Digital ID and Control ｜ with Dr. Paula Boddington (a9VeKqd6szA)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=a9VeKqd6szA

The idea that Elon Musk will bring back free speech to Twitter, like just frame it that way. Elon Musk is not going to bring back absolute free speech to Twitter. That’s not going to happen because just the fact that you have to create hierarchies in the manner in which information is displayed means that whatever you think free speech is, it can’t completely exist because you have to prioritize. You can’t get the flood of all Twitter at once in your face. It’s not possible that that happens. So there has to be a kind of prioritization. Therefore, that prioritization is based on a hierarchy of values and that hierarchy of values will appear in the way in which information is displayed to you. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Because, I mean, who can possibly be well at this weird time? I think it’s probably best in some ways not to think about it too much. In other words, I am fine. Yeah, I know to me. I guess we’re fine as much as is possible. I think like you, I’ve been trying to disconnect a little bit and try to be focused on closer things just because at some point it starts ripping you apart. There’s not much you can do about the big story. You can talk about it a bit, but if you obsess on it too much, then you can really fall into despair because there’s not much you can do. Yeah, you can fall into despair and you can also start thinking the most ridiculous things because there are so many people who are trying to find out exactly what’s going on. How could you even know exactly what’s going on? Yeah, because you have a sense that things are going on. We have this sense that things are happening and that there’s all these, you can see that there’s things happening, that there’s directions being taken, but it’s all very ambiguous and none of it is communicated clearly or it’s communicated through weird secondary means and stuff. It’s hard to really, yeah, anyways. In any case, I think that in so far as there are things happening with control and tech and all the rest of it, one of the great things to do against that is to do stuff locally and face to face and person to person. That’s one of the ways of resisting it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, creating resilience by having real networks of people that you are connected to and that for sure, that seems to me definitely to be the only thing that you can really do. But it’s hard because at some point, I’m thinking, okay, I need to move away from the digital space just because it’s all kind of happening through the digital space. But then if you do that, I don’t know, then the digital space also offers reach, which it really does. It really offers reach and the capacity to communicate ideas. And so you think if I do that, then it also has a cost, which is, yeah, which is then your ideas don’t get out there and then you’re not part of the conversation anymore. So it’s difficult decisions to make. Yeah, it’s difficult, but in a sense, it’s kind of like medicine. It’s like the way that medicine is also poison. So it’s a matter of using it wisely, I think, rather than, you know, because you can use technology. You can listen to idiotic TikTok videos and Twitter, or you can listen to sort of documentaries from things you’ve never heard about and talk to people on the other side of the world. Yeah, exactly. And you can network with people in a way that is not possible in the physical space. It’s limited and you have to be careful not to take it for what it’s not, but it has a certain level of reality, which can be pretty powerful too. I do think it needs to be balanced. I think it just needs to be balanced by material reality, as well as just seeing people in person. And I think a lot of people are doing that, actually. I think a lot of people are more doing crafts, you know, learning woodwork, just get fed up with living totally in their mangled heads. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So I think that what I wanted, I really enjoyed you sent me a message about agency. And I think that it would be really interesting to go into that in terms of, you know, my discussion with John Brevecky and also the question of how beings stack up and how they exist at different levels. And so maybe you can, if you want, you could give a sense of what you were talking about in terms of agency and we could start from there. I think that’d be really interesting. All right. Okay. I’ll try and remember now. I’ll have to try to remember because I thought we’re going to be talking about digital ID. Well, let’s talk about digital ID. If you think we, is that what you’d rather talk about? Would you rather talk about? Whatever. I’ll try and remember what I said about. Okay. So then we could talk about digital ID then. That’s totally fine. That’s totally fine. We could talk about the agency as well, because I could just, I could just kind of try and find out, can I just read quickly skim through? You mentioned that agency, that even higher level agency, does it necessarily require consciousness and that it, to a certain extent, consciousness is that most of the things we do with agency actually require, don’t require consciousness to kind of seep into the things you’re doing. So, right. You’re going downstairs skills as you master a skill, you actually become less and less conscious of that skill. And so I really thought that was a really great point because it can also help us understand the fall and the relationship of like the notion that knowledge of the specifics, is it necessarily always, it’s not necessarily a good, it can actually be a danger because you’re actually falling into the lower tiers. Whereas as you, as you join them together, you can be moving up in the world and you become less, you can become something like super conscious. So there could be, there’s a sense in which there is a super consciousness, which is not the same as unconscious in the sense of ignorance and just not knowing what you’re doing. Cause that’s also real, that also exists. Like let’s say the state before you learn a skill, you’re not aware of it and you can’t discern, you can’t discern difference. You can’t know what’s relevant and what’s irrelevant. And then you learn the skill and then you reach a point where those points kind of fuse together into a state of super consciousness where you actually now are no longer conscious of the distinction, you just engage with them. And so I think that that’s a really interesting idea. Yeah, so yeah, that’s what I was thinking about because in terms of what you’re talking about with John, you came across a point where you were worried about the notion of moral responsibility, that could you be responsible for something if you weren’t conscious of it? But of course you can be. In fact, when we praise, it’s easier to see it in terms of when we praise somebody for their skill, you know, a concert pianist isn’t going to be thinking, you know, consciously remembering the scales and where to put each finger, you would just be unable to do it. And I presume like when you’re doing your carving, your stuff that you had to learn, that you’re no longer, you just do it automatically, I should imagine. Yeah. And there’s something, there’s a sense in which like you could see that in the positive where you accumulate a skill and then you become unconscious of it. But you could also see it as a habit sometimes, like a bad habit, that at first you engage with consciously and then slowly it becomes part of your being. And then, you know, you’re not, let’s say you’re not conscious of the nastiness you’re spreading sometimes. You’re actually unconscious of it because it’s been completely assimilated to your being. Yes. So then the judgment of whether or not, you know, whether or not you’re responsible for that is going to depend upon so much, so much as how you got there, how you developed it, how you fell into it and what the consciousness, what self-consciousness you had as you were going, what you were actually trying to aim towards. So if you’re actually aiming towards the good, then you would incorporate things. But if you’re developing those bad habits that presumably you weren’t aiming towards, you weren’t. But it’s interesting because one of the things that we’ve seen, like in terms of narrative in the past few generations, is the idea that all the bad stuff that you have as a result of, you know, let’s say your parents, like your parents were a certain way and then you’ve accumulated these patterns and now you’re repeating the pattern. So it’s like my mother’s fault, you know, I’m mean to my kids and it’s my mother’s, my parents’ fault basically. Yes, yes, yes. Do you know about Philip Larkin poem? No. Oh right, it’s, you know Philip Larkin is this really famous 20th century British poet who always had the most miserable poems and the poem actually contains an Anglo-Saxon word, but it’s like they eff you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to but they do, they fill you with the faults they had and add a few more just for you. And so it’s that kind of idea. Yeah, so you can really see how the problem of agency is there even in the question like our modern pop psychology and the way we kind of understand ourselves. We have a sense in which we can actually do bad things and not be responsible and say it’s my parents’ fault basically. Yes. And so how do we then, how do you see the question of consciousness in terms of, or how do you see the relationship of agencies at different levels? Like have you thought about that in terms of the notion of personal agency but then the sub-personal agency and then transpersonal agency in terms of larger beings like teams or families or sports or nations? Well, yeah, I mean that’s a really interesting question but you’d have to, in order for it to work as a team you’d have to have some kind of shared goal, wouldn’t you? And some awareness of where you were in the team. But that can actually happen, it can actually happen through, so through training and through deliberately doing stuff like for example in an orchestra, in an orchestra you’re aiming to, or in a choir, in a choir you could sing as a soloist but if you’re singing in a choir your aim is to blend in with a choir, your aim is not to sort of stand out unless you’re a soloist. And if you’re playing in an orchestra your aim is to make your sound, you know, so if you’re playing second flute in the flute section your aim is to make your sound blend in with the first flute and with all the rest of the orchestra. So that would have to be done, that’s a huge amount of skill that would have to be aimed towards a goal that you’re all trying to achieve. But it can actually happen kind of spontaneously. Can I tell you a story about a time when I caught a thief in Amsterdam, like it was absolutely, this was absolutely fantastic, it was like I’ve got a friend who lives in Amsterdam, I’d gone to visit her for the weekend and we’d like gone out, we’d gone out on the town various places, which I hadn’t done for such a long time because I’d been at home with kids so we’d kind of forget where you were and we were walking along in the middle of Amsterdam and there was a group of young men just overtook us and as they overtook us one of them just turned around and glanced back at me and I knew instantly, like he gave me the evil eye basically, I knew instantly he’s got my purse, I’d even checked in my pocket and he’d snatched my purse and my friend and I we had been cycling so we were wheeling bikes along and we just acted as if we’d been training for years so we just scooted on our bikes, she went ahead of him and caught, because he was on foot and caught him like that and I went behind like that and we tracked him against the wall with our bikes and he was absolutely petrified and threw my purse away and ran off but it was a really fantastic example of, we hadn’t planned this at all, we just somehow we acted together. Yeah and it’s interesting because you can understand like anybody who’s played a sport and is good at playing team sports or has done something or like say worked in a play or something where all of a sudden everybody you actually give up your immediate agency to a certain extent or like your independent agency in order to participate in a higher form of agency there’s a weird kind of magic that happens and you can even experience it almost like as a as a form of ecstasy, it’s like a little ecstasy because you feel as if you’re participating in something bigger than you. It’s like you know when that feeling of playing, I don’t know you’re playing basketball with someone you’re used to playing with and you don’t even think about it, you’re not looking, you make the pass, you know they’re there, you don’t know why you know they’re there and then they get it and it’s like and you have this sense of like right the world is one or whatever, it’s almost like a little religious experience to have that to have that happen to you. Yes but I don’t think that means that the team itself is conscious, I don’t think it means but it means that there’s a kind of subjective awareness for team itself in the same sort of way as you know different parts of you don’t need to have you know in the same way in which you’re learning a skill that doesn’t have to be consciousness, you can have consciousness in the sense of having knowledge of what’s going on but that’s different from a sense of like a subjective awareness of what’s actually happening so I don’t think the team needs to have that subjective awareness. So the question would be like so this I mean this is what I’ve been thinking about like this is the question that I’ve had and so one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is how organizations like teams and those types of organizations organize themselves hierarchically and there’s usually there’s often a point you know like a team captain or a coach or maybe there’s a few but there’s a sense in which they can maybe become the locus of consciousness of the of the team and so it’s so the team does have a form of agency and consciousness but it’s expressed in the hierarchy through people right and so that’s why you have a leader and so the leader is actually the locus of consciousness for the for the group but it’s a so so in a sense the so that’s why I would think that the group probably does have a form of consciousness and agency but it needs to be it needs to happen in that way it’s not just automatic it has to happen in a way in which there’s a point like a leader that is directing action and is also a reference point that we all agree on in order in order for what we’re doing and so in that way we can have but like in your case that’s not what happens so for example like you said all of a sudden two people are acting in unison towards a goal and so and there’s no there’s no like there’s no person there’s just a reason the reason is what is making that body exist at that moment yes but I imagine in that kind of case because my friend our friend alive we both had we would have had a lifetime of common experiences of maybe she’s probably her person and we’re both women who who who have the experience of if you’re if you’re a woman you have a different sense of safety in the street with your man you know on average so but we would have had those and also she’s like she I mean she I was originally friends with her mother I mean the most kind of like determined amazing family so it’s also it’s also her personality but it’s you it can just happen spontaneously like that but also it can go wrong so um in terms of a team so I um I actually have just been watching um there’s a Netflix documentary about this space shuttle challenger disaster which is just like a horrible example of that not happening because there were so many different goals but the management were after so there was pressure on NASA so that was a disaster where if you remember it was in 1987 1987 I think that was supposed to be the first teacher in space so it’s the first time they had a sort of like the civilian going up in space and one of the reasons why they did that was because people were losing interest in the space shuttle so they needed to have public interest to get um you know to get the funding continued and there was they were the launch had been failed you know the launch had been delayed because of various reasons and there were all so many people in the organization warning NASA warning people in the management but the overings were going to fail there was ice on that there was ice on the shuttle when they launched it and there’s different different strands within management as to what their goals were yeah so you can see how the the let’s say the goal was not a good that could bind that together like let’s say the goal of getting good marketing a good PR uh impression let’s say that’s not the type of goal that can bind a space shuttle team in order to succeed so if it had been if it is bound by a better by a better good then then all those things would not have happened like they wouldn’t they would not have yeah yeah that way yeah I mean I mean there’s another element of that is the element of element of spectacle but also because of because the children involved it’s in a sense it’s reverse of what should have happened because because there were children watching like there were millions of American school children watching yeah launch her school her pupils at the launch and and her children she had no but school teachers obviously all the astronauts had fat had families but they wouldn’t have had millions of children watching so you would have thought they should have had higher standards of safety but it led to from having lower standards like distracted like oh it’s for the kiddies the kids will find it fun and that’s that’s I’ve noticed that kind of thing happens happens a lot actually in terms of luring us to do things it’s a bit sort of you know a bit it’s a real distraction actually yeah and there’s also like we talk about how it can go wrong there’s also ways it can go wrong when it can go too well right where this is of course the cult or the you know or the the let’s say the the tyrannical the possibility of a tyrannical leader that sucks up the people so much into a higher cause that they cease to almost exist as individuals and they just become they just become nodes for this this pattern and so then it can spiral because it you know because there is like a real ecstasy in participating in something bigger than you like that’s a real thing and so you can weaponize that towards towards bad towards evils if you fewer if you’re capable like if you’re a charming cult leader you can drag people in and make them really feel that sense and it’s it’s and it’s real it’s not an illusion it’s it’s really happening but then they then they can lead to uh there’s a there’s a movie a crazy horror movie what it’s called midsummer that a24 put out uh like a few years ago where they explore the problem of a basically a cult that that they the individuals almost cease to exist like they someone gets hurt everybody feels it like there’s a sympathy all through uh and then it draws them in so much but then there’s also obviously like this crazy dark side to it which is that you know they end up killing all these strangers and they have to part they have to do these these these types of uh of murders in order to cohere the group together um but you can see like in in any we can see it from in hindsight when we look at movements like mao’s uh mao’s cultural revolution for example yeah i don’t think i think that could be happening at the same time within an organization so that kind of that kind of thing could have been happening i’d say within within nasa with people who’ve identified so much of the organization and it’s one of the things i find really worrying about a lot of the big tech giants like places like google and so on when they just people are just they’re like nurtured like babies like they their whole lives are on site everything’s laid on for them um so that you you’re you can really get some and one of the one of the main findings that social psychologists who look at the ways in which people can make disastrously wrong decisions or things can look evil can come out of good intention is that you should make certain you’ve got more than one social reference group so that if you know if you go to work but you also belong to a church or it could even be like a bridge club or anything differently no you’re right i this is something that i’ve been talking about recently too which is that the the buffer against this type of excess is a fractal identity system so the idea is that a real healthy traditional society would have a fractal levels of identity where like you said you you have your family you have clubs you have different clubs that are based on different things you can maybe have a sports club or a something that celebrates some aspect of your even if it is your nation or whatever but you know you have the what is it in in quebec they had like the daughters of isabelle and the knights of columbus but then they also had you know the so you had all these different like organizations and they would scale up in a way that that was fractal so the the nation doesn’t compete with these lower levels they just exist at lower levels and they actually build on each other in order to succeed but what you can see in the the kind of tyrannical single identity problem is how it wants to actually eliminate the intermediary uh let’s say allegiances and mao’s cultural revolution is actually a great example of that where mao actually tried to eliminate all intermediary allegiances you know to that as superstitious in order to bind everybody to one central one which was the state yeah so one of the things you need for that is actually um a block on communication and on knowledge so for example you might get like a woman’s group within a church and what happens is that they’ll be moaning about how stupid they think the sermon was this week for example or you know or what that actually that kind of thing is is necessary but there is there’s there’s a block on community a block on communication so that you can you can get together and say what you really think about things or talk about things more privately but i think that’s one of the big one of the big problems with one of the big problems with the kind of thinking behind a lot of the digital stuff now it’s like an ethos but data is good information is good and then straight away equating that with communication with open communication but i think that but actually what works what works then are different pathways of knowledge and information and does that make sense in terms of no definitely i totally agree and i’m trying to see like i’m trying to one of the things it seems like so so when you have a fractal system of identities there’s a there’s certain constraints on that fractal system which are just just the fact that you live in a village you have people around you like maybe you have a club that’s actually bigger than your village but you can’t meet all the time so maybe i don’t know yeah like you’re you’re in a guild of whatever you’re a guild of people making jewelry so if you once every few years you can get together with your guild and so there’s all these limiting factors which create which actually bind the hierarchy in a normal way so you spend a lot of time with your family and so you have that private space in order to air out like you can like you said you can complain to your husband or to your wife about how bad the sermon was or whatever so you can kind of have these these fractal structures one of the things that the online space does is that because it’s the potentiality is is unbound you could say and so so right so on let’s say in in a normal like in a normal traditional world you might have someone with kooky ideas in the village and that person they’ll be kooky they’ll have weird ideas they’ll be they’ll be strange it might be a bit obsessive and so you keep an eye on them you watch them you’re careful they don’t spend too much time with your kids or whatever so there’s like a natural like system but what happens online is that that kooky person with like really crazy kooky ideas can now be connected to 10 000 other people all around the world that have those crazy kooky ideas so because of that then from those that hold the reins of power they suddenly feel the need to i’m trying to play devil’s advocate here they they they feel the need to want to stifle that because they can see that a pattern which would exist in the in the world regularly but would be constrained is now more and more unconstrained because of tech what tech offers so they have to bring down on it more control than what you would in a in a village situation yes i think that’s what’s happening because a lot of the stuff that’s happening is a solution is brought in by technology to solve the problems that technology has created technology brings itself yeah and also what happens what what generally tends to happen so technology creates problems then rides to the rescue like you know the guys with the white hats on are rescuing it they cause a problem in the first place and it’s always the individual people who get blamed so that you know the technology is designed in ways that would enable that kind of thing and then the people who are behaving like this seem to be like you know dreadful people they might they might not be all that great as people but it’s the technology that’s enabled them to do it but but but it also i mean it just happens this can happen anyway in ways in which society is becoming more more fractured you know like people who live in suburbs are very distanced and in lots of cities it’s actually also becoming fractured because there are different populations in different demographics and different population groups living kind of like almost sort of separate parallel lives um there’s i was thinking about this last week just for again something personal that i noticed which is that i live in my property’s leasehold which because i own it but it’s on land owned by the council they want to change the lease and they want to introduce a clause whereby which is a harassment clause but you’re not supposed to use an abusive or offensive language um for race sex culture or other characteristic and to kind of think this is the kind of thing which is happening in the digital space and it’s happening here as well so how much is how much are people thinking how much people kind of learning from a kind of control in the digital space and thinking we have to have it in the real world no that’s a really good point because there’s a there’s a sense in which how can i say this this is gonna this is gonna sound people are gonna find this really weird but there’s a sense in which the let’s say like abusive language for example or using kind of horrible language those are things that happen in the world like they happen and the thing is that doing that in the world can bring you can let’s say can create certain situations like you can actually impose your strength on on others if you use those types of language but it actually also creates problems for you it actually has a cost and that cost plays itself out in the world especially in a world that has more and more uh let’s say different groups interacting with each other and so it’s like you know that racist uncle it’s like oh yeah i have that racist uncle so that racist uncle you know you’re annoyed with him he’s annoying you just kind of but you still meet with them you know for thanksgiving or whatever but it’s like he’s just annoying but because of because of you’re right it’s interesting because of the online space is so pervasive and then you see these mobs and these patterns that appear then all of a sudden it’s like oh that racist uncle who’s annoying and and and offensive it’s like i want him to get fined i want him to go to jail because i can see it as part of this larger kind of pattern that’s happening in in the digital space yeah because you i mean that has been happening you know how people have been divided and things like whether you’re vaccinated or not and i mean people i mean here it’s different in different countries because in here in britain it just seems to have stopped it’s like it’s mostly over and if you tiptoe around you can just avoid having rows with people it’s just like it vanished into thin air um it’s different in different places but it could it could get it could get really unpleasant it could oh yeah it’s like this is a moment where i wish the queen would would remind the canada that we’re in the commonwealth and that you know but now that’s not what’s going on here in canada it’s like my goodness this has to stop but it’s not going to stop it’s really been weaponized where we are and and it’s been politicized all of this whole question is is really becoming a political tool and and you can actually see it play out and you can realize that right now those in power in canada have absolutely no reason to back down they have they have every reason to hold on to this because it’s to their political advantage in every way and so it’s a yeah it’s a it’s a bit of a it’s a bit of a strange time can’t the queen just sack trudeau can’t she do that she in theory she can through the the the in theory she can but it’s never going to happen that’s never going to happen no it’s never going to happen yeah no it’s never going to happen yeah so but i think i’d like to it’s funny because i didn’t think when i thought we’re going to talk about agency and then you thought we’re going to talk about digital id but it’s just super interesting that those have even in our own conversation they kind of come together so there’s a sense in which because of the digital space because of the digital space itself and what it offers and also the dangers of it it seems as if the the need for a single id like of a single identification that will encompass all of your being it seems to be pressing upon us as something which is inevitable and so we can like i i hate everything about it but i also see that i can also see that because of what the because i participate in the digital sphere i can notice that without that at some point it becomes untenable like the digital space becomes untenable without something like that so what are your thoughts about these because we have one in quebec right now where we are it’s happening right now in june the digital id project is starting in ontario in another province it’s already it already started and so we are seen as the we are seen as the forerunners right there’s a video of our of our banking association and it’s like the president of the banking association whatever a canadian banking association for the world economic forum saying like canada is going to be is going to spearhead this this single digital identity thing and it’s related to to banking of course because it’s related to security and to the problem that that online banking poses because of identification and security yeah so so is it going to be just used for banking or is it going to be just used for everything and it’s going to be compulsory well no that well of course it’s going to be compulsory but not right away right away it’s all voluntary and so it’s all voluntary but like there’s a it’s it’s it’s voluntary but it’s biometric it’s in in terms of quebec they’ve been they’ve said clearly that there’s going to be a biometric element to the digital id so you can you can see that if so there’s this is i don’t know if this is the case but i find it very interesting to notice that both both our prime minister and my premier in quebec they although they’re not using like here in quebec they’re not using the the vaccine passport anymore but they they said don’t remove it from your phone right because we might need it later right and so and so you realize that with a biometric id then all of this can will can easily become compulsory like it any other any other pandemic any other disease or anything and all of a sudden it all becomes compulsory because it’s like a perfect it’s a perfect storm where you need to control people at the entry in stores you need a digital id they scan your face or your eyes when you walk in they let you in if you’re vaccinated or not and then you just pick things up you walk out of the store and you’ve paid everything it’s like it’s perfect it’s it’s it’s but you can see how it’ll easily become compulsory with with with the with the covid or another pandemic question yeah i mean it it could it could easily become it could easily become compulsory but i mean we get um we can easily get sucked into this sort of piece by piece again again one of the things about agency there in terms of the attraction the attraction of having a digital id is being pushed forward in some circles as being it makes life so much easier online because you just have one you wouldn’t have to have all your different passwords um it would just so it’s presented to us as actually enhancing your agency of course which it actually does of course it does the reverse it’s enhancing your agency to engage with technology so the technologies the technology produces a world which in some ways obviously enables them to do lots of things but on the other hand you have to do it in the way that technology sets out exactly and it also as it becomes centralized then you’re also giving up all your agency into that centralized system and so if if let’s say 50 years ago it was really hard to turn a citizen off because their birth certificate was a piece of paper there you know their their their cards were all you know they had money in their bank account they had money it’s like it was all decentralized and so it was really hard to turn someone off as you create a centralized system then all this comes together and it then it ends up centralizing into a a government digital id then it’s like click yes of course the whole system is much more fragile both than a piece of paper because the whole thing could just the whole thing could just the whole thing could just disappear the whole thing yeah and that’s the tower of babel like that’s the problem of too big to fail too which is that as you kind of give up your your all of this kind of gets centralized into one space then it yeah but but also in many ways they overset it to themselves so for example when about vaccine passports so you have to be digital it didn’t have to be digital actually because you could have had you could have had a stamp in your passport you could just have a in the old days you just had a vaccination little card so it doesn’t have to be digital so so so but again a lot of it is just a lot of it is overselling stuff in order to justify its own existence but that happens over time but but it but it’s also it’s like it’s interesting because there’s also technology offers it offers something and so for example like if you have a centralized id system like a server like we had here like yes you have a centralized system of covid passports then the state is regulating it and the state is is is is controlling it it’s like if you have a card with like a with the date of your vaccine and the doctor’s signature yeah it’s like that could be faked very easily right it could be easily faked and so and so there’s a sensor because because technology offers us the capacity because one of the problems that happens as soon as there’s control there’s corruption right there’s no corruption if there’s no control there’s no need for corruption if there’s no control control systems bring about corruption and then the control system wants to cover for that corruption through more control and so technology offers an unlimited version of that yes like indefinite scaling of what that that that that brings about yeah because it’s going to go it’s going to it’s going to be claimed to be uncorruptible somebody will manage to hack it but it’s it’s like when you develop locks you had to become you have just become one step ahead of for for people who can crack locks it’s that’s that’s that’s what’s going to be that’s what’s going to be happening um yeah and you can feel it like it’s funny because i can i can i don’t i don’t know how to say this like you can feel it for example two-step identification has become mandatory it’s almost everywhere now you can’t almost can’t get out of it my my banking app asked me a few weeks ago if i wanted to use facial recognition to get on to the to the banking app and i was like okay well i guess i mean i knew we were there but it’s like it’s just weird to have the app tell you well you know it’s and almost hinting at you know you can put it off for a little while but you might yeah you might be able to put it off forever soon you’re gonna have to or else you’re not going to have access to the service anymore yes yeah but but of course i suppose i mean i suppose for one of the things that struck me i mean for banking i suppose it’s it’s it’s to do with the security of your of your money yeah but of course one of the reasons why your money is so insecure is because of the digital digital i actually every time i log into my account i have this free sort of fear but it’s completely empty you’re gonna get there it’s just gonna be zero yeah i know what you mean because it’s like it’s not you know if i there’s a way in which let’s say you know my money if i have it under my bed it’s locally insecure yes yeah like it but but i know like it’s there i know it’s like if someone breaks in or whatever but this this this is virtual world yes yes so who knows yeah the whole the whole system is set up to increase anxiety so even so even so even some of the some of the advantages of having a one digital id because then you don’t need to remember all the passwords is because i mean i wrote down i recently wrote all my passwords down in a book because there are so many of them there were like 300 i had 300 different passwords and but some of them they have they have ludicrously high standards for what we have for something like who who is going to sign in to some obscure academic journal and write a review on my behalf nobody’s going to do it but not but so so they’re inventing ludicrous levels of security so this like this constant state of anxiety that we’re living in is really heightened state of and and because it’s all digital you could you could just forget your passwords you could just um i suppose if it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s interesting they’re introducing the digital i mean the biometric for banking because one of the things that’s one of the things that i was thinking about because we you probably have it somewhere here but i’m not sure the ways and the first things that i introduced biometrics in were the things where the state was interested in security so passport control and and police things and for banking it was just it was more like you remembering the information it’s one of the things i’m really interested in in thinking about are the ways in which digital id is controlled in terms of the levels of information and then also the material realization because say say say take vaccine passports for example um if you think if the state say you have to have vaccine passports you think they would provide you with so when you had a vaccine certificate in the old days when you just got vaccinated you got bit of paper they gave you paper now you have to buy the phone yourself you are paying for the phone and you’re paying for the data each month in order for the state to control you it seems like it seems like a bit of a con yeah and and also that in terms of digital identity i was thinking about that a lot because the word identity is carrying so much work so it’s identity in terms of individuating you as a person which you can do like you say jonathan peugeot the canadian icon carver you know is there is there any one russian russian orthodox right i’m just joking because that’s what jordan fitosin called the russian orthodox icon carver didn’t he didn’t he say you were a former catholic atheist yeah yeah that was hilarious like it was just funny i love jordan it was funny actually that’s an interesting example because it still identifies you it’s still everybody still knew who he meant yeah exactly yeah um but but but there’s something about the the question of identity is super important i guess i mean i guess that that’s the question of the day it’s a question of of our time you know the problem of identity and the problem of identities in general and how how these work and and the excesses that our world has brought about which is on the one hand this fluidity of identity this notion that identities are fluid that we praise hybrid identities that we have all of these but there’s also a desire to totally map out and control identity at the same time those two extremes are happening at the same time and the idea for example so you would understand like in a traditional way or like i think in a mystical christian way you would understand something like you would have the notion that identity is apophatic that to a certain extent identity leads to mystery and so behind identity is something like a mystery there’s something you know it’s like christ in you you could say it that way or you could say the divine light the divine spark there’s something behind you behind all your named identities which is which is which is higher and is can be completely contained and that is actually it’s all that’s a really important part of what identity is and what it leads to but there’s a sense in which the idea of digital identity and the idea that you could have a name or a number or something which identifies you without which you cease to exist almost in practice like or that you cease to exist socially at least like you couldn’t exist socially you can’t it’s already there like you know social security numbers and all these types of of identification it’s not like this is one thing that’s happening now it’s something that’s been building up for you know for a century or more but the idea that if you don’t have this then you don’t exist socially and that’s a crazy idea well yeah i mean because there are people who live like that but one of the things that fascinates me is how identity can mean just like picking out one individual person so that’s it’s just about matter of separating one person from another which of course but of course in a sense the state has to do that in terms of like tax which is legitimate and so on and but but also identity so that’s just simply bare you know bare identification of one individual as opposed to another individual but then we use identity to mean um you know our essence or how we’re going to make ourselves or our agency or what makes us really really distinctive of filling out the filling out the individual things and that’s one of the things i was thinking about and thinking about how like you know the vaccine passports and all the rest of it are actually physically on your on person’s phone because if you have a if you have a smartphone which most people do now then it’s also the smartphone is also where you are you know looking at videos engaging with friends getting lots of feedback interacting in the world in a way which is building up your your identity in the online space connecting to friends but it’s also where which is so that’s quite that’s two two sort of you know slightly um you know not quite the same thing but all it actually physically embodied in the same device that you that you’ll carry around with you yeah but it’s collecting information about you collecting information about you all the time so there’s also the notion of a digital identity in terms of the identity that’s being constructed out of the vast trail of information that we’re leaving wherever we go yeah the digital twin and yeah and there’s a sense in which you get it you get an idea that it’s that the moving toward digital identity and even biometric measure especially is moving towards a space where your digital twin it’s like in a movie right your digital twin replaces you yes and becomes the truer self yes because it’s actually the self by which all your social interactions and social uh clout all your participation in reality that’s the one that is measured like that’s one that’s measuring all those things yes yeah i mean it if you go into different directions from here now but you know there are some people who are trying to do that trying to actually make digital twins like trying to create you know martin rothblatt is trying to make a um uh it’s got his robot bina 64 i think it’s called is trying to make an identical copy of of um i forget if martin i forget whether martin rothblatt is a man or a woman because it’s one of these people who transitioned but he’s all her wife trying to make an identity and and you get the idea that ray kurtzfile and people like that have of trying to actually upload ourselves completely get a copy of our minds and upload ourselves but we’re into yeah into the into the into the but these are narrative like it’s important i think it’s important to understand these types of events that they someone who’s doing that as a narrative crux like as a narrative point that makes you notice a pattern that’s happening more generally that is they are you are building your digital twin you’re doing it all the time we’re doing we are building a kind of digital twin uh and then then you have examples where this becomes almost like uh like a mythical ritualized version of it where someone is like building a robot and like you know like training it to be them uh and so we find that odd but it’s important to understand it rather as a marker to understand something that’s happening on a bigger on a bigger scale which is this is this is being done to you like we are building our digital twin yeah and so so a lot of our problems i think would arise when you actually start believing that all this data about you is actually you so i think that gets back to what you’re talking about a christian sense of of you know the self being that the identity being being a mystery um because because it has a causal it’s super important what you’re saying is super important because it has a causal effect on you you can imagine that this causality can be reversed and you can see little examples of that imagine like a little example of that that you can find is like the you see it in celebrities sometimes where a celebrity develops a persona and then that persona invades them yeah and then they become a caricature of themselves and they become like you know they become a caricature of their own persona and so you can see that happening in the in the world it’s the kind of thing that’s already already exists but in the digital space it’s a it’s far more it’s dangerous and it’s dangerous on a scale that’s everybody like everybody can can be colonized by their facebook instagram persona and the algorithm is doing that to you too because if you if you go and you visit certain sites then the advertisements start to reflect that digital twin and then that’s not as if it’s not as if it’s neutral that return is actually going to affect you and is going to causally transform you in a way that that will make you more of the into that twin like even you as a as a in your full in the fullness of yourself will make you more into that twin yeah i think one i think one of the ways in which that’s happening is in in terms of the ways in which a conflation between information or data and actually knowledge and understanding so the data that’s the data that’s collected is just like little little points of information which have been analyzed in various ways and you can you know you can extract meaning out of it or you can extract sometimes pseudo meaning because what’s what rocks out the data it hasn’t got any meaning at all it’s just like for say some piece of machine learning is is is putting stuff together in a way that’s sort of nonsensical but that’s not how we understand ourselves there’s a there’s a there’s a really interesting um there’s some interesting work from somebody called neil lawrence who’s professor of machine learning at cambridge and he mostly works technically in machine learning he’s got some really interesting stuff about the difference between how minds work and how artificial intelligence or machines work he’s actually got a really good ted talk on it but he’s written some stuff on it as well so he talks about what he calls the embodiment factor which is in it just to just to cut a lot of it really quickly one of the main differences between how computers process information and how we do is that he says we all have what he calls locked in syndrome so compared to computers we are more like um he uses the example of john colboby who was um who’s written a book for diving benefit and the butterfly it’s a really actually a really beautiful book actually he he had a catastrophic stroke and ended up in communicated through blinking his eye and um he said that human beings are all more like him than we are like computers because how we communicate um in terms of our brains of processing absolutely a massive amounts of information all the time if you had to think about what you can see right now and communicate to somebody else exactly everything that you could even just see right now you couldn’t do it so if somebody’s worked out in terms of information theory it would take you something like longer than the age of a universe to be able to just communicate what you’re seeing yeah what’s in just the just the complexity of the world that’s presenting itself to you and computers are computers the other way around they can communicate really really quickly so i mean what we need to be doing is using them in complementary ways but the result of that for how we think is that we have to communicate so for example from poetry through art but also because we have access to our own understanding we can know immediately so for example when um my friend and i were both chasing that thief in Amsterdam we both had immediate access to like a whole store of similar maybe similar things that have happened maybe we watched the same police films or so you know we’ve got we could instantly know she’s i can tell from what she’s doing but what she’s going to do she’s yeah she’s trying to catch him as well so yeah so the way which we communicate is we can you know communicate through poetry and so on um so so i thought that might be interesting just to and i would really recommend his TED talk actually i think it’s um it’s really interesting because he’s it’s interesting as well because a lot of the people who actually work really intensely in tech exactly the people who who are skeptical about whether or not artificial intelligence is at all like human intelligence yeah it’s very very different but this roundabout way of saying yes but emphasizing the dangers of thinking that the digital information collected about you is actually anything like what you are like because it’s missing so much it’s missing so much stuff and it’s interpreting the data in a way that’s sort of like machine readable that anybody else can access it but we access ourselves quite differently and information means and what’s information to one person is something completely different completely different it means something yeah so i’m another example but but that’s might be easy to grasp to illustrate all this um i’ve recently been looking at um i think i mentioned before i do some work with a team of people who do research on the care of patients with dementia we’ve been looking there’s lots of there’s lots of research trying to um trying to um find ways of using machine learning to help diagnose dementia and it’s interesting if they want to try to diagnose dementia earlier so some there are some teams trying to diagnose dementia like decades before the symptoms which is really really interesting because if you haven’t got any symptoms what does that mean to say you have dementia um so they’re trying to do it from really minute little uh ways in which your brain works or how in all the suggestions that you collect all the information from all your health information from every health incident you ever had information from things like your gait how you use computers how you use um if you’re connected up to the internet the things how you use technology around you all sorts of data um and then try to claim you could build up a picture this is a picture of um that you have that you now have dementia or diagnosed with dementia and just assuming this is a good thing but they haven’t actually thought that for them it’s might be interesting information for research but for a person to be told that or to be told but actually you may be functioning perfectly well in everyday life but we can tell from how you’ve aren’t this little puzzle but you’ve got the beginnings of your brain isn’t processing information quite the normal way and actually this means that you this they haven’t not necessarily thinking but this is going to mean something medical information means something to an individual it’s yeah you’re not a neutral agent that’ll just receive it won’t it’ll have a causal effect on you yeah yeah so how can you do something about it like you can do something about it if you knew that information that’d be horrible yeah it wouldn’t be horrible wouldn’t it it would be horrible it’s it’s actually uh sorry this is this is going off topic of it it’s a real example about how tech sells itself because they start off by saying we have to do this because dementia is such a terrible terrible disease in a way that nobody working in dementia care would would go on about how awful it was because people have to live with it so you’re trying to make it as livable as possible and then half the papers say we need to diagnose dementia as early as possible so that we can have treatment again treatment and the other half say we need to diagnose it as early as possible because there is no treatment and so we do you imagine but that’s a great this is a super great example to understand the problem of the digital twin or like the information twin or even like the so so think about it like you could give yourself a like a speculative example like you you could diagnose dementia in a person at 10 years old right so you have a 10 year old kid and you diagnose that when they are 75 they will have dementia and so you tell them like okay so now we know that you’re going to have dementia when you’re 75 and so if you do like an hour of this exercise you take this drug every day for the rest of your life then then you then there’s a 70 chance that when you’re 75 right you won’t have dementia so you can see like so that means that you’re going to make that person’s entire life managed by this thing and and and it’s going to it’s going to basically take up their all their resources and and it’ll be like it’s super interesting because there’s something about covid in that kind of thing too it’s like because we can then we will and we don’t understand that we don’t calculate what that what the causal effect is and what the cause is like because we can lock everybody down for two years pretty much and we can force everybody to do this and do that and and force kids to wear masks and do this we will we will do it because it will work like we will we will let’s say prevent a certain amount of people from dying from the disease and then not realizing that it has a causal effect which is beyond the disease yes yes it is it’s so often health you really have to watch it so often health which is used to to put push these technologies so not you know like even Elon Musk’s Neuralink I I don’t know if what his first what he’s really doing it but it’s a you say well it could be useful for people who are quadriplegic or right it’s always health but it’s also it’s interesting it actually gets back to the children because it’s often kind of like thinking about thinking about the children so people are persuaded of digital id online because then you could use that to make certain children can’t access pornography for example that’s one of the arguments that used but also then like in terms of covid the children were collateral damage they were they were they were just used as shields for they would use the shields for 85 year olds so it seems to be I mean I don’t know if you got any thoughts about that about what there’s something there’s something really what is it yeah what is it what’s going on what’s happening I think it’s the I think we’re I think it really is the McCloughan’s electric beast like I think that what we’re seeing is is the possibilities of technology the possibilities of of the possibilities of technologies are advancing through attention and through the poss just the capacity that it has and we are just we’re just following and so and it’s not like nobody’s you hope that most people are definitely not doing it through ill means through ill intent it’s just it’s just happening it’s like if a possibility of how can I say this it’s like if I can impose a certain stricture and it’ll and it’ll I can do it through technical means then it’ll happen and what it does is it makes that system stronger and then it just keeps happening over and over so there’s no I don’t know like I don’t have a solution for it like I don’t know exactly what the the the like in terms of the idea of sacrificing children to to to the to the elderly I did I do think that to a certain extent a lot of what the extent of the COVID measures that were happening is like there’s something about a there’s something about the last moment of the the boomer generation like the last moment of the 60s and some people get really angry that I say that but I think that there’s something about it which is which is there as well like a fear of death like a fear of death that is really pervasive and we don’t know what to do with it like we don’t know how to die and we don’t know and we don’t know we we so we we move from euthanasia to to these extreme measures and we don’t know how to manage how to manage death that’s really interesting it’s also really interesting but but trying to advance you because you have euthanasia in Canada don’t you yeah yeah so it’s advancing euthanasia and trying to extend life a kind of both the piece it’s a notion of control but one of the things that really struck that really struck me about how elderly people were treated in Britain and I’m sure it was similar in Canada was that they didn’t want them to die but they didn’t want to live either that’s right they imprisoned I know people that were imprisoned in their apartment for months yes basically could not leave could not walk out on their porch had guards at the door and they were saying this is for your protection and it’s super interesting because like there’s a local restaurant near my like a little restaurant in my house and as soon as the the strictures would would come down a little bit like they’d be full of old people and they’d be like oh don’t they know that they could get it don’t they know that they could die it’s like stop thinking they’re idiots like people live they want to live they don’t want to just be a living dead person for two years you know getting imprisoned in your like they would show I remember if you saw like they would show these these crazy videos toward the end of some of the measures where they would say a husband and a wife you know that are like 90 years old they haven’t seen each other in a year yeah and they’re like oh and now they’re celebrating because they’re they’re seeing each other again what is happening why didn’t you just let them see each other and maybe they would get it and die but you risked like this this you created this extreme pain between these two people and you told them that we’re doing this for your own safety I don’t know that that kind of stuff just drove me nuts I was like what is happening what is the story this was the same here there were couples who were in the same care home the same care home but not allowed to see each other and these are and when you’re talking about somebody in the 80s in their 80s or 90s that’s not a boomer generation they might have taken part of enormity landings liberated bergen belson rescued people from fires and then oh you can’t go to your granddaughter’s wedding in case you catch a nasty illness it’s pathetic but they’re not the boomer generation but even the boomer generation it is about a bit ironic that these are the generation who kind of like uh took ludicrous amount of drugs and rode around on motorbikes and and now they’re worried about dying now but but I think there’s there is something there is something in it about this this this this fear fear of death the fear of death and just yeah well that’s what technology is so so the technology is is ultimate like technology primarily let’s say mythologically is to put off death that’s what it is right it’s the garments of skin it’s the it’s the the it’s the the city of cain it’s the whole death at bay you know that’s what medicine is all of these things and there’s nothing wrong with that but we can understand that if we if we divorce technology from its basic primal reality which is a desire to stave off death uh through means that are taken from death to a certain extent uh then we don’t understand it and then we will struggle to understand why and be surprised that people are the transhumanists understand technology as a way for immortal life that they understand you know that it’s all about this this this desire to yeah to stave off death so as technical society increases then it’s not it’s not surprising also that fear of death increases as well and this is not like it’s not it’s not a it’s not like it just it’s not a weird thing you know we experienced this when we were in africa we experienced it so much you know you when you live with risk uh you are less afraid because you know that it can happen at any time but you just live with risk so we were living in congo we’d live in local neighborhoods and so there was always danger obviously but you would you would manage the danger you would you would live with it you would see it but the people that lived in closed off compounds completely closed off compounds they were always scared completely afraid to go out and couldn’t you know they would all of a sudden they would look outside and everything was danger and that’s what that’s also what technology does as it makes you safer it makes you more afraid there’s no there’s no way around that and so it’s that’s what we that’s also what we’re seeing that’s also what we see for the last two years yes so so that explains the sort of like all the anxiety about about safety on online and think you have to have higher and higher or higher levels of security um but so i think people think that technology is increasing their agency and it does increase it in certain ways but it’s decreasing it in other ways but if you think if you think about it but in terms of in terms of staving off fear of death would that be a kind of a way of making us see how it’s containing our agent our agency but we’re just willingly going along with it but i think i think you said a little while ago that we were just passively going along with it but in a sense we’re not because we’re sort of actively actively colluding in our own um fragmentation the way in which our notion of identity is being coming fragment fragmented and ways in which the technology is is often hacking the worst bits of us so you know in terms of like the online the social media companies have worked out that that it’s our worst um our worst emotions are the ones that are most easily riled and the ones that are most addictive like you know the ludicrous you know the ludicrous righteous indignation you can get in some having some insane spat on twitter so we don’t even know this person is yeah they’re maybe even anonymous like they don’t even know their name yeah i know it’s you’re right but there it has to do with increase so there’s also a relationship with staving off death and an increase in power and so that’s a real thing right when you if you if you stave off death and increase your power it’s like a drug obviously and that increase in power is something that can happen at a very physical level right which is that i have a gun or i have a fortified castle um but it can happen also in terms of your influence and in terms of your reputation because as i increase in power and influence then i the type of feeling that i get the type of feeling that i get from having a gun i can also have from just increasing my power of reputation and so you can understand that so you can see like if you can if you can understand that it’s related the notion of safety increase in power and but then it also leads to the fragility at the same time all of these things are happening are happening at once uh and it’s it’s hard to kind of capture analytically but you can to capture it mythologically you can see that there are many structures like that where you see this this uh this this image appear like one one of the biggest ones is the statue of daniel the statue of nebuchadnezzar in the book of daniel where you see this hierarchy of metals and this soft metal at the top and then these harder and harder metals that are more powerful and more brittle and then they end with a kind of hybrid metal at the at the bottom which is multiplicity which is fragmentation which is quantity and then but it’s also the most fragile and then the statue shatters so you can if you think of like your your online presence as something like that also like the type of influence that you have with your wife or your husband is something which is extremely qualitative yes but is very limited and then your family your your social sphere your influence in your church or whatever but then online it’s like the capacity you have to influence and to to affect others is huge but then it also has the other characteristics of being fragmented and fragile at the same time yeah so then you yourself reflected back online is fragmented and fragile so so one of the one of the things i’ve been trying to grapple with and i haven’t got i’m i’m still thinking about this very programmatically is in terms of how there’s a paradox between how the way we’re using technology in the online world is kind of like really prioritizing the self as if the self and i and i you know yourself alone with a computer or a smartphone is like the center of the world and yet our notions of self are just becoming increasingly fragmented and in some of in some of the sort of identities that are coming up it’s as if there’s a real priority to the mind or the self a sort of like isolated little like an almost like a cartesian self or a cartesian mind as if that’s got state priority over the body so the ways of you get so see there seem to be so many body modifications and so many ways of it if your if your mind doesn’t match your body you have to change your body to we can the body is just like a become a piece of technology that we we can we can just use to alter in the case you know the way in which hydra talked about the standing reserve of the world yeah your body’s standing reserve your body’s their own standing reserve so you can put a chip in it to make it easier to access everything if you want you can you know you can you can change sexes apparently you can you can have ludicrous piercings or you can just present yourself in in different ways but i was actually thinking about i was thinking about this in terms of how day cards divide because people are talking about this at the dualism but how they got was thinking about this because nobody is a card cartesian dualist anymore in the sense of day carp there was a mental substance and a physical substance nobody thinks there’s a mental substance and a physical substance but then it kind of struck me that when when i mean you probably know this but not everybody will know it when day got set down to write his discourse on the method about how he came to the you know he’s came to his car clue conclusions but the cockatoo ergo sum i think i am um he’s done it at a time when the reason why he was searching for certainty because he was living at a time where there were lots of different beliefs around and there was there was no certainty as to what to believe and he spent some time away just doing things like spending years playing cards with soldiers to try to wipe his mind clean and when he sat down to do this he isolated himself he sat alone in a stove heated room as he described it i was thinking so is that solitude connected with the way which he came to the conclusion that the source of his certainty what he can know for certain is his thinking self and and so not just the substance but the fact that this is the basis of his epistemology yeah how similar that is to the way in which people are walking along walking along not seeing the world because they’re on their phones or just alone with their computers is do you think i might have something to do with how the mind is being prioritized and i think i think you’re right i think that i think that it’s a the way it’s always i when when when when i think about the contemporary word i always have to think of it in extremes and so it’s like as we’re presenting let’s say as we’re presenting the extreme of the mind the isolated mind and this this this idea of the mind looking at a screen and tracking with the screen there’s there’s also at the same time a kind of obsession with the idiosyncrasies of the body as well so you know in it in a in a normal world there would be less of both like there would be less there would be less obsessing with this this kind of weird solipsistic world where you self-define yourself and then it would also be less obsessive with you know seeing that because there’s also there’s also like a weird obsession with gratification and the sense in which the idiosyncrasies of the body also have to be met yes and so that’s kind of how that’s also the way it’s presented if you pay attention to some of the discourse it’s like the body wants this what can i do that’s what my body wants like there’s there’s like an extreme sense of disjunction and that is so i see it more as a disjunction and so so so yes there’s there is and so but you can already see it like in the time of Descartes and as as the as the as the enlightenment kind of makes its way out is that you end up having idealism and materialism and they can’t they can’t bring them together again and so we’re seeing extreme versions of that in individual lives where people are on the one hand obsessed with like pleasure and obsessed with with side with their their own like personal idiosyncratic satisfaction but at the same time they’re divorced from their body and they’re living in this kind of abstracted self-willing yes you know solipsistic being so so that’s the way that i that i see that okay yeah that’s the kind that’s the way that i kind of and there’s also there’s also a weird thing that happens which is that it seems like breaking down someone that way seems to also make it possible for them to get sucked into sucked into an i to suck sucked into something that will kind of take them up let’s say you know and so give themselves to some to some cause or some identity that will completely absorb them you know and so that’s why you you also see these weird neo-religious movements and these this kind of neo-religious politics you know and and you know the clans and all of that it’s like it’s it’s all it’s because the clans are important in the online space too so it’s not it’s as if doing this makes you also like almost like like like something that was prone to being an occult or something like that i don’t know how else to say it does that make sense yeah i think it makes sense i said what so one of the things there’s lots of different things happening at once i think so one of the things that happening is is distortion of time so that everything has got to be instant so i mean even actually a friend was saying the other day when she was a she wanted to know why i hadn’t got a smartphone and she was saying oh but if i’m out somewhere and i want to know something i can find it out immediately why do you want to know it immediately everything has got to be really instant but also i think you’re right about that that point about desire if you have it there’s a there’s a move around but if you have a desire for something or even if it’s a fleeting desire that’s somehow part of your identity yeah well you’re getting about 8 000 trillion different kind of gender identities and sexual orientations and so on because if you if you ever have some sort of fleeting desire then that must somehow reflect on who you are which is but but it’s it’s interesting because it’s it’s not unrelated also to consumer culture and to marketing and to like mass capitalism because we have that reality not just with our sexual desires but we have that reality for everything right you if you want to eat something you could probably find it whatever it is whatever you can think of yes you know if you’re near any city you could probably find what you want to eat you go to the grocery store and you have foods from everywhere in the entire world that is there to you to available to you and i can order something on amazon and get it tomorrow and you pretty much almost and if i can’t i’m annoyed it’s like wait what why isn’t there two day shipping for this one thing i have to wait two weeks really like it just gets it gets on your nerves and so so it’s like this instant gratification is is is all over the place yeah it’s not just yeah i mean that that also links back to what we were talking about at the beginning about agency about building up a skill and building up a character over a long period of time but this is just the reverse of that it’s the idea that you’ve got to form what your identity is i think maybe that’s one of the reasons why people’s identities are shifting are shifting so much but somebody can say you know some celebrity can come out one week they’re non-binary the next week week they’re trans but but but that’s kind of a reverse of the idea that you’re building you’re building up something which is can get integrated into yourself over a long period of time but it’s got all done at a time switch is gone yeah well i mean i think it’s all there is definitely an inversion that happened in general like and then it happened really in the 1960s most most basically where it really was that there was a sense in which we shifted we twisted we inverted it we said that your identities are socially constructed and therefore they have no validity they’re not real they’re just social construction your desires because they’re experienced then those are real and those are that on which you should base your identity and it’s really opposite of any traditional world like any any traditional religion or any traditional world where there’s a sense in which you participate in these in these identities that are that come from above you could say and those are the ones that are the most stable but those down here like these little desires they’re constantly shifting they’re always changing you know then you can have contradictory desires like you can have desires that you can hate someone and love them at the same time and so you actually have to be careful with down here with all the desires because they’ll lead you into chaos and confusion and tyranny and and so it’s like all these things are going to happen but i mean that’s a that’s a basic major change that happened in in the in the past few generations that has been kind of building up i think from materialism itself yes you can understand that that’s that’s one of the implications of materialism is that identity comes from below it comes from this this stuff not from not from these these structures that are that are come from above those are just tyrannies they’re just you know methods of of controlling others and all that stuff so the the trouble is very deep like in terms of of how to how to to if if we can’t get out of that thinking already like we’re we’re that’s going to be we’re going to be in trouble no matter what because if you if you really think that your desires are have are real and that you should be led by them after that no matter what no matter what you’re you’re always going to you’re always going to be turning in a in a circle in a wheel yeah so yeah so it so it may it it may well be but that like from the 60s but that came into that came into popular culture but it’s actually been present in philosophy for longer than that yeah so that you can see it in utilitarianism from the idea that what we need to do is so dirham bentham talked about how mankind is under two sovereign masters so for motivation to to seek happiness or to avoid pain so that you can always see you can always see some point of that because of course it’s more it’s stronger in terms of pain because it’s if you’re using that as a basis for that but basis for ethics it might not be enough this total basis because you see the attraction of thinking but of course i mean inflicting gratuitous pain must be must be must be wrong and and then more modern versions of utilitarianism are actually desire-based so thinking that because there are problems with we don’t just want to have the experience of happiness we want to actually do we want to actually do stuff you know john nosik’s is it john nosik i never remember the philosopher nosik i can’t remember his first name he invented the idea of the experience machine yeah but you could just go in and just have all these experiences but nothing real was happening you know like yeah i know and i i also read recently that they they they tried to read ask some students about this again like they tried to redo the experience and that the results were radically different than what they were when he came up with the experiment more students wanted to go in yeah like a lot more a lot more people wanted to go in now oh right yeah because because because i because i always asked i’ve always i’ve taught this for years i’ve always asked the students about it and it’s always a substantial minority of students who say but good mostly men actually but so but but but for the idea that what we want to do is have our desires satisfied so you can see how that might be a preference you know move on from that but then there are all sorts of ways in which you might try to solve the problem but desires can be fleeting so harry frankburt brought in an idea about higher order or lower order desires but we can order them in some way but you haven’t you might have a desire not to have a certain desire so you might require not to pig out last thing at night for example but that but that still has that still has the problem and there’s no there’s no nothing outside the field of desires you just have to get into a coherent system but this is this this is actually i mean this actually comes into a lot of the computing and a lot of work in ai so um so for example stewart russell have you ever come across his work he’s he’s like a leading ai type he’s co-written but like what’s probably the the um most well-used textbook on ai and he’s also recently two or three years ago written a book about super intelligence he’s trying to answer the trying to address nick ostrom who wrote a book on super intelligence uh about a while ago now about six years ago i think was worried about looking at the problem about how super intelligence might develop in a way that’s going to control us and trying to how can we stop how can we build ai in a way that’s going to make certain but it’s going to align with human values so but stewart russell is trying to do a a second go at trying to refine that but his way of doing it is to say because his definition of intelligence which is widely used is completely instrumental so intelligence is judged in terms of how well or how efficiently you reach a goal so the goals aren’t part of the definition of intelligence it could be any goal yeah so you could intelligently kill the whole human race for example right we can’t feel so the goals got to be put in there so the question is how do we stop insofar as super intelligence is possible which is another another question how can we make certain that it’s aligned with our goals so russell’s idea in a nutshell is to train the ai to observe our desires and our behavior and extrapolate oh my god extrapolate yeah that’s what i thought yeah extrapolate extrapolate from how we how we’re behaving so that it can learn what it can learn what humans really want yeah that’s great yeah especially if you do that online that’s super duper there that’s not going to end well yeah so but if it’s going to extrapolate from human behavior how could it extrapolate when it hasn’t got it hasn’t got that shared experience of a human being in the same way like you know my friend instantly we both instantly knew we were trying to catch that catch the person who stole my purse yeah and also if you can’t tell the difference between quantitative and qualitative realities which is that you know you might get married just once in your life but that thing might be the most important of your the most important thing that you’re aspiring to but every day i do stupid things and i play video games and i whatever and and and do things that are boring and useless but if you ask me what’s the most important i’ll tell you that it’s the one thing that happened at one time and so the idea that you can extrapolate out of human desires is hilarious because most of the time our desires are pointless well not pointless but they they they really are base and they kind of lead us into base behaviors yeah yeah i know actually so if you’d ask me a question about you know which two days of my life were i happiest they were also the two days when i had the most pain because that’s when i had my kids right how could you extrapolate from that exactly no yeah i think you you’ve got it right but it’s interesting like maybe i want to finish with one last point which which maybe can can uh i want to get your opinion on because it it actually comes down to what we talked about a little bit at the outset in terms of the idea the the question of understanding agency or even consciousness of higher order beings as being framed in human in in humanity that is that the hierarchy of beings itself is the actual frame by which consciousness and intelligence happens right so it happens through agents it’s not something that happens just up there in in the sphere right and so the the agency and the consciousness of a group culminates into leaders into you know into to beings that actually have a position right so i think that that’s one of the things that people seem to i think maybe some people are thinking about it but in terms of super intelligence or in terms of artificial intelligence and the idea of uh the idea of uh of the the you know the that intelligent that ai could surpass us right i think that we need to always understand it within the human hierarchy which is that intelligence will be it depends who is going to wield it and those in power will always wield it and so artificial intelligence will all just always be more power and it will be wielded by those that already have power and so the and so whether or not the the computer is thinking on its own or whether or not it is fully conscious or whatever you’ll never know that you can never verify that you’ll never be able to have that experience but what you can see is you can see the fingers of those that the kings and the powerful in the world of how they will they will utilize that power to for certain actual purposes and so i think that we should not be naive like the idea that you could program good intentions in ai it’s like who’s going to be wielding that ai who’s going to hold it who’s going to hold the reins who’s going to hold the on-off switch who’s going to like who’s going to decide what information gets put into it all of that is what’s most more important than the actual algorithms themselves like although they can be super powerful and and that that’s the real question is is that’s more important than than the other questions in my opinion yeah i think you’re right because in a way where there’s a real tendency to think of ai as if it’s a separate agency when ai is just something that’s produced by people and used by people so like the control problem in ai is is it is a problem is an issue in the technology but to make certain it does what you want it to do which is a problem because it’s a problem with like with any computer program you could write a computer program and it everybody who writes programs know that they don’t always work it’s just and because it’s so complex there’s there’s a big problem with that but it’s it’s for people i mean i think the real control problem is the people who are using the ai the people who got all the power the big companies the big i mean i mean look what’s happening in our world at the moment this is this is not so much a matter of a but the day that we’re recording this and waiting to find out whether elon musk is going to buy twitter and so i sometimes think that’s one of the reasons why the state wants to control individuals because they’ve given up the the the the any idea that they could control all these billionaire tech people who are ones who are really running the world so it’s yeah i think you’re right it’s but we tend to attribute agency to something we we tend to attribute cause to whatever seems to be new or distinctive if there’s a complex situation you’ll pick out the person who looks a bit different or the new thing that’s just happened but that’s often a mistake that’s what’s happening with with tech the ai is made by people it’s operated by people a lot yeah and you’re and you know you’re right on both like if you look at the elon musk situation it’s really interesting because you can actually see how everybody knows that implicitly like everybody really knows that implicitly because you have people that are in this situation where elon musk might buy twitter you have people that are cheering and are gloating and are so excited because they align themselves with elon musk and his way of thinking and what he’s doing and then you have people that are freaking out and are completely losing their mind um and the thing is is that so for example so this is also the problem so it’s like for example twitter couldn’t the idea that let’s say elon musk will bring back free speech to twitter like just frame it that way like elon musk is not going to bring back absolute free speech to twitter that’s not going to happen because you just the fact that you have to create hierarchies in the manner in which information is displayed means that whatever you think free speech is can’t it can’t completely exist because you have to prioritize you can’t get the flood of all twitter at once in your face it’s not it’s not it’s not possible but that happens so there has to be a kind of prioritization and therefore that prioritization is based on a hierarchy of values and that hierarchy of values will appear in the way in which information is displayed to you so i mean i can understand why people are i mean i’m annoyed at twitter because i don’t like their their hierarchies the way that they they create hierarchy uh of values i think it’s lopsided i think that it’s only it’s only on one political in one political direction and so i’m annoyed and i find it frustrating but but people who think that all that’s going to happen is like your opening of free speech that’s not how it works information doesn’t work that way yes it’s also not going to work because in different countries you can you can i mean like in britain lots of people have been you know interviewed by the police for example over what they said on twitter or lost their i’ve actually lost their jobs over stuff they said on twitter wow so so yeah so there’s a there’s a well-known case here of a woman maya maybe she didn’t say on twitter but there’s there’s cases of people who’ve who get into trouble for for saying really outrageous things like men can’t be women yeah well that’s what i mean it shows you that and yeah it’s revealing how it’s definitely revealing it’s revealing where the principalities are when that happens like you can see if you want to you can actually detect who’s in charge like who’s running the story who’s running the show yeah it’s also interesting about a lot of the newspapers and media outlets coming out outraged about musk it’s so fun the washington post owned by jeff bezos but but you know it’s so funny i mean it that for sure is hilarious like yeah yeah i have to admit that i’ve been i’ve been perversely enjoying the whole thing like it i just find it hilarious and it’s making me want to pull away from twitter even more but it’s still funny to watch to watch that people become very obvious like like things become very obvious in the in these types of moments it is all right we’ve been going for a while and i need to i need to go but this is this was wonderful as usual we need to plan like every once in a while come back and continue our discussion that would be great i’ve really enjoyed it and it was yeah it was it’s interesting having different ideas um between agency and ideal all match up yeah in the end even though we didn’t know we were going to bring them together they turned out sorry i couldn’t i’m sorry i couldn’t remember what i’d written us email about agency and i couldn’t remember what i’d said but yeah i like my lack of agency but it’s been great talking to you it’s really interesting and fun as well thanks for thanks for your time and uh and for people who were listening the opening of this video uh the the music it’s like that we’re going to put in the heavy metal version which was done by uh my nephew jamie yeah and so and so paula is the one who who i think you reached out to your nephew and said oh would you like to do a version of this and they did this great heavy metal version that a lot of people love people really love it so so that thanks here thanks thank your nephew jamie for us we really enjoy it yes i will yeah yeah all right everybody thanks for your attention and we’ll see you soon as you know the symbolic world is not just a bunch of videos on youtube we are also a podcast which you can find on your usual podcast platform but we also have a website with a blog and several very interesting articles by very intelligent people that have been thinking about symbolism on all kinds of subjects we also have a clips channel a facebook group you know there’s a whole lot of ways that you can get more involved in the exploration and the discussion of symbolism don’t forget that my brother matthew wrote a book called the language of creation which is a very powerful synthesis of a lot of the ideas that explore and so please go ahead and explore this world you can also participate by you know buying things that i’ve designed t-shirts with different designs on them and you can also support this podcast and these videos through paypal or through patreon everybody who supports me has access to an extra video a month and there are also all kinds of other goodies and tiers that you can get involved with so everybody thank you again and thank you for your support