are not doing abstraction, forecasting deep into the future and making choices now based on forecasts of the future, not just adaptive signals in the moment and evolutionary code from history. That's really different, right? Like making choices now that can factor deep modeling of the future. And with humans, our uniqueness one to the next in terms of response to similar stimuli is much higher than it is with a termite. One of the interesting things there is that their uniqueness is extremely low. They're basically fungible within a class, right? There's different classes, but within a class they're basically fungible. And their system uses that very high numbers and lots of loss, right?

Lots of death and loss feels that way. Don't you think we humans are deceiving ourselves about our uniqueness? Perhaps it doesn't. It just. Isn't there some sense in which this emergence just creates different higher and higher levels of abstraction where every. At every layer, each organism feels unique? Is that possible? That we're all equally dumb but at different scales?

No, I think uniqueness is evolving. I think that hydrogen atoms are more similar to each other than cells of the same type are. And I think that cells are more similar to each other than humans are. I think that highly k selected species are more unique than our selected species. So they're different evolutionary processes. The r selected species where you have a whole a lot of death and very high birth rates, you're not looking for as much individuality within or individual possible expression to cover the evolutionary search space within an individual. You're looking at it more in terms of a numbers game. So, yeah, I would say there's probably more difference between one orca and the next than there is between one Cape buffalo and the next.

Given that, it would be interesting to get your thoughts about mimetic theory where we're imitating each other in the context of this idea of uniqueness. How much truth is there to that? How compelling is this worldview to you of Girardian mimetic theory of desire, where maybe you can explain it from your perspective, but it seems like imitating each other is the fundamental property of the behavior of human civilization.

Well, imitation is not unique to humans, right? Monkeys imitate. So a certain amount of learning through observing is not unique to humans. Humans do more of it. It's actually kind of worth speaking to this for a moment. Monkeys can learn new behaviors, new. We've even seen teaching an ape sign language and then the ape teaching other apes sign language. So that's a kind of mimesis. Right. Kind of learning through imitation. And that needs to happen if they need to learn or develop capacities that are not just coded by their genetics. Right? So within the same genome, they're learning new things based on the environment and so based on someone else. Learn something first. And so let's pick it up. How much a creature is the result of just its genetic programming and how much it's learning is a very interesting question. And I think this is a place where humans really show up radically different than everything else. And you can see it in the. In the neoteny, how long. We're basically fetal that a. The closest ancestors to us. If we look at a chimp, a chimp can hold on to its mother's fur while she moves around. Day one, and obviously we see horses up and walking within 20 minutes. The fact that it takes a human a year to be walking and it takes a horse 20 minutes, and you say how many multiples of 20 minutes go into a year? Like, that's a long period of helplessness. That wouldn't work for a horse. Right. Like they or anything else. And. And not only could we not hold on to mom in the first day, it's three months before we can move our head volitionally. So it's like, why are we embryonic for so long? Basically, it's like it's still fetal on the outside. Had to be, because couldn't keep growing inside and actually ever get out with big heads and narrower hips from going upright. So here's a place where there's A co evolution of the pattern of humans. Specifically. Here are our neoteny and what that portends to learning with our being tool making and environment modifying creatures. Which is because we have the abstraction to make tools. We change our environments more than other creatures change their environments. The next most environment modifying creature to us is like a beaver. And then we're in la. You fly into LAX and you look at the just orthogonal grid going on forever in all directions. And you know, we've recently come into the Anthropocene where the surface of the earth is changing more from human activity than geological activity. And then beavers and you're like okay, wow. We're really in a class of our own in terms of environment modifying.

Yeah.

So as soon as we started tool making we were able to change our environments much more radically. We could put on clothes and go to a cold place. Right. And this is really important because we actually went and became apex predators in every environment. We functioned like apex predators. The polar bear can't leave the arctic. Right. And the lion can't leave the savannah and orca can't leave the ocean. And we went and became apex predators in all those environments because of our tool creation capacity, we could become better predators than them adapted to the environment, or at least with our tools adapted to the environment.

So in every aspect towards any organism in any environment, we're incredibly good at becoming apex predators.

Yes. And nothing else can do that kind of thing. There, there is no other apex predator that you see. The other apex predator is only getting better at being a predator through evolutionary process that's super slow. And that super slow process creates co selective process with their environment. So as the predator becomes a tiny bit faster, it eats more of the slow prey, the genes of the fast prey inbreed and the prey becomes faster. And so there's this kind of balancing and we in because of our tool making, we increased our predatory capacity faster than anything else could increase its resilience to it. As a result we started outstripping the environment and extincting species, following stone tools and going and becoming apex predator everywhere. This is why we can't keep applying apex predator theories. Because we're not an apex predator. We're an apex predator, but we're something much more than that. Like just for an example, the top apex predator in the world, an orca. An orca can eat one big fish at a time, like one tuna and it'll miss most of the time, or one seal and we can put a mile long drift net out on a single Boat and pull up an entire school of them.

Right.

We can deplete the entire oceans of them. That's not an orca, right? Like that's not an apex predator. And that's not even including that. We can then genetically engineer different creatures. We can extinct species, we can devastate whole ecosystems. We can make built worlds that have no natural things, that are just human built worlds. We can build new types of natural creatures, synthetic life. So we are much more like little gods than we are like apex predators now. But we're still behaving as apex predators and little gods that behave as apex predators cause us a problem. Kind of core to my assessment of the world.

So what does it mean to be a predator? So a predator is somebody that effectively can mine the resources from a place so for their survival or is it also just purely like higher level objectives of violence? And what is. Can predators be predators towards the same each other towards the same species? Like are we think, are we using the word predator sort of generally, which then connects to conflict and military conflict, Violent conflict in the space of human species.

Obviously we can say that plants are mining the resources of their environment in a particular way, using photosynthesis to be able to pull minerals out of the soil and nitrogen and carbon out of the air and like that. And we can say herbivores are being able to mine and concentrate that. So I wouldn't say mining the environment is unique to predator. Predator is, you know, Generally being defined as mining other animals. Right. We don't consider herbivores predators, but animal which requires some type of violence capacity. Because animals move, plants don't move, so requires some capacity to overtake something that can move and try to get away. We'll go back to the Girard Sing, then we'll come back here. Why are we neotenous? Why are we embryonic for so long? Because are we. Did we just move from the savannah to the Arctic and we need to learn new stuff. If we came genetically programmed, we would not be able to do that. Are we throwing spears or are we fishing or are we running an industrial supply chain or are we texting? What is the adaptive behavior? Horses today in the wild and horses 10,000 years ago are doing pretty much the same stuff. And so since we make tools and we evolve our tools and then change our environments so quickly, and other animals are largely the result of their environment, but we're environment modifying so rapidly, we need to come without too much programming so we can learn the environment we're in, learn the language. Right. Which is going to be very important. Learn the tool making, learn the. And so we have a very long period of relative helpless helplessness because we aren't coded how to behave yet. Because we're imprinting a lot of software on how to behave that is useful to that particular time. So our mimesis is not. It's not unique to humans, but the total amount of it is really unique. And this is also where the uniqueness can go up, right? Is because we are less just the result of the genetics. And that means the kind of learning through history that they got coded in genetics and more the result of. It's almost like our hardware selected for software, right? Like if evolution is kind of doing these. Think of as a hardware selection. I have problems with computer metaphors for biology, but I'll use this one here. That we have not had hardware changes since the beginning of sapiens, but our world is really, really different. And that's all changes in software, right? Changes in. On the same fundamental genetic substrate, what we're doing with these brains and minds and bodies and social groups and like that. And so now, Gerard specifically was looking at. When we watch other people talking, so we learn language, you and I would have a hard time learning Mandarin today, or it would take a lot of work. We'd be learning how to conjugate verbs and stuff. But a baby learns it instantly, without anyone even really trying to teach it, just through mimesis. So it's a. It's a powerful thing. They're obviously more neuroplastic than we are when they're doing that and all their attention is allocated that. But they're also learning how to move their bodies and they're learning all kinds of stuff through mimesis. One of the things that Gerard says is they're also learning what to want. And they learn what to want. They learn desire by watching what other people want. And so intrinsic to this, people end up wanting what other people want. And if we can't have what other people have without taking it away from them, then that becomes a source of conflict. So the mimesis of desire is the fundamental generator of conflict. And that then the conflict energy within a group of people will build over time. This is a very, very crude interpretation of the theory.

Can we just pause on that? For people who are not familiar and for me, who hasn't, I'm loosely familiar but haven't internalized it. But every time I think about it, it's a very compelling view of the world. Whether it's true or not, it's quite, it's like when you take everything Freud says as truth. It's a very interesting way to think about the world. In the same way thinking about the mimetic theory of desire that everything we want is imitation of other people's wants. We don't have any original wants. Were constantly imitating others and so, and not just others but you know, others were exposed to. So there's these like little local pockets, however defined local of people like imitating each other. And one that's super empowering because then you can pick which group you can join. Like what, what do you want to imitate? It's, it's, it's the old like you know, whoever your friends are, that's what your life is going to be like. That's really powerful. I mean it's depressing that we're so unoriginal, but it's also liberating in that if this holds true that we can choose our life by choosing the people we hang out with.

So, okay, thoughts that are very compelling, that seem like they're more absolute than they actually are end up also being dangerous communism. I, I'm going to discuss here where I think we need to amend this particular theory. But specifically you just said something that everyone who's paid attention knows is true experientially, which is who you're around affects who you become. And as libertarian and self determining and sovereign as we'd like to be, everybody I think knows that if you got put in a maximum security prison, aspects of your personality would have to adapt or you wouldn't survive there. Right? You would become different if you were, if, if you grew up in Darfur versus Finland, you would be different with your same genetics. Like just there's no real question about that. And that even today if you hang out in a place with ultra marathoners as your roommates or all people who are obese as your roommates, the statistical likelihood of what happens to your fitness is pretty clear. Right? Like the behavioral science of this is pretty clear. So the whole saying we are the average of the five people we spend the most time around. I think the more self reflective someone is and the more time they spend by themselves in self reflection, the less this is true. But it's still true. So one of the best things someone can do to become more self determined is be self determined about the environments they want to put themselves in. Because to the degree that there is some self determination and some determination by the environment, don't be fighting an environment that is predisposing you in bad directions. Try to put yourself in an environment that is predisposing the things that you want. In turn, try to affect the environment in ways that predispose positive things for those around you.

Or perhaps also there's probably interesting ways to play with this. You could probably put yourself like form connections that have this perfect tension in all directions to where you're actually free to decide whatever the heck you want. Because the set of wants within your circle of interactions is so conflicting that you're free to choose whichever one. So if there's enough tension, as opposed to everybody aligned like a flock of birds.

Yeah, you, I mean, you definitely want that. All of the dialectics would be balanced. So if you have someone who is extremely oriented to self empowerment and someone who's extremely oriented to kind of empathy and compassion, both the dialectic of those is better than either of them on their own. If you have both of them inhabiting, being inhabited better than you by the same person, spending time around that person will probably do well for you. I think the thing you just mentioned is super important when it comes to cognitive schools, which is, I think one of the fastest things people can do to improve their learning and their, not just cognitive learning, but their meaningful problem solving, communication and civic capacity. Capacity to participate as a citizen with other people and making the world better is to be seeking dialectical synthesis all the time. And so in the Hegelian sense, if you have a thesis, you have an antithesis. So maybe we have libertarianism on one side and Marxist kind of communism on the other side. And one is arguing that the individual is the unit of choice. And so we want to increase the freedom and support of individual choice because as they make more agentic choices, it'll produce a better whole for everybody. The other side saying, well, the individuals are conditioned by their environment who would choose to be born into Darfur rather than Finland. So we actually need to collectively make environments that are good because that the environment conditions the individuals. So you have a thesis and an antithesis cases. And then Hegel's idea is you have a synthesis which is a kind of higher order truth that understands how those relate in a way that neither of them do. And so it is actually at a higher order of complexity. So the first part would be, can I steel man each of these? Can I argue each one well enough that the proponents of it are like totally, you got that? And not just argue it rhetorically, but can I inhabit it where I can try to see and feel the world the way someone Seeing and feeling the world that way would. Because once I do, then I don't want to screw those people because there's truth in it, right? And I'm not going to go back to war with them. I'm going to go to finding solutions that could actually work at a higher order. If I don't go to a higher order, then there's war. But then the higher order thing would be, well, it seems like the individual does affect the commons and the collective and other people. It also seems like the collective conditions individuals, at least statistically. And I can cherry pick out the one guy who got out of the ghetto and pulled himself up by his bootstraps. But I can also say statistically that most people born into the ghetto show up differently than most people born into the Hamptons. And so unless you want to argue that and have you take your child from the Hamptons and put them in the ghetto, then like, come on, be realistic about this thing. So how do we make. We don't want social systems that make weak dependent individuals, right, the welfare argument. But we also don't want no social system that supports individuals to do better. We don't want individuals where their self expression and agency fucks the environment and everybody else and employs slave labor and whatever. So can we make it to where individuals are creating holes that are better for conditioning other individuals? Can we make it to where we have holes that are conditioning increased agency and sovereignty? Right? That would be the synthesis. So the thing that I'm coming to here is if people have that as a frame and sometimes it's not just thesis and antithesis, it's like eight different views, right? Can I steel man each view? This is not just can I take the perspective, but am I seeking them? Am I actively trying to inhabit other people's perspective? Then can I really try to essentialize it and argue the, the best points of it, both the sense making about reality and the values, why these values actually matter. Then just like I want to seek those perspectives, then I want to seek is there a higher order set of understandings that could fulfill the values of and synthesize the sense making of all of them simultaneously? Maybe I won't get it, but I want to be seeking it and I want to be seeking progressively better ones. So this is perspective seeking, driving perspective taking and then seeking synthesis. I think that that one cognitive disposition might be the most helpful thing.

Would you put a title of dialectic synthesis on that process? Because that seems to be such a part. So like this rigorous empathy like, like it's not just empathy, it's empathy with rigor. Like you really want to understand and, and embody different worldviews and then try to find a higher order synthesis.

Okay. So I remember last night you told me when we first met, you said that you looked in somebody's eyes and you felt that you had suffered in some ways that they had suffered and so you could trust them. Sure. Shared pathos. Right. Creates a certain sense of kind of shared bonding and shared intimacy. So empathy is actually feeling the suffering of somebody else and feeling the depth of their sentience. I don't want to fuck them anymore. I mean hurt them. I don't want to behave in a. I don't want my proposition to go through when I go and inhabit the perspective of the other people if they feel that's really going to mess them up. Right. And so the rigorous empathy, it's different than just compassion, which is I generally care. Like I have a generalized care. But I don't know what it's like to be them. I can never know what it's like to be them perfectly. And that there's a humility you have to have, which is. My most rigorous attempt is still not it. My most rigorous attempt, mine. To know what it's like to be a woman is still not it. I have no question that if I was actually a woman it would be different than my best guesses. I have no question if I was actually black, it's be different than my best guesses. So there's a humility in that which keeps me listening because I don't think that I know fully, but I want to and I'm going to keep trying better to. And then I want to across them. And then I want to say is there a way we can forward together and not have to be in war? It has to be something that could meet the values that everyone holds, that could reconcile the partial sense making that everyone holds and that could offer a way forward that is more agreeable than the partial perspectives at war with each other.

But the. So the more you succeed at the sympathy with humility, the more you're carrying the burden of their. Of other people's pain. Essentially.

Now this goes back to the question of do I see us as one being or 7.8 billion? I think the. If I'm overwhelmed with my own pain, I can't empathize that much because I don't have the bandwidth. I don't have the capacity. If I don't feel like I can do something about a particular problem in the world. It's hard to feel it because it's just too devastating. And so a lot of people go numb and even go nihilistic because they just don't feel the agency. So as I actually become more empowered as an individual and have more sense of agency, I also become more empowered to be more empathetic for others and be more connected to that shared burden and want to be able to make choices on behalf of. And in. And in benefit of.

So this way of living seems like a way of living that would solve a lot of problems in society from a cellular automata perspective. So if you have a bunch of little, like little agents behaving in this way, my intuition. There'll be interesting complexities that emerge. But my intuition is it will create a society that's very different and recognizably better than the one we have today. How much like.

Oh, wait, hold that question because I want to come back to it. But this brings us back to Gerard, which we didn't answer. The conflict theory.

Yes.

Because about how to get past the conflict theory.

Yes. You know the Robert Frost poem about the two paths. You never have time to return back to the other. We're going to have to do that quite a lot. We're going to be living that poem over and over again. But yes, how. How to. Let's return back.

Okay. So the rest of the argument goes. You learn to want what other people want. Therefore, fundamental conflict based in our desire, because we want the thing that somebody else has. And then people are conf. They're in conflict over trying to get the same stuff, power, status, attention, physical stuff, a mate, whatever it is. And then the. We learn the conflict by watching. And so then the conflict becomes mimetic and we become on the Palestinian side of the Israeli side, or the communist or the capitalist side, or the left or right politically or whatever it is. And until eventually the conflict energy in the system builds up so much that some type of violence is needed to get the bad guy, whoever it is, that we're going to blame. And Gerard talks about why scapegoating was kind of a mechanism to minimize the amount of violence. Let's blame. Let's blame a. A scapegoat as being more relevant than they really were. But if we all believe it, then we can all kind of calm down with the conflict energy.

It's a really interesting concept, by the way. I mean, you went. You beautifully summarized it. But the idea that there's a scapegoat, that there's a this kind of thing naturally leads to a conflict, and then they find the other. Some group that's the other that's either real or artificial as the cause of the conflict.

Well, it's always artificial because the cause of the conflict in Gerard is the mimesis of desire itself. And how do we attack that? How do we attack that? It's our own desire. So this now gets to something more like Buddha said, right. Which was, desire is the cause of suffering. Girard and Buddha would kind of agree in this way.

So and so. But that's. That explains. I mean, again, it's a compelling description of human history that we do tend to come up with the other. And.

Okay, kind of. I just. I just had such a funny experience with someone critiquing Gerard the other day in such a elegant and beautiful and simple way. It's a. A friend who's grew up Aboriginal. Australian, is a scholar of aboriginal social technologies. And he's like, nah, man. Gerard just made shit up about how tribes work. Like, we come from a tribe, we've got tens of thousands of years, and we didn't have increasing conflict and then scapegoat and kill someone. We'd have a little bit of conflict, and then we would dance, and then everybody'd be fine. Like, we'd dance around the campfire. Everyone would, like, kind of physically get the energy out. We'd look in each other's eyes, we'd have positive bonding, and then we're fine, and nobody. No scapegoats.

And I think that's called the Joe Rogan theory of desire, which is. He's like, all. All of human problems have to do. Do with the fact that you don't do enough hard shit in your day. So maybe you could just dance it. Because he says doing exercise and running on that treadmill gets all the demons out. Maybe just dancing gets all the demons out.

So this is why I say we have to be careful with taking an idea that seems too explanatory and then taking it as a given and then saying, well, now that we're stuck with the fact that conflict is inexorable because mimetic desire. And therefore, how do we deal with the inexorability of the conflict and how to sublimate violence? Well, no, the whole thing might be actually gibberish, meaning it's only true in certain conditions and other conditions it's not true. So the deeper question is, under which conditions is that true? Under which conditions is it not true? What do those other conditions make possible?

And look like, and in general, we should stay away from really compelling models of reality because there's something about our brains that these models become sticky and we can't even think outside of them.

It's not that we stay away from them. It's that we know that the model of reality is never reality. That's the key thing.

Humility. Again, it goes back to just having the humility that you don't have a perfect model of reality.

There's an ep. The model of reality could never be reality. The process of modeling is inherently information reduction. And I can never show that the unknown, unknown set has been factored.

It's back to the cellular automata. You can't put the genie back in the bottle like when you realize it's unfortunately, sadly impossible to. To create a model of cellular automata even if you know the basic rules that predict to even any degree of accuracy what. How that system will evolve. Which is fascinating mathematically. Sorry. I think about it quite a lot is very annoying. Wolfram has this Rule 30. Like you should be able to predict it. It's so simple. But you can't predict what's going to be. Like there's a. There's a problem. He defines. They try to predict some aspect of the middle. Middle column of the system, just anything about it. What's going to happen in the future. And you can't. You can't. It sucks because then we can't make sense of this world in a really in of reality in a definitive way. It's always like in the striving. Like we're always striving. Yeah.

I don't think this sucks.

That. So that's a feature, not a bug.

Well, that's assuming a designer. I would say I don't think it sucks. I think it's not only beautiful, but maybe necessary for beauty.

The mess. So you're. So you're. You disagree with Jordan Peterson. You should clean up your room. You like. The room's messy. It's. It's essential for the. For beauty.

It's not messy. Okay. I take. I have no idea if it was intended this way. And so I'm just interpreting it a way. I like the commandment about having no false idols. To me, the way I interpret that is meaningful is that reality is sacred to me. I have a reverence for reality, but I know my best understanding of it is never complete. I know my best model of it is a model where I tried to make some kind of predictive capacity by reducing the complexity of it to a set of stuff that I could observe and then a subset of that stuff that I thought was the causal dynamics and then some set of, you know, mechanisms that are involved. And what we find is that it can be super useful, like Newtonian gravity can help us do ballistic curves and all kinds of super useful stuff. And then we get to the place where it doesn't explain what's happening at the cosmological scale or at a quantum scale. And at each time what we're finding is we excluded stuff. And it also doesn't explain the reconciliation of gravity with quantum mechanics and the other kind of fundamental laws and the. So models can be useful, but they're never true with a capital table, meaning they're never an actual real full. They're never a complete description of what's happening in real systems. They can be a complete description of what's happening in an artificial system that was the result of applying a model. So the model of a circuit board and the circuit board are the same thing. But I would argue that the model of a cell and the cell are not the same thing. And I would say this is key to what we call complexity versus the complicated, which is a distinction Dave Snowden made well in defining the difference between simple, complicated, complex and chaotic systems. But one of the definers in complex systems is that no matter how you model the complex system, it will still have some emergent behavior not predicted by the model.

Can you elaborate on the complex versus the complicated?

Complicated means we can fully explicate the phase space of all the things that it can do. We can program it all human, not all. For the most part, human built things are complicated. They don't self organize, they don't self repair, they're not self evolving. And we can make a blueprint for them where, sorry for human systems, for human technologies.

Human technologies. Okay, so, so non.

That are basically the application of models.

Right.

And engineering is kind of applied science science as the modeling process and but with, but humans are complex, complex stuff. With biological type stuff and sociological type stuff, it more has generator functions and even those can't be fully explicated than it has or our explication can't prove that it has closure of what would be in the unknown, unknown set where we keep finding like oh, it's just the genome, oh well now it's the genome in the epigenome and then a recursive change on the epigenome because of the proteome and then there's mitochondrial DNA and then viruses affected and Right. So it's like we get over excited when we think we found the thing.

So on Facebook, you know how you can list your relationship as complicated is to actually say it's, it's complex. That's the more accurate description. You self terminating is a really interesting idea that you talk about quite a bit. First of all, what is a self terminating system? And I think you have a sense, correct me if I'm wrong, that human civilization as it currently is, is a self terminating system. Why do you have that intuition combined with the definition of what self terminating means?

Okay, so if we look at human societies, historically, human civilizations, it's not that hard to realize that most of the major civilizations and empires of the past don't exist anymore. So they had a life cycle, they died for some reason. So we don't still have in the early Egyptian empire or Inca or Maya or Aztec or any of those. Right. And so they, they terminated. Sometimes it seems like they were terminated from the outside in war. Sometimes it seems like they self terminate. When we look at Easter island, it was a self termination. So let's go ahead and take an island situation. If I have an island and we are consuming the resources on that island faster than the resources can replicate themselves and there's a finite space there, that system is going to self terminate, it's not going to be able to keep doing that thing because you'll get to a place of there's no resources left and then you get. So now if I'm utilizing the resources faster than they can replicate or faster than they can replenish and I'm actually growing our population in the process, I'm even increasing the rate of the utilization of resources, I might get an exponential curve and then hit a wall and then just collapse the exponential curve rather than do an S curve or some other kind of thing. So self terminating system is any system that depends upon a substrate system that is debasing its own substrate, that is debasing what it depends upon.

So you're right that if you look at empires, they rise and fall throughout human history, but, but not this time, bro, where this one's going to last forever.

That's. I like that idea. I think that if we don't understand why all the previous ones failed, we can't ensure that. And so I think it's very important to understand it well so that we can have that be a designed outcome with somewhat decent probability.

So we're, it's sort of in terms of consuming the resources on the island, we're a clever bunch and we keep coming up especially when the on the horizon there is a termination point. We keep coming up with clever ways of avoiding disaster, of avoiding collapse, of constructing. This is where technological innovation, this is where growth comes in. Coming up with different ways to improve productivity and the way society functions such that we consume less resources or get a lot more from the resources we have. So there's some sense in which there's a human ingenuity is a source for optimism about the future of this particular system. That that may not be self terminating if. If there's more innovation than there is consumption.

So over consumption of resource is just one way a thing can self terminate. We're just kind of starting here. But there are reasons for optimism and pessimism. Then they're both worth understanding. And there's failure modes on understanding either without the other. As we mentioned previously there, there's what I would call naive techno optimism. Naive techno capital optimism that says stuff just has been getting better and better and we wouldn't want to live in the dark ages. And tech has done all this awesome stuff and we know the proponents of those models and that stuff is going to kind of keep getting better. Of course there are problems, but human ingenuity rises to it. Supply and demand will solve the problems. Whatever.

Would you put Ray Kurzweil in that or in that bucket? Is there some specific people you have in mind or. Naive optimism is truly naive to where you're essentially just have an optimism that's blind to any kind of realities of the way technology progresses.

I don't think that anyone who thinks about it and writes about it is perfectly naive.

Gotcha.

But there might play time. It's a Platonic ideal there, there might be a bias in the nature of the assessment. I would also say there's kind of naive techno pessimism and there are. Critics of technology. I mean you read the Unabomber's manifesto on why technology can't not result in our self termination so we have to take it out before it gets any further. But also if you read a lot of the X risk community, you know, Bostrom and friends, it's like our total number of existential risks and the total probability of them is going up. And so I think that there are. We have to hold together where our positive possibilities and our risk possibilities are both increasing and then say for the positive possibilities to be realized long term, all of the catastrophic risks have to not happen. Any of the catastrophic risks happening is enough to keep that positive outcome from occurring. So how do we ensure that none of them happen if we want to say, let's have a civilization that doesn't collapse. So again, collapse theory, it's worth looking at books like the Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. It does an analysis of that many of the societies fell for internal institutional decay, civilizational decay reasons. Baudrillard in Simulation and Simulacra looks at a very different way of looking at how institutional decay in the collective intelligence of a system happens and it becomes kind of more internally parasitic on itself. Obviously Jared diamond made a more popular book called Collapse and as we were mentioning, the antikythera mechanism has been getting attention in the news lately. But it's like a 2000 year old clock, right? Like metal gears. And does that mean we lost like 1500 years of technological progress and from a society that was relatively technologically advanced? So what I'm interested in here is being able to say, okay, well, why did previous societies fail? Can we understand that abstractly enough that we can make a civilizational model that isn't just trying to solve one type of failure, but solve the underlying things that generate the failures as a whole? Are there some underlying generator functions or patterns that would make a system self terminating? And can we solve those and have that be the kernel of a new civilizational model that is not self terminating? And can we then be able to actually look at the categories of extras we're aware of and see that we actually have resilience in the presence of those? Not just resilience, but anti fragility. And I would say for the optimism to be grounded, it has to actually be able to understand the risk space well and have adequate solutions for it.

So can we try to dig into some basic intuitions about the underlying sources of catastrophic failures of the system and over consumption that's built in into self terminating systems? So both the overconsumption, which is like the slow death, and then, then there's the fast death of nuclear war and all those kinds of things. AGI, biotech, bioengineering, nanotechnology, nano. My favorite nanobots. Nanobots are my favorite because it sounds so cool to me that I could just know that I would be one of the scientists that would be full steam ahead in building them without sufficiently thinking about the negative consequences. I would definitely be, I would be podcasting all about the negative consequences. But. But when I go back home, I just in my heart know the amount of excitement is a dumb descendant of ape. No offense to apes. So I want to backtrack on my previous comments about negative comments about apes that I have that sense of excitement.