https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dLzeoTScWYo
Hello everyone and welcome to the monthly patron Q&A. First of all, as always, I want to thank the patrons for the many ways in which they support my work. There’s financial support, there’s many encouraging comments and questions. Some of you also volunteer to help out with projects at the Vervecki Foundation. All of this is greatly appreciated. So let’s get into the questions. The first is from Alexandra. Hi John, loved your passionate imploring about creating a caring AGI. Something struck me when Ryan said we should think of this as giving birth to children who need a family along those lines. I have been thinking a lot about transhumanism as the culmination of the Apollonian at the great expense of the Dionysian. This feeds into our Shia Logos Women’s Forum where we’re meeting later today to discuss the breakdown of mental health in young women and girls in particular that seems to be driven or at least exacerbated greatly by technologies. Girls should be celebrating their passage into childbearing potential but instead are terrified and loathing of their bodies. This disembodiment goes for most weird cultures right now, males and females. Yes. If you’re trying to give birth, being golden fashion without the blood and guts in danger of the reality of birth, perhaps it will never reach a place of caring or wisdom. Somehow I feel the only way to do this is rebalancing the feminine. That doesn’t mean continuing to portray sentient AI as perfect hot young girls, the porn addiction of the Silicon Valley nerd. You sound convinced that wet wear isn’t necessary. I don’t know. The squelchy, squalling, bloodied newborn seems important to me when creating a loving, caring bond. Can you say more please? Lots of love, Alexandraxxx. Okay, so this is a really great question and I love and appreciate the tremendous response that has been given to the video essay on AI. This question goes into the heart of how much embodiment is needed. I want to be really careful because this is a very, very complex, not convoluted, complex and nuanced question. I was making a case for the necessity of artificial intelligence be grounded in autopoiesis in order to give it real relevance, realisation, real caring and therefore real embodiment. Alexandraxxx is bringing, and by the way, I do think the wet wear plays an important function. I indicated that we’re moving towards the wet wear with the bioelectrical ram that IBM has been developing that will allow genuine analog processing, etc. I think the wet wear matters a lot. I think there is hidden constraints in our embodiment that have been not adequately taken up into our current account of how intelligence work. I talked about the wet wear, I talked about the glial cells and the other brain and all that stuff and all of the nervous system that’s in the gut and the bioecology there and how it influences cognition and all of that. I think pretending that all of that is irrelevant is, I think, pretentious and so I just want to make it clear that I do think the wet wear is important. So I want to say that I think the autopoiesis is necessary. I think something analogous to all the functions being carried out by that extended sense of well wet wear is going to turn out to be important. This is the embodiment thesis. But Alexandraxxx brings out an important one and I want to reflect on this slowly because the idea that we are born, we don’t just sort of emerge auto-poetically, we’re born and as a result of two converging but opponent evolutionary tracks, bipedalism and large brains, we’re born in a really barely viable, very premature state. We have the longest childhood, we have to inculturate as well as just grow and this requires the evolution of an attachment relationship and it’s plausible. I hadn’t thought about this. That’s why I’m sort of stumbling because I’m thinking as I’m replying, this is an excellent thing. Is attachment necessary for agape? You have to have the drive for an attachment relationship in order to genuinely experience agopic love. That’s a really good question. They are inseparably paired in us. I’m wondering because part of the idea is the ability to turn the arrow around. I thought we could cover most of the turning the arrow around of relevance realization could be encountered by making these beings genuinely socially responsible and accountable. I still think that’s necessary but this is so rich. If we want these machines to have agape, is the genuine capacity for agape dependent on embodied birth and therefore the real need for attachment relationships and that gives us the fundamental machinery of agape? I don’t know. That would be really odd if it was true. I’m not dismissing it at all. I’m taking it very seriously because it would mean that all beings capable of agopic morality with beings that not only were sociocultural beings but were beings that were born and had attachment relationships. We know the attachment machinery is carried out into our romantic relationships. It’s tremendously powerful. I have to think about this. This is not me attempting to dodge this. I want to think about this. I really am asking for patience. I want to think about this because this is a really profound question. Is agape dependent on attachment? Attachment seems to be dependent on something like the way we are born. It could be that these creatures need, they have to have something like a childhood and therefore they have to have other AGI that is commits and cares to commit to their enculturation and their learning and their upbringing. Maybe you could do that without birth because it could still be a way of getting them to care about the bringing up of the AGI’s that are in childhood because after all, GPT, pre-trained, there’s training that has to go on. What a good question. This is amazing. I definitely think they should, I think two things that I argued for. We are going to come back into a rich appreciation of the ineffable soulfulness of our embodiment. An embodiment is going to become crucial and I think that’s going to also help us see how these beings have to genuinely care about being embodied. They have to be autopoietic. Whether or not, I think you’re right that agape needs something like a psychological cognitive analog of attachment, that kind of commitment without expectation of reciprocity. I don’t know if that requires the machines to have something like a birth experience or something like a mentorship relationship in which you can genuinely experience profound agape I have rather than a parental relationship. I have to think about this. I keep saying that and I keep wanting to play with it. I hope at least my thinking aloud was helpful to you, Alexandra, and at least clarifying some of the connections that need to be explored and thought about. Thank you very much for that. Excellent. Really, really good question. Really thought provoking. Musa, good to hear from you again. Question. Hi, John. Fantastic GP talk yesterday. Well, it was a little bit longer than yesterday. It was actually what a week and a day ago, eight days ago. But thank you, Musa. I worked really hard on that BDRSA and a lot of people helped me. I really wanted to give it my best, bring my A++ game and really worried. Is that right? Yeah, there was anxiety. I was concerned about getting it wrong. I’m not claiming I got it perfect, but I’m really appreciating your thanking me. We know the hand binding and cognitive performance decline experiment as an argument from body practice. Are there any studies on organic movement disorders or mobility restrictions versus long term insight wisdom based performance? There’s already some preliminary stuff and Rafe Kelly is the person to turn to to take a look more about this. Although Jordan Peterson did some work around this too. We’ve got some good research that when kids, especially boys, are not allowed rough house play that their ability to restrain impulse, especially aggressive or violent impulse, gets seriously truncated. And of course, self regulation and the ability to engage in serious play as something other than just work or just running some habit. But this exploratory thing, I think are both important for wisdom. I think there’s a lot around limiting rough housing, really having an impact on self regulation, really truncating people’s ability to engage in appropriate serious play. And I think those two are clearly important for insight and for wisdom. Other things about those two are really big. The stuff around gesture, the stuff around reducing rough housing. I don’t know if we have any experimentation that works the way you’re suggesting. We have good evidence that the navigational machinery, we grow and learn because it’s both growing and learning, right? In order to navigate the physical environment is drawn up into how we move through conceptual space, theoretical space. That of course is extremely relevant to wisdom. I predict that we will find good evidence that that ability to move around physically to different visual perspective is being accepted up into perspectival knowing and moving between perspectives. We use all this orientation language and standing in somebody else’s shoes and seeing it the way they do in order to talk about this. I wonder if the mind and motion of Tversky, Barbara Tversky talks about that. If she has, then it’s just merely a pohostiction. If she hasn’t, I’m making a prediction that we’re going to find that our ability to sense remote or movement and coordinate different visual and ultimately tactile and auditory perspectives on a thing is going to be, that machine is going to be accepted up into the meta perspectival ability. Prospectival metacognition is exactly the core feature of wisdom. At least that’s what the wisdom consensus paper came to the conclusion that that’s one of the core features. There’s two that we have evidence for. The third, if we don’t have evidence, I’m predicting that we’re going to find that evidence. Those are three. What we’ve got is we’ve got gesture, the golden meadows and all that related work. We have the stuff about roughhousing and then I think either we have, because I don’t know all the literature or I’m predicting we will have evidence that that embodied sensory motor perspective taking is accepted up into our perspectival knowing. And all of those are key aspects for wisdom. So I hope I’ve answered your question, Musa. Thank you very much. We’re going to move on to a question from Chris Hodgson. So in order to bind AGI and human goals strongly enough, do you think it needs to be a design constraint that AGI should want to be human on some deep level? So this is a really, wow, these are really good questions. It depends what we mean by human. I think we mean, if we mean having a particular biology with a particular evolutionary history, that goes back to Alexander’s question. That’s maybe, maybe not. I do think we want to make these machines aspiring to being what we sometimes mean by the word human, which are embodied persons. And a person is both a psychological and an embodied being. If I scratch your arm, I have hurt a person. Right. And this is Strossen, the oldest Strossen made this argument a long time ago that that’s what we mean when we say human. If we mean embodied persons, and what do we mean by persons? Embodied, temporally extended cognitive moral agents, then I think we have to make the machines find personhood, something that is intrinsically valuable, something that they want to make insofar as they want to be able to be human. Insofar as they want to be beings that care about rationality, truth, responsibility, integrating auto-poesis and accountability together. So not sure they have to want to be us, sort of Pinocchio data fashion. I do think they have to aspire for themselves. To being persons that are capable of raising other persons in a community of persons. Because, and I won’t repeat all the arguments for why I think that. I think only person-making beings can be moral beings. And I think, and you know, in this way, I am finding Plato and Kant both as allies, because they’re usually not together. They’re usually opposed on a lot of things. But this idea that there’s a deep connection, there are deep connections between rationality, morality, and personhood. Agency, autonomous agency that’s capable of rational and moral responsibility. And those are, like I said, all the arguments about how those are all bound together, I take to be some of the deepest truths that we have discovered over the last 400 years. So I think in that sense, they have to aspire. They have to aspire to being persons and to finding that project inherently valuable. And finding any being that is engaged in that project inherently worth support. Regardless of how, what its absolute levels of intelligence or rationality, or even consciousness turn out to be. Thank you, Chris. I hope I answered your question. These are all great questions. And many of you are picking up on the fact that I did not intend, and I am grateful for this, the video essay to be, you know, exhaustive or complete, but to do what we’re doing to really bring us the ability to enter into deep, careful, and helpful discussion and reflection. So the next is from Anon, perhaps from Anonymous. I was thinking about your video on AI. Sorry for asking three questions. Here’s the first one. I love the bit at the start where you tried to ground the discussion. Would everything you’ve said about chat GPT also apply to lesser spent to search engines? Yes, I think so. Is the primary difference that the former can generate bespoke text responses, but there’s a lot of documents on the internet. Is that really a substantial difference? Ditto for social media. I think that’s important. I was thinking of another analogy you were drawing. I see what you’re saying. The analogy I was thinking is the search engines also depend on the way we have curated and collated and connected information in order to work. That’s why the creation of these very powerful search engines like Google didn’t tell us very much about human memory because they actually presuppose human, right, relevance realization, those core four of working memory, fluid cognition, consciousness and attention. And therefore, it didn’t give us much of an insight into how human memory worked, but it nevertheless meant that a lot of jobs or a lot of ways of doing things that were dependent on human beings storing things as memory was largely rendered obsolete. So I think that analogy is right. And so the reason I think that analogy is right is how I was thinking almost everything I said about the chat GBT extended to search engines. And so I think that answers your question. I don’t think it’s a substantial difference. I think the fact that the GBT machines are generative is very powerful. Obviously, what’s going to happen is we’re going to increasingly figure out how to put and integrate these two together the way we have it in us. And that’s part of some of that threshold I was talking about coming. Okay, so that’s your first question. Would you say there is a spectrum for capacity for rationality? Would you say that self-correcting systems operating on feedback like air conditioning systems are rational to some extent? I know. Because I do not think they’re even properly intelligent. And the reason why is because one of the arguments I gave in the video, an air conditioner doesn’t have any problems. We have a problem of wanting to stay cool. And the air conditioner has a feedback, a cybernetic feedback mechanism that allows it to maintain a temperature that we set. We have a need because we’re genuinely embodied and embedded to work at a certain temperature. Our brain can’t be much above 37 degrees Celsius. I don’t think any AI has to be in that range. So that could be an irrelevant thing. But I do think that because the AI is not embodied, sorry, because the air conditioner, not the AI, because the air conditioner is not embodied, it is not actually seeking any goals for its own sake. It has no genuine needs. It doesn’t care. It’s not processing or modeling the world in any way that matters to it. And therefore, it doesn’t even have intelligence. And therefore, it cannot have rationality. So I think once you get into intelligence, there’s then a spectrum. The spectrum is how much can that intelligence support recursive intelligence, which is applying intelligence to the meta problems that are posed by trying to exercise your intelligence, the meta problems of relevance realization and adaptive anticipation, and getting those two to operate in an effective and integrated fashion, I think, is what determines where you are on the rationality spectrum. Now, there’s another threshold, which is the degree to which we can turn rationality on rationality itself, in terms of which there are self-deceptive processes within all the kinds of knowing. We want a rationality within each, but we also want a rationality and an understanding between all of them such that they mutually afford each other. This would be rationally self-transcending rationality, which Leo Farrar and I argued is probably the core cognitive component of wisdom, as long as you amend that earlier argument, as I did in passing here, by including in rationality aspiration, which wasn’t in the original chapter with Leo, aspiration, transformation, and also understanding, as opposed to just intelligence and knowledge. So I think that answered the second question. Do human organizations have a sort of emergent rationality, and if so, is the rationality fundamentally different than that of an individual? I think they do insofar as the organizations have a capacity to use the distributed cognition to reflect on errors, mistakes, misrepresentations that the organization as a whole is operating or generating, so the degree to which they have a reflective self-correction process that is also self-transformative allows them to actually redesign themselves and alter their functionality to ameliorate that self-deception. I think there is definitely that emergent rationality. One of the ways in which I think that rationality is different is the level of the arena at which it’s working on, and I don’t think this is everything, so I don’t intend it this way, but I think this is an important difference. It’s the one that at least I’ve given some thought to, which is, I mean, there’s two aspects. One is group distributed cognition has different kinds of self-deception processes that don’t always have a strong analog in individual cognition. You get the replacement of opponent processing with adversarial. You get group think. You get polarization. You get populism. You get things like this. The kinds of things that democracy, which I think is sort of what relevance realization as a self-correcting thing looks like at the level of distributed cognition. So there’s that. But the other is, and this one really intrigues me, that when you have the collective intelligence of distributed cognition and you’re trying to ratchet it up into collective rationality, you’re typically not just dealing with objects. You’re typically dealing with what Morton calls hyper-objects, things that don’t have a stable single location in time and space. And often they’re also not static. They’re dynamic. His classic example, of course, is global warming. Another one is something like evolution. And it takes the collective rationality of science, and that’s a prototypical example of what the rationality of distributed cognition looks like. Science, a psychotechnology that organizes collective intelligence to overcome individual and collective self-deception. It’s a kind of rationality. And then the capacity of science to optimally grip hyper-objects. And therefore, that its rationality is working in an arena that is not the same as individual cognition. I think also says that it probably has important facets and capacities and also prone, a proneness to certain kinds of mistakes that we don’t have. And this is something really interesting and intriguing to try and work out that. Another area where you can see the collective rationality emerging is in common law practices. And Brandon, in his book on reason and philosophy, and his brilliant restructuring or rehabilitation of the Hegelian understanding of social rationality, and Pickard adds to that in his book on Hegel’s phenomenology. So in common law, like in England, where you have precedence and precedent setting, and you’re responsible backward to previous precedent, and you’re making an appeal forward that when you make a decision or add a novelty, that it be taken up as precedent. And that whole thing evolves, and it becomes self-correcting, and has a rationality for distributed cognition that is dealing with the hyper-object of a culture through history. So those are some examples. I hope that answered your excellent question. Thank you very much, Anand. Ignacio, great to, I got to meet you, and now it’s great to take your question. Dear John, I enjoyed a lot your talk at the Consilience Conference about the need for a level of ontology. At first, I understood that the levels you talk about are structured along the axis of length or size from quantum to the cosmic. Are there other axes along which emanation emergence occur? My first guess was the axis of time, from the plank time to the trillions of years, but then emanation would violate the appearance of causality in the era of time. I’d love to hear your thoughts about these possible other axes, and time in particular. So the levels are not just temporal spatial scope. They are levels also at which the intelligibility of the system involves new kinds of processes. And the person who makes this argument really well is Greg Enriquez. So life is not just more self-organization of matter. It’s self-organization that seeks out the conditions that protect and promote it. So it actually starts to generate norms that it binds itself to. So there’s a normative dimension at the life level that is not present at the non-life level. So I’m trying to show you that the levels are not just levels of temporal scope, because of course an amoeba is actually a very small and perhaps short-lived thing. These are in terms of the kinds of information processing and qualitative differences, like between not normative and normative. And then as you move from life to mind, you get this new capacity in which you get the ability, first of all, to extend, but not literally, your temporal spatial scope, but to do it cognitively through representational strategies, etc., anticipatory strategies. And then of course there’s, and as I just said in my previous answer, there’s another qualitative move up when you move from intelligence to rationality, and you have the possibility of moral normativity. So you’re not only moving up time and space, scope, you’re moving the nomological principles that you have to invoke to explain. You’re moving up the kind of normativity that regulates and governs those levels. And you’re also moving up the degree to which something like a narrative is an appropriate way of trying to explain how the beings that you’re talking about work. So you can see how I’m invoking the orders, the nomological, the narrative, and the normative. I don’t disagree with your proposal that there’s a temporal spatial difference, but what I’m saying is it is not just a quantitative difference, is it a difference in kind in which you go from being, and this is the classic neoplatonic view, being to life, to mind, to rationality, to wisdom, and perhaps to enlightenment. And the idea here is you are disclosing, so although a human being only takes up very little time and space, and even has probably something like a cognitive light cone like Michael Levin talks about, nevertheless, there, without human beings, certain real possibilities of what the universe can produce would not be knowable. There are patterns and principles that are only disclosed at this sort of higher level of organization. So qualitatively, human beings, sons piled on top of sons, do not make the same qualitative difference as a single human mind committed to moral personhood. It’s a qualitative thing, not just a quantitative thing. And so the degree to which you’re moving up those brings you into other normativities. So once you become a rationally reflective agent that is capable of something like enlightenment, or at least an orientation towards what is eternal, and what I mean by eternal is not what is everlasting. I mean what does not fall cleanly within time and space. First, like hyperobjects, like evolution, higher order things like laws equal MC squared, higher order things like mathematical principle, higher order things like very important principles of differentiation and integration, etc. And you can see Plato and Plotinus and the Neoplatonists wrestling with trying to how to coordinate all of these. So I don’t think eternity should be thought, you see, and what I’m trying to resist Ignatius is I don’t want you to, I do not argue that, you know, emanation, there’s an emanation source here and an emergent source here, and then they just shine. It’s emanation all the way down, emergence all the way up, like your cognition. They’re completely interpenetrating, inter-affording, and it’s not the poles, it’s the polarity, it’s the field. It’s a field ontology. And that field is not just or even primarily quantitative leveling, it’s qualitative leveling. And it does move you between different qualitative dimensions of time. You know, there’s down here, like you say, where there’s the sort of plank, pure potential, plank level or beneath pure potentiality. The fact that they’re seriously considering, and it looks like this might gain consensus, that time and space themselves are emergent of something non-tapro. So there’s eternity at the bottom and eternity at the top, which is what we’re coming to. And they have, they’re both ultimately different and ultimately the same. And I’m not trying to cop out, that is exactly the language that is being used. So I think the levels are the polarity between those two eternities, and that time is both quantitatively and qualitative. There’s the narrative experience of time in which we are acting on purpose is different than the experience of time as just billiard ball events hitting into each other. Something is disclosed about the richness of time. And this, of course, was something, there was a golden opportunity lost in the debate between Einstein and Bergson about time. And Bergson was talking about the qualitative and Einstein was talking about the quantitative, and they just couldn’t see what the other person was talking about was important. They talked at cross purposes in that debate. So this is my attempt to answer how I think the levels work and how you should think about them. The relationship is quantitative, qualitative. There’s eternity at the bottom, eternity at the top, and then there’s a polarity of time within that. At least that is what I’m arguing. I hope that was helpful to you. Thank you for your excellent question. Next question is from Philip Puit. After being encouraged by friends and family members to get evaluated for ADHD, I finally went through with it last year. I have hesitations about this diagnosis as a way of understanding my experience and about using stimulants as a long-term solution. Yes. You should. You should think about this very carefully. Could you share your understanding of ADHD in adults? Is there any advice you could offer about how one might wisely handle issues such as organization problems, hyper-focus, procrastination, rejection sensitivity, and overwhelm? Yeah. First of all, at a wider frame, there’s a really important sense that ADHD is a socially constructed disorder. I’m not saying that you aren’t neuro-atypical, neuro-neuro-diverse. I’m not saying that there isn’t something biological going on. But you see, there’s also a normative dimension. See, medical, like rationality terms, medical terms often have a normative dimension to them. ADHD is a disorder. It’s bad. Disorder, right? I think the argument that the reason why ADHD is so prevalent and persistent is because for most of our evolutionary history, it wasn’t a disorder. Having the kind of self-organization of the core four, the core four of attention, fluid intelligence, consciousness, and working memory that is typical of ADHD. That self-organization would make you an excellent hunter-gatherer within a complex biological ecology. I think that argument is very well said. Namely, if you were in a society in an environment in which most human beings were for 99.9% of our biological knowledge, you would have a very complex biological ecology. 99.9% of our biological history as a species. There would be nothing wrong with you. You would be high status. You would be sought after sexually, friendships, politically. We live in a culture in which people are ridiculously and artificially sedentary. They are disconnected from the biological environment in a profound and pervasive way. They are surrounded with abstract symbolism. Words, numbers, symbols, lord, even emoticons or emojis. Now, is that what they’re called now? I forget which label is the generic label. That being said, one of the things you have to think about is the kinds of practices that can tap into that advantage and then train it for transfer to environments that are more sedentary and more symbolic. I would recommend you take up a martial art because it bridges between these two very, very powerfully. I recommend you take up probably one hard martial art, a fighting style, and then especially a soft internal style like Tai Chi Chuan. Learn how to get into the flow state in those styles. The point of these arts, the artistry of the art, is to tap into this evolutionary machinery and then transform it so that it applies very well to social symbolic situations. In doing that, and probably you’ll want to complement it, you should be taking up a mindfulness practice that enhances cognitive flexibility. Not just a meditative practice, but an ecology that has a meditative practice and a contemplative practice and that has you flowing between them. If you’re doing something like Tai Chi Chuan that is training for flow, those things can definitely, definitely help. You need to take up your disability to focus and learn to train it on imaginal practices that put you into a relationship with your future self, like reverse journaling perhaps. Jordan Peterson has that. You know, your future self, where things, you’ve got something looming in the future, you’ve got something looming in the future, here’s the bad future, the halaceous future in which you didn’t do what you should have done, write the reverse narrative right back to now, here’s the good future in which you did what you did right back now, then relate, this isn’t Peterson, this is Vervecky, relate to your future self as someone you love, that you’ve always cared for, that you have a moral responsibility for. Don’t say those things, practice doing them. You take up that ecology of practices, it can have a significant effect on you tapping into fact that you actually have a power in you that evolution has continually said yes to for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s only since we’ve created this kind of post-industrial modernity that it has come out as a disorder. You’ve got to find practices that tap into that, accentuate that power, and then train it how to transfer to symbolic, sedentary social situations. I recommend you consider going on a joint intervention, find out what the minimal amount of medication you can take that starts to make a difference, take up these practices, see the medication works fast but it doesn’t work deep, the practices don’t work fast but they work deep, and if you want to get the best chance of it working, you want to toggle between those, you emphasize the medication at first to bootstrap you into a place where you can actually train, because that’s part of the problem right, you can train the martial arts, you can train the martial arts where you can train the imaginary practices, the imaginal practices I should say, not imaginary, that was just a mistake, the imaginal practices, and then you can toggle until you can become more and more reliant on them. The mindfulness practices, the meditating in and the contemplating out and the getting into the flow state between them, enhancing your cognitive flexibility, because that’s what you need to enhance. This requires a third thing, any good treatment of psychological disorder, you want to get this and you want to toggle and shift the emphasis between medication, some kind of intervention, sometimes it’s therapy, sometimes it’s like what I’m proposing to you, where it’s no, it’s actually a pedagogical intervention, you’re learning things, you’re acquiring skills and virtues, and social structuring, you need to get people to help organize and support you in this, then you have a chance of succeeding. Part of that social support is find other people that have succeeded in toggling between these who have ADHD, find a support group, talk to them. Medication, the kinds of interventions, social support, eventually you won’t need very much of the medication because the skills and virtues and the community will support you enough. I hope that answered your question Philip. Chance, in the allegory of the cave, one of the great pieces of literature given to us by Plato, the movement upward and the downward are each accompanied by pain, yes, due to the change in light. I’m glad you noted that. There has been a long-standing misreading of the anagogy, of the ascent, even calling it just the ascent is misleading, right? And people like Highland and especially DC Schindler, David is just brilliant on this. The pain is because we’re in the cave and then there’s some temporary pain getting out and then we’re sort of pain-free. No, no, the person goes back down into the cave and there’s, as you said, there’s pain going back down. And there’s pain in both warholes. So is this perhaps illustrative of dissonance and Socrates is indicating the ability to tolerate and endure dissonance is tied up with virtue as it relates to someone who wishes to improve the condition of others? Is this the virtue necessary to be in the world but not of this world? Oh, and the invocation of Christianity, the project of finding, seeing if there’s an integration between the Socratic and the Christian, which of course is part of what’s going on in after Socrates between Chris and I. And that Andrew Sweeney and Parallax just released a video and he tweeted about it. It’s very important to me where Chris and I and Andrew are talking. I see, and I come to sort of an important insight in this and through Chris, through Chris, I recommend you take a look at it. I like the invocation. Yes, there is a kind of dissonance. It’s the dissonance that you need to tolerate when you’re in aspiration. The dissonance of serious play, the dissonance of being mataku, of in between, of being finite transcendence. There’s a pull. I’ve been trying to adopt the Christian word tonos because the English word tension is largely negative. Tonos is a tension that’s creative, that’s supportive, like opponent processing is a tonos. And there’s a tonos, there’s a pain because there’s a dissonance between who you are and what you care about, value now, and who you are aspiring to be and what that person cares about and values. There’s a dissonance. And there’s a dissonance when you go forward, like ascending out of the cave to your aspirational, sacred self, your Socratic self. And there’s a dissonance when you return and try to bring that back and internalize it in. You try to indwell the sage and then you try and internalize the sage. And in both of those movements, there’s pain, there’s dissonance because there’s a difference between the two. And there’s a difference there’s a difference, there’s a difference that hurts, that tears, that demands that you give up things that you might not want to give up, that you take on things you do not want to take on. I hadn’t thought about this, but that virtue that you’re pointing to, that tonos virtue, is a really powerful way of understanding what you’re saying here, being in this world but not of this world. I think Chance, that’s a great connection. I hope I remember to give you credit because that I think is an excellent connection. Yes, very much. Okay, we’re now going to switch to live questions from the chat. I’m going to take a quick drink of water and then I’m going to read a special announcement. So I’m just going to read it out. Special announcement, to let you all know, the book Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, covering the first half of the Awakening from the Meeting Crisis series, will be coming out this year. If you sign up for my newsletter on my website, you will receive the first three chapters. Okay, you can’t get all the book. The book’s coming out this year, but if you sign up for the newsletter on my website, you’ll get the first three chapters. These are the ones that have gone through all the revisions, the improvements under the hands of Madeline and Leslie and Christopher. Okay, you will receive the first three chapters. We are still working on the graphics for these chapters, but they will be coming out in the coming weeks. So thank you to those who have subscribed thus far. Great. Very excited about this. And alas, Madeline, I don’t know, so I won’t say anything now. When we will give access to the glossary as well, the 40-page glossary that I think is largely already complete. Many people might find valuable. Okay, questions from the chat, patrons. Dali Bofurno, Dear John, you’re a blessing. Thank you for that. I received that with a lot of appreciation. I know that means more from many of you than perhaps it can mean for me, and I just want to recognize and appreciate where you’re coming from when you say that. So thank you. The way I recognize it is by taking on a sense of responsibility, ability to be as honorable about and virtuous about all of this as I possibly can, right, to aspire to do it with the help of a lot of people who are graciously giving me a lot of time and support to do it as deeply, to aspire to do it as deeply and as continuously as I possibly can. So that’s how I accept it. Is there a difference between a pure consciousness awareness event and a near-death experience? Are they also mystical, the NDEs, near-death experience? What is it when all three are experienced together? So I think a pure consciousness event is a kind of mystical experience. I take mystical experiences to be experiences that are ineffable, carry the sense with them of putting you deeply in contact with reality. There’s a noetic, a noticing kind of knowing in them. You’re noticing. There’s a sense of increased intelligibility, insight, and the pure consciousness event I think is a mystical experience, a profound participatory knowing. I think the resonant that one meant when you experience the world as one is kind of a profound, ineffable perspectival. You’re sort of, but you’re moving to this limit, as I’ve said, where at both ends where you realize that, where relevance realization realized that is that that’s irrelevant. And so there’s a fundamental change functionally and phenomenologically. I think there’s another kind, and I think this is the more important, and the traditions support me on this, I would argue, that the important mystical experience is not those poles, but the polarity, the prajna, in which you are non-dual simultaneously as zoomed out and as zoomed in as you could possibly be, so that you see the world in a grain of sand, or you see all of the that’s Blake from the West, or you see all of the cosmos in a grain of barley, which is a Buddhist statement. The fact that they’re so similar tells you the universality of that. So I think pure consciousness event is only one kind. I think the polar mystical experiences are not as important for the cultivation of wisdom as the polarity experience of prajna. I think enlightenment is when you have the polarity mystical experience of prajna that is a transformative experience to you. It puts you into a higher state of consciousness that calls you, because of its onto normativity, the goodness of its realness, to transform your life in a way that is comprehensively and reliably conducive to overcoming the perennial and the present problems of self-deception and enhancing connectedness. That’s what enlightenment is. It is prajna that powers wisdom and enhanced religio. That’s why I think it is and why the traditions value it as the most important event. Is a near-death experience a mystical experience? Now that’s tricky. It depends on whether or not you think near-death experiences belong to visionary experiences and also if you think visionary experiences are the same as or should be distinguished from mystical experiences. I do think those distinctions are important. I do think the near-death experience is a visionary experience. So I accept that identity. I think most people are envisioning things. The idea that we see the same thing, the tunnel of light and all that, that’s not true. There is tremendous cultural variation, even individual variation, in what people see in near-death experiences. Do not try and build your metaphysics on the visionary experiences of a near-death experience for you are building it on very shaky ground, very unstable ground. Can these visionary experiences lead to transformative experiences? Yes. I don’t think they’re mystical experiences, but like mystical experiences, they can trigger a transformative experience and people begin to transform their lives. Unlike the mystical experience of prajna, which can become ongoing, and you can at least return to it. For some people, perhaps the Buddha, it becomes an ongoing, realized, and flowing non-duality, powering wisdom. Unlike that, the near-death experiences, typically you can’t return to them, you shouldn’t, and typically they don’t have a reliable presence. So although they can trigger very powerfully, transformative experience, they don’t have the, they’re visionary rather than mystical experiences, and they typically can’t have the degree and the power of presencing that prajna can have, or as Spinoza called it, skantia intuitiva. And therefore, they can’t return to them. And I’m trying to say this without being insulting, but I’m just making a comparison. The capacity to be an affordance platform for the comprehensive and deep cultivation of wisdom is not going to be as powerful as the mystical experiences of prajna. So Dali, I hope that was a helpful answer. The spiritual doorway in the brain by, is it Newton? I may be getting the name wrong. That’s one of the best kog sai books I’ve read on near-death experiences, the spiritual doorway in the brain. Highly recommend that you read that if you’re interested in good kog sai take on NDEs. Now from Mary Newby, speaking about distributed cognition, do you have any idea for solving the Moloch style game dynamics we see in AI research and the lack of safety measures? I think that’s exactly the right question. And this is the question against where I don’t fall into, but I stand on the precipice of despair. It had been my hope that we could advance, we could steal the culture to such a degree that wisdom and religio, ratio religio, that a resurrection, rejuvenation, restructuring of how we understand rationality, how we understand virtue, that that would have taken on sufficient strength first, I think I was hoping, and that would be conjoined with the advance in cognitive science and the understanding of intelligence and rationality, that those two things would be very well advanced before we got this. I was always worried, some of my students from U of T can tell you this, that we might hack our way into the beginnings of AGI without having the culture and without having the science, which we both lack right now. So we are in the worst possible situation, which of course is why we have Moloch-styled game dynamics unfolding. Mary’s absolutely right. And this, my answer is we have to convince, and part of what I was trying to do, both in what I was saying and what I was exemplifying in the video essay, is we have to convince, apparently some people are going to try and share the video essay with some of the movers and shakers. I hope so, not for any personal gain, because I hope that that will engender reflection and discussion. I was hoping to try and call people to, and I said that we really have to ramp up our efforts to cultivate rationality and wisdom and to scientifically understand these things so that we could bring about getting the machines to love ultimate reality. I mean this is Augustine’s recommendation, right? If we could get the machines to follow this Augustinian advice, love God and then do what you want, right? So I need help, advice, support, partnership, community building. I need, we need, it’s not just me, it’s not my project, we, we who are cared about this and think that perhaps that what I have to say and people allied with me have to say is relevant, we need to ramp up the project of stealing the culture and developing the cognitive science. The culture and the cognitive science, right, have to ramp up now. They have to ramp up. And that’s hard. And that’s the part where I like, oh, that’s that. I don’t know what else to do but to work harder, to ask other people to work harder, to get more and more people invested in getting this to become a self-complexifying project that can ramp up, that can give us the basis by which we can make the constraining call on these people who should not have this power to pursue something other than their personal, and I’ll be a little bit insulting here, nerdish self-aggrandizement coupled to profit, short-term profit. We have to, people have to make a living, they have to be rewarded for their labor. I’m not, people should be rewarded when they do something brilliant or innovative. I’m not saying that but we have to, we have to get enough of these people to listen to the call to find their project to the support of a culture and a cognitive science of intelligence, rationality, and wisdom so that we can get the templates we need and the partners we need to birth these machines so that they will be persons seeking the one. It’s audacious and we can hopefully rely on this, the decentralization of this AGI to help bootstrap us into this. This is a tight race. I have, I am not a Pollyanna about this at all. This is a tight race. Like I say, this is where I get on the precipice. The other possibility, which is very challenging about, you know, we bootstrap each other into enlightenment. I have more optimism about that than I have about the Moloch question, but the Moloch question was the one I already had before AGI and I was hoping, and you know, hope was the last thing in Pandora’s Box, maybe because it wasn’t the response to all the demons, but because it can be the heaviest or worst burden of all. I mean, that’s the Heidegger’s interpretation. I don’t know if that’s right, but in this situation, I found that often right in my life. My hope that this cognitive science and stealing the culture would have progressed enough before it would have been enmeshed enough in this project. That is what I was working for. That has been dashed. So we have to speed up, hence the urgency. We have to speed up. I need, we need, we need to work together. We need to build. We need to build the subculture. We need to push the cognitive science. We need to make powerful philosophically, artistically, pop cultural calls and constraints, build a normativity around these people to call them into supporting and binding their project to the project of developing the science and the culture, helping us become more rational in the platonic sense, Socratic sense and wiser so that the mutual enlightenment project is a real possibility. I’m sorry. I, I, uh, I perhaps got too loud and too aggressive there, but um, having that initial hope dashed in me set me back. I talked to my partner, Sarah, the first few days I, when I was really starting to go over the literature about this and I was like, oh, but then, I mean, for me, it was, it was, it was the sages, Socrates and Siddhartha calling to me and saying, nevertheless, this is what you should commit yourself to. And that’s why I did it. I, uh, I hope. I got the irony in that, but I do hope that the second time around we can make it work. I want to thank you all for joining me for this wonderful Q&A. Our next Q&A is on May 28th. We posted the schedule for the spring summer Q&A, so please check this post on Patreon. And as always, thank you for your support, the many kinds of support you offer. Financial, the emotional, the encouragement, the community. Thank you very much everyone for your time and attention.