How can AI understand us, if we don't fully understand ourselves?

How do I know that I'm not in a simulation? Like how do I know that all these people around me are not like non player characters, that my parents are non player characters? And I would like, how do you know? Okay, it doesn't matter if I'm in a video game or a simulation or whatever this is, whatever this reality thing is, I like it and I'm stick around.

Knowledge is this ever growing pursuit of beliefs that consistently challenge themselves and explain more and more about the world. The idea of who I am is changing on a moment to moment basis. You know, all of us can reflect on who we were five years ago or 10 years ago and realize that we were completely different people.

We could give people a mirror of themselves and their beliefs about the world. Like that could literally help people self actualize.

One of the greatest spiritual teachings is the idea of no self. The idea that you are not a persistent being in the world. Can you take a step back and stop looking at the world as just a set of facts or a set of capital T truths and have an operating system that enables you to systematically question truths and produce new truths over time? I want a different view of a recommendation engine where I say these are the beliefs that matter to me.

If you had to explain epistemic need to a five year old, what would you say?

Yeah. So first of all.

Between stimulus and response, there's a space. And in that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. Viktor Frankl's words resonate deeply with me because my life has been about understanding that space, how we think, how we feel, why I am the way I am, why I think, the things I do, and how I can connect with others and with myself. My name is Robert Ta. I'm a product leader, entrepreneur and founder. And my purpose is to map human belief systems with empathy and accuracy as a tool for self awareness and also as the foundation for AI alignment. I really believe that if we don't fully understand ourselves, then how can AI understand us in the future? And there's 8 billion of us all figuring it out as we get more experiences as we live longer as time goes on that shape us, that shape our beliefs. So who's building the programmatic representation of everybody's models of self? And I see that as a fundamental problem to solve and that's why I'm launching this podcast, is to bring together a community of people that want to build a better future together. Not just in this particular problem set, but anybody that is a fan of a build in the Open approach. Anybody who is interested in building a better future together, we want to build a community around this because I really believe that if we unite people from different disciplines to work on this problem, then we can best solve it. Before we get into the podcast, I'll just give you a quick flyby about why I get so much energy talking about these concepts. So to share a little bit about my why. I grew up in an immigrant family with an older brother who I was very close to. I brought myself to college. I ran my first business, there was a private tutoring business to be able.

To pay the bills.

And I used to have a lot of limiting beliefs. I had limiting beliefs around mental health, emotional health. And I realized that was a cultural thing. Uh, and at some point in my journey, I realized that held me back. One of the most defining points where I realized that was when my brother called me one day and he called me and said, hey bro, I'm not doing all right, can I come over for a month? And I said, of course, I love you. And I only had one bed at a time.

I was, you know, I was pretty.

Poor come out of college. And that month turned into kind of a crash course and roller coaster on like getting up to speed on mental health, understanding the symptoms that I was seeing. Like, he would call me at work and ask, hey bro, are you trying to kill me? Are people out after me? And I was juggling, launching my first product during those days. And I'll never forget the stress and anxiety of stepping out of a work meeting and calls me and it's some new paranoid delusion that really blew my mind that he could even believe that his brother of decades that has loved him all his life, could really believe that, that I was trying to kill him. And so one of the biggest dreams I have for this project, if we are successful, is to be able to map my brother's belief systems and other people like him give that data in a way to a doctor or psychiatrist so that they could work through those beliefs. Like what is a paranoid delusion? How do we represent that and how do we help you with that?

How do we give you the tools.

To be able to map out whether this belief is really yours or not? And how do we help you evolve that? So I started this podcast to build a community of like minded people with shared values who want to build a better future together. Here's what you can expect. Awesome guest interviews. Other entrepreneurs, founders, leaders, researchers, scientists, builders.

On the front lines.

Building a better future together Team Deep Dives from the Epistemic Me team with updates and radical transparency with all the nitty gritty behind the scenes trying to bootstrap a global open source project to change the world.

And so if any of that sounds.

Interesting to you, hit subscribe, give us feedback. We read all the comments, we'll read.

All your questions and if you have.

Any feedback for, you know how it's edited, the topics, the guests, let us know, we would love to know. Have a great day, enjoy the show.

Welcome to the ABCs for building the Future podcast where we bring on founders, entrepreneurs, leaders, researchers and scientists who are working on big things with big stories to tell. In particular, this is the first episode of our podcast where we're talking about a project that we're working on. And so we're going to spend some time introducing ourselves the project, the problem statement, the solution statement, kind of the problems we seek to solve and our philosophies behind why we want to work on this problem, why we see it being important. So with that said, I think, Dean, do you want to intro yourself? And then we go, Jonathan, then I could intro myself and then we'll get into the list of questions we have prepared.

Sure, yeah. So, hey, I'm Dean. I am currently living in San Francisco in Nob Hill. I work as a software engineer at Stripe and been building epistemic Me on the side with Jonathan Robert for about the last six months. Yeah, so just to cue off some of those questions that you asked, Systemic Me is really the toolkit. The way I see it is it's, it's the toolkit to ask the right questions about anything that you have questions about, whether that be health problems that you're facing at work. It's a way to introduce systems and structures or as we call it in philosophy, epistemology, about how to question your own beliefs and ultimately find the truth. And it's something that I think, we think is missing in AI today, or at least the observability of how that's being done.

I'm Jonathan, I'm also in San Francisco. I'm a serial entrepreneur and I have been working on epistemic me for the last six months. Dan and I met at a party here in San Francisco and just had this awesome philosophical conversation and that turned into a yeah, we should, we should build this kind of momentum pretty quickly. It's part of a long journey, understanding sense making and collective intelligence. And at a previous startup I built, I had worked on a number of different projects modeling team dynamics and individual sense making dynamics and started to develop this ontology, this system of looking at the world. They called it the explainable meta learning framework a couple years ago. And it was a little bit complex to explain to people. I thought getting this idea of what beliefs are in a way that they can be predictive about how we understand the world could be a really helpful initial point to understand how philosophy can interact with AI and help us work with philosophy and help AI to understand us. So that was the kind of initial idea making a belief system that could explain how you think about things day to day. Then something that related to you personally be a way that people could see the power of understanding their individual sense making and understanding their individual capacity to make decisions. And yes, in AI take a quiz and then understand you better and develop a specific beliefs. And I think that's really one of my underlying beliefs is that philosophy is the tool that can help us evolve AI in a way that is is human align.

Cool. Thanks, Dean. Thanks, Jonathan. I love how excited you both are to just dive into talking about epistemic me a little bit about my background. And then I think actually we should talk about the origin of this, how it started from that party. So I think the next thing I want to go into is ask you a little bit more about that conversation. Then we can go into some of the questions we prepared because I think that would be interesting for the audience to know the origin story and the evolution. I'm a product leader and entrepreneur. I have a background launching products at workday and working in product architecture as well as integrations consulting. I have a patent for some analytics work that's something I really like. I like data and I like data about health. I like using data to verify beliefs. And so I got talking to Jonathan because we're connected through a couple mutual communities and somebody connected us and we started talking and we just totally hit it off. And he started describing this project and it seemed like I had skill sets that can maybe add to the mission of the project and further it. And I am pretty stoked about it. Like it's a different way of looking at a problem and solving it. And the way that I frame it because we're all just diving into the project. The way that I frame it is if we don't fully understand ourselves, how can AI understand us? I think that's what this is. I've always been a personal growth nerd. So this type of project where we could give people a mirror of themselves and their beliefs about the world that could literally help people self Actualize, like, that's so cool. So I want to go back to the origin story. Tell me more about meeting at this party. What was the party like? What was this conversation? How did you even get into talking about, let's start this open source project that should be a global thing? Like now that's what we're thinking, right? But like, what was, how was that conversation like? And then how did you start collaborating? I think that would be interesting to know.

Yeah, it definitely didn't start off as let's go work on this open source project. I think it was very much a natural conversation. I think that Jonathan and I just happened into. I don't know what was the exact trigger point. Jonathan. I think it was David Deutsch's the Beginning of Infinity. David Deutsch is this theoretical. He's really famous for some of his theories about quantum mechanics, but he's also a philosopher and he has this epistemology which he's laid out about how to assess what's true in the world and how to form these explanations about how the world works. So he, he lays out a lot of the concepts which actually are reflected in some of our docs that need to be these things that are falsifiable. And that knowledge is this ever growing pursuit of beliefs that consistently challenge themselves and explain more and more about the world. And I think that was just a concept that we really hit off on and that led to a series of walks in the park and that led to a series of like, okay, how do we put this into code? But yeah, Jonathan, I don't know if that's how I recall it. I'm curious to see what you would add to that.

Go ahead, Jonathan.

Yeah, it was a little while ago, the conversation. I think we covered a number of topics and I just remember it being something like where I'm thinking about ideas like metaphysics and philosophy and evolution. And there's probably a certain set of topics I'm like looking to talk to people about. And I remember feeling maybe in the wrong place to talk about this stuff. And I was fairly close to leaving the party. Dean had ran to my wife and they were chatting and then we were. And then I was about to go and then all of a sudden we started talking to Dean and we probably talked like 30, 45 minutes or something like that about this broad range of topics around AI, around philosophy, around evolution. And it was, yeah, just when you meet somebody you can talk about the details of what you're really interested in is just to me, kind of resonance. And so I remember that. And then we followed that up with the meetup over in Hayes Valley, took a walk and discussed these topics quite a bit more. And I think Dean comes from a point of view of consciousness and through meditation and meditation practices, there's a certain exposure to those ideas that I think that if you're thinking about those questions, then you are thinking philosophically, you're thinking about what I mean in the world, and it makes it easy to connect about meaningful conversations in that direction.

Yeah, I think I actually thought that was really fascinating because I think Jonathan hit an interesting point there, which is I approach philosophy from the perspective of Eastern meditation, which is really about inquiring within yourself and in a way you could argue is doing science on your own beliefs that you witness with as they come up in your mind. Jonathan is a very like, systematic and structured thinker. And he can come up with all the references on the fly and lay out this whole overview of philosophy. I was really impressed. I think I had come into Western philosophy by sort of picking, having the concepts where I could and applying it to what I discovered about my own mind. Particularly like how to think about epistemology, how to think about what's true, what is ontology. Jonathan introduced me to the idea of teleology, which I think was a novel concept, a term I hadn't heard. And I think that's actually become quite important within epistemic me. And maybe, Jonathan, you could speak more to the importance of teleology and how that fits into what we're doing.

Yeah, I think my philosophical journey, there's a lot of Eastern traditions in philosophy and Western traditions is what we normally think of in philosophy, the Plato, Aristotle, Kant lineage of thought. And I think the idea of who you are as a person manifests in these aspects of thought. Right. And so in one question of what is. What are you as a person? Or what is a self? And then what is world? Are questions of metaphysics. And when you think about it, metaphysics wraps the context of all epistemology. Like anything that we know is seen through this lens of where do we define? How do we define the world, how do we find ourselves? What are concepts of the world? What are concepts of self? And then you get into aspects, beliefs about those that can populate an epistemology. And then I think the longer you look at the problem, you realize that you're coming into the world is also wrapped in a context. And that's what I call the teleological, teleological context. It is one of purpose, and not like in a soft sense of what purpose is, but rather if you think about what are the beliefs of how I got here in the world and what are the beliefs of what the world will be when I leave. Then you get an idea of what does the world mean without you. And those are like underlying beliefs that I feel like everybody brings into their thinking about the world. Whether you think that like God invented the earth in seven days and you were, you were brought here. Belief underlies all the other beliefs that you have about things that you see in the world. If you think you're a product of 3.5 billion years of evolution on Earth, how do you explain the idea that one day there was not a chicken on earth and then another day there was a chicken on earth? These are what teleological beliefs get you. How do I change as a person? And that developmental journey is also explained by teleological beliefs. So.

Yeah, coming up is this idea of what is a self? You know, that idea of like, who am I? Because it seems to be that the idea of who I am is changing on a moment to moment basis. You know, all of us can reflect on who we were five years ago, 10 years ago, and realize that we were completely different people. So if we're trying to encode this idea of what is a self, we inherently need to wrap it in these series of different contexts. And I think that's where some of these, that's where I think the software angle came into play, where we realized, you know, this is a lot of what software is meant to do. It's meant to store things that version over time and provide access patterns to them and enable you to work with these pieces of data. But I think we started to realize that a lot of what we were talking about were things that we could model in software, particularly this idea of the ever changing self.

If you had to explain epistemic knee to a five year old, what would you say? Because I think everything we've said so far, maybe a 5 year old wouldn't really know, but if we did had to explain it to a five year old, how would you explain it?

I have some ideas there, Jonathan, if you want to go.

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, so first of all, I wouldn't use the term epistemology at all. And frankly, I wouldn't use any terms in a way. Like my first gut instinct is to say, you know, I actually think five year olds embody like the philosophy of epistemic me better than some adults. You know, five year olds are always asking questions, and they're asking the questions that they're not supposed to. My family members always tell the story of when I was five years old, I went up to someone at a party and I was like, why are you bald? You know, and like, this just this inherent curiosity to figure out, like, what is the world and why? Why does it work the way it does, is something that I think all children seem to inherently have. If I were to try to explain this particular concept, it would probably be in the same way you try and teach science to children. You show them an experiment, you try to teach them a single concept where there's an idea that you're trying to show them. I think a common childhood experiment is like, does this item float? Does this candle float? Or does this coin float in water? And you ask them, hey, do you think this thing is going to float in water? And then you have them place it in water and see whether it floats or not. And they record their results. And it's this idea of asking questions and recording what happened and using that as evidence to structure.