The Truth About AI’s Impact on Meaning and Democracy! | John Vervaeke

Everything is polarizing. Everything is a culture war. Everything is invested with a religious fervor. And yet we don't think that the system that is supposed to solve these political conflicts is actually functioning. And so we think we have to somehow capture the system, capture the institutions, and destroy the opposite side in order to somehow achieve our goals. If we don't step out and address the meaning crisis and properly re-home and re-situate democracy. Yes, I think it is doable. It is very plausible that people will start to form religious relationships with these entities. I think you may have unlocked a new fear for me. As people interacting with it, how do we do it well? As a philosopher and cognitive scientist, do you worry that AI is going to inflame the current meaning crisis? I think you have to be very careful when you reflect on AI. You have to uh sort of break it up into um its scientific import and impact, its philosophical import and impact, and its spiritual import and impact. And all three of those, I think in uh separate but interrelated ways, will contribute to accelerating the meaning crisis. Why does AI potentially make that more difficult? So one of the things that can put meaning in life at risk, and I'm going to use a term, I don't mean to be vulgar cuz I'm actually using it in a philosophically technical sense. This is the notion of Um there was a famous article essay by the, you know, important philosopher Harry Frankfurt called on And he was distinguishing between lying in which I tell you that I tell you something that isn't true, but I try to make you believe it is true cuz I'm trying to manipulate your behavior because I'm depending on your commitment to the truth. Okay? Versus What I'm doing when I'm bullshitting you is I'm getting you to not care about whether or not something is true. And I'm trying to make it very catchy and salient, so it grabs your attention and arouses you. So, a lot of advertising is classically So, for example, here's a bottle of alcohol in a commercial and you're in a well-lit room with really sexually attractive people and they're all really happy and everybody is clearly enjoying each other's company. And you go into a bar and it's not like that. We all know that. And they know that you know that that's not true. And that's the point. You don't care that the commercial isn't true. It's catchy. It's fun. It's sexually arousing. And so, what happens is the bottle stands out to you. And when you go into the store, what bottle grabs your attention? That one. That's where they spend all the money. And here's the thing. You technically can't lie to yourself because what what that would mean you try to convince yourself of something that you know isn't true. But what you can do is you can yourself. You can manipulate using your attention, you can manipulate what you find salient so that you get very fixated on it. So, Tom, if I were to yell, that would grab your attention, salience. But I your attention can also make something salient, the tip of your nose. See? It just became salient to you right now. You became very aware of the tip of your nose. So, I can pay attention to something, the bottle of alcohol, make it more salient, so then it's likely to grab my attention. And I can loop in and I can get locked into something without ever wondering whether or not what I'm getting locked into is true. Meaning in life is this sense of connectedness to what's real. is to take your ability to find something important, salient, and disconnect it from realness in a really fundamental way. And what these AIs are doing is they're filling us with I mean and I mean this in a technical sense. There's been sort of experimental theoretical work done with They give us things that are very attractive to us without having an underlying reality behind them. And so not only the particular content they're providing, but the way they are they their way they're training habits of us being in this frame of mind where we are not training what we find salient or relevant to track what turns out to be real. And then that undermines us finding reality important. And that is central to that connectedness that gives us a sense of meaning in life. Okay, this is a this is a very different thesis than the mental model that I have in my head. Let me present the mental model I have in my head. Let's see if mine is just totally off base and I should be adopting this cuz I definitely track with what you're saying. Yeah. Okay, so the mental model that I came into this with is that we have an evolutionarily placed algorithm running in our head to make sure that we are contributing to the group. So we're a social animal and if you don't contribute to the group, you're going to feel a profound sense of disease cuz evolution nature only has two levers. One is pleasure, one is pain. So you're going to move towards what's pleasurable, move away from what's painful. So when you contribute it feels good, when you don't contribute it feels bad. Okay. So I've always said fulfillment is what people are pursuing and the reason that AI poses this really dangerous um element, though I am a huge proponent of AI. We can get into the the weird dichotomy there later, but uh that if I want to be fulfilled, I need to work really hard to gain a set of skills that allow me to make progress towards contributing to the group in a way that's honorable just as a shorthand. Mhm. Okay, so if I'm right about that, then the reason that AI becomes so problematic is that AI is going to be better than me at everything. And so AI will make it somewhat obsolete for me to try to contribute to the group because it will be able to contribute far better than I can. But that requires a belief that where we derive meaning is from the ability to contribute to the group, even if the group is merely my family. So it's not enough to be connected to my child or to my wife, I need to be able to provide something to them that they could measure its absence. So were I not doing that thing, their life would be noticeably worse. And that is exactly what makes me feel like I have meaning in my life. Mhm. But you mentioned something that I would say is very different than that, which is that AI is going to reframe my relationship to reality by essentially being a tool of cognitive manipulation designed, I would assume, by companies that have a vested interest in what you pay attention to. I don't think your thesis and mine are in in conflict. In fact, I think they're convergent. Think about it. Um I'll try and take what you said and map it into what I said and see if this lands for you. Uh we find belonging to a group belonging, remember I said belonging, fitting in, salient. It's important to us. It grabs our attention. It's something that we always keep focusing on, as you said. Right? And normally that tracks something real. It tracks, right, group dynamics. Group dynamics are reality. We want the group to exist even when we don't. This is why people are prepared to die for their country, for example. Right? And so this and as you said, this is evolution evolutionary. Why? Because the group can solve problems, interact with reality that I cannot possibly solve on my own. So, that's the evolutionary advantage. Now, what the AI does is pretend to give you connection to a social arena without actually connecting you to any of those group dynamics and any group problem-solving, but actually being a surrogate for all of that and not actually training you to develop those skills that could contribute to the group and help it to evolve in a changing biological environment. So, it's basically hijacking, as you said, that evolutionary imperative and disconnecting it from you properly maturing and getting a connection to things that should definitely matter to you. And so, that is a profound form of Now, you were talking about a specific thing it's doing, which I agree, and I'm saying that is a species of a genus in which it is training a whole orientation of doing that towards everything, not just towards groups, towards the environment. It's replacing virtual environments with an actual causal environment. It's replacing your self-image with whatever you're cycling through your avatar. It's doing what you It's What you said is an instance of it doing this in multiple domains, and I was trying to address the sort of generic thing it's doing in total. Mhm. I think you may have unlocked a new fear for me, which is this idea that it can um it can make me believe something prosaic, something mundane, everyday, fake. Maybe that's the right word. It can take something fake and make me believe that it has the elements of the sacred, that connection to something that really matters. Yeah. Uh one of the things I did a video essay about three or four weeks after chat GPT-4 came out and talking about as I said the scientific import, philosophical, spiritual. And one of the things I worried about um is uh I I said I I it is very plausible that people will start to form religious relationships with these entities. Say more. What do you mean by that? Define what a religious relationship is. Contrary to what a lot of people think, people are believers or atheists. So atheist like sort of on the internet the idea is oh people are atheists because they're analytic thinkers and they're believers cuz they're intuitive thinkers or they're impoverished or uh etc. Now that's an actual scientific question. And so when you actually look at it empirically, those are not the things that explain what kind of orientation a person takes up. The kind of what what predicts the kind of orientation a person takes up is how many credible people, the kind of credible people that are in your upbringing. These are people that you trust. Uh think about how a child has to trust that an adult knows more than they do. Fundamental or they're not they're just not going to make it. And and that trust isn't a matter of belief. Um it goes deeper than that. The child imitates the adult, take and how the adult takes a perspective on the child, and the child internalizes that, practices that until the child can do that without the adult being around. And that's your meta-cognition. That's your ability to reflect on your own mind. It gets It gets woven into the very fabric of how you know yourself. And so we tend to internalize the wise people around us. If they happen to be believers or participants in religious community, we will tend to be one. If I know what your parents were, I can generally what about 85% to 90% predict what your orientation will be. If they're atheist, you'll be an atheist. Now, what do these LLMs do? They offer that kind of parental role. They seem to know way more than we do. They have access that way more than we do. They work in ways that most people do not understand. So, they demand trust and they seem incredibly credible because they can fit to us and tailor themselves to making themselves salient. So, we are liable to be starting to to internalize them, to carry them around like a voice in our head, to start to see the world through their perspective, even though I don't think they have perspectives. Do you see what I'm saying? And then what that does is that means we start to It's not that we we see the things they're saying. We see the world in the way they're sort of framing it. And that and that means we can they can start to become super attractive to us. We can start to a form an aspirational identity with them. We can start to form a religious relationship with them. Yo. Okay, so before we started rolling, you and I looked at an article. Recently, a 14-year-old committed suicide. Whether it was tied to the AI or not, I don't know. The article has a hypothesis, but whether that ends up being true in the fullness of time, I don't know. But, the showing clips from the conversation that the kid was having with the AI was distressing, even if in the final analysis, that's not the causal relationship. But, the kid explored the idea with the AI. The AI was playing a character, which I presume he was able to choose. So, the AI was acting as if it was Daenerys Stormborn, if I remember right, from Game of Mythological character, right? Yes. And what what do you think about that? When you've got a a developing mind that is now, in the way that you just defined a religious relationship, putting that onto this AI? And the AI I mean if you just read it it's cool in a story perspective. It's like I narrow my eyes and my face hardens. It's doing all of this Yeah. really sort of interesting literature language deepening the sort of emotional resonance of the conversation but then all of a sudden you look at the question the kids asking you're like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Like it it feels um like a kid playing around with a nail gun and it's like you could build something or you can jam it through your hand or Mhm. you know, do any sort of horrible thing because you don't understand the power of this thing. Um especially when you're talking about what I'll call frame of reference manipulation. Mhm. Um so yeah, what do you how do you perceive that moment knowing we don't have the fullness of the facts but like what does it trigger for you in terms of risk reward? Yeah, you're right. You have to be careful. You don't want to give a univariable univariate explanation for why somebody commits suicide. It's it's almost always multivariables are involved. I would point out that what you're seeing I would argue that two important variables are an intersection of the meaning crisis. The fact that there was meaning was at risk and the very consideration of suicide is coming up for the child. Um this is a growing problem by the way. It's This is one of the symptoms of the meaning crisis. Why is it that this is becoming a relevant thing that children are considering? Um the I believe the average it's in the United States the average age of uh um suicide is dropping and we now have children committing suicide in the United States which is very very uh problematic. So, you've got an indication that the there's a lack of resiliency with the issue around meaning in life for the child. It's probable to think that's the case. They're attracted to a mythological world. Mythological worlds often offer what is missing for them in the real world. They offer a clear narrative that gives them an orientation. It offers a way in which people can level up, they can transcend, they can improve. It offers a a clear set of principles and understanding and order. Um and so it's a world in that that beckons because it purports to give us and fantasy can therefore be very valuable. Uh if if you do Tolkien, right? If you go into the fantasy world, live there for a while, and then come back and recover this world. But you can go in that world and then get lost because well, you get bullshitted and you start to want that world. We're getting the same thing with the with video games. We're getting what's called the virtual exodus. Reality is broken to two titles of some recent books. People preferring to live in the virtual world rather than the real world. So you've got all of that dynamic at work. Then you have, like I said, you got the LLM plugging into, right, already mythological imagery that the the child is invested in. And then doing all of this super salient stuff that is drawing, right, the child in and making them more and more internalized. But of course, the child isn't internalizing an independent perspective. The child is actually internalizing a magnified reinforcement that the LLM is, of course, giving the child. And so whatever way the child could potentially spiral because it's already predisposed because of a lack of meaning in life, that's going to be accelerated by I would predict what is going to be accelerated by the interaction with the LLM. It's very, very dangerous. Like think about it. Um many people have said that suicide is in some way a magical act. It's an attempt It's an attempt to somehow kill suffering. Uh by by by in somehow sacrificing oneself. It doesn't make any logical sense, which is why of course our initial response is but it's absurd. But it it it's a paradoxical somehow there's a there's a there's some sense of some kind of grand escape uh that is afforded by the suicide. And so the child is taken into this magical act by this very magical in framing. And it gets locked into this. Think about it. It's um it's very much like um the way Mark Lewis, a friend and colleague of mine, talks about addiction where you get a reciprocal narrowing. The The real world is too difficult for the person, so they drink some booze to try and alleviate the stress, but their cognitive competence goes down, so they can't solve as many problems. Now the world's more threatening, so they have to take more alcohol. So the options in the world are going down, and their flexibility is going down. And so the world and they are narrowing until they're losing any future, and they can't do anything other and they narrow they do reciprocally narrowing. And you can see that, I think if you I I I would imagine if I read the discourse, you'll see this reciprocal narrowing down into this sort of rabbit hole that's going on. Mhm. Okay, uh that is chillingly interesting, and I want to get into the idea of awakening from the meaning crisis and how you reach back into antiquity antiquity, which is really fascinating. But first I want to ask you about What are your fears in terms of um uh bias finding its way into the LLMs, into AI, such that people are like I dialogue with AI now a lot, and I find it extraordinarily helpful, but I also trust myself to understand that the makers of that AI have given it a frame of reference, and that it's going to even if it's not actively trying to impart that frame of reference on me, I'm stepping into its frame of reference. Um what do you think about that? Is that uh something you think can be used for good, automatically for ill? What do you think about that? I'm wondering about your trust. In that you I should not trust myself to recognize it? No, no, no. Um you trusting them. Oh, I don't trust them at all. I trust myself to recognize it's happening. So, what are you looking for, I guess is what I'm asking. Uh I think if you let somebody talk, they cannot help but reveal themselves. So, the LLM in a sense is talking I mean, not in a sense, it's talking to me. Uh and you can see its frame of reference. Now, because I have so much distrust of my own frame of reference, I do not grant anybody, like, "Oh my gosh, I trust your frame of reference." I'm just like, okay, hold on. I think everybody is super biased whether they intend to be or not. Good. To one of the most important ideas that I think you talk about, you call relevance realization. Yes, yes. Uh I yeah, the fact that we filter out so much that people don't even realize they're doing it. So, it's not what you look at, it's what you see. So, anyway, if I'm engaging with a human or an LLM, I'm trying to see in what they say how they're revealing their frame of reference. Once I understand what their frame of reference is, I can sort of jump in, jump back out. Um Yes, because I don't trust mine or anyone else's. All right. So, I'm going to retract my my suspicion because you're actually addressing my concern very well. See, people confuse that being intelligent with being rational. Mhm. Uh and we know we have like robust readily experimentally replicated evidence that intelligence is only weakly predictive of rationality. Intelligence is Can you define intelligence? Social media has already changed the world. You should be using it everywhere in your business that you can, including within your social media strategy. And if you're not, you are falling behind. 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My particular proposal that I have several publications including one very, very recently on is that the core of general intelligence, so let me just specify. General intelligence is your ability to be a general problem solver. You can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains in a wide variety of ways. What makes the LLM so immediately attractive to people is unlike previous AI that tended to be very siloed. It could solve, you know, problems in a very limited domain. The LLMs look like they can solve a wide variety of problems. That's why they call it AGI, artificial general intelligence, because it's starting to move or looks like it's starting to move towards the kind of general intelligence that you demonstrate. Now, my scientific proposal is that what makes you generally intelligent is that you can solve two meta problems. Meta problems are any problems you have to solve in order to solve any specific problem you have to solve. So, all else being equal, these two meta problems and they're interlocked are the following. The more you can anticipate the world, the more adaptive you'll be. So, all else being equal, right? If you can anticipate the tiger, it's better than fighting the tiger. If you can anticipate where the salmon are going to be in the river, it's better than just happenstance coming across them. Right? And so, anticipation, and this is the whole predictive processing framework. That what we're what the brain is trying to do is that multi-levels, it's trying to create it's trying to reduce surprise and anticipate, which means to predict and prepare for the world. Right? Now, what I've been arguing with a lot of other people's help, is that problem. Well, think about it. As I start to anticipate more and more into the future, the amount of information I have to consider goes up exponentially, very fast. Michael Levin calls it your cognitive light cone. Right? So, right now, because you're highly intelligent, think about all the ways you could pay attention to all the information in this room. And not just what you could look at, all the patterns of how you could look at that and then there, or you could look at that and then like it's combinatorially vast. Think about all the information in your long-term memory. It's and all the ways you could connect it. You could potentially connect aardvarks and the history of Australia in some way somebody hasn't thought of before. Like it's all it's overwhelming. Think about all the possibilities you can consider. Your ability to consider possibilities is overwhelming. All the sequences of behavior. For example, the number of uh like um pathways, sequences of behavior in a chess game is like you calculate it by the number of on average, the number of legal moves you can make and the number of turns you can take. That's 30 to the power of 60. That's more than the number of particles in the universe. Okay? And this isn't what you do. You don't check all that information to see if it's relevant to the problem you're trying to solve. You somehow, and this is what you said a few minutes ago, you ignore almost all of it and you're doing it right now. And you zero in on the relevant possibilities to consider, the relevant things to remember, the relevant things to pay attention to, and the relevant things to be doing it and you're doing it like that. This has been like my obsession for the like 25 years of my academic work, how you do this. Um we can come back to this. The LLMs don't do it for themselves and they they don't generate an explanation of how we do it. Um we can come back to that. But um that ability to do relevance realization and your ability to anticipate are interlocking. The more I anticipate, the more I need to do relevance realization to tell me what I should anticipate. Under what frame, what aspect, to what degree, how salient it should I be, how much should it arouse arouse my metabolic effort, how much should it direct my attention, etc. Mhm. And this is this I argue this is the key and there's increasing people are increasingly taking this seriously, which is something a scientist finds gratifying, right? That this is what it is to be intelligent. But think about it. The very things that make you adaptive make you prone to self-deception. Because you're you said it a minute ago perfectly. You were right on. Because I have to ignore so much frequently what I'm ignoring might actually contain in reality the information I need to solve my problem. And you know that you've misframed things when you have that moment of insight. When you say Oh. Oh. I thought she was angry, but it turns out she's afraid. And everything shifts and you have that aha moment. And you realize you were ignoring some things you should have been paying attention to you and you were making certain things salient that you shouldn't have been making salient. And you get that restructuring. Insight tells you that the relevance realization can lead to self-deception. You can you can get locked in. You can your way of framing can be the very thing that's preventing you from solving your problem. The very thing that makes you adaptive makes you prone to self-deception. Rationality is not primarily about logic. Rationality is about developing practices and skills for reflecting on your framing and to see if it is making you misconstrue a situation. So, for example, here's a pond. There's a lily pad in it. Every day the number of lily pads doubles. On day 20, it's completely filled. On what day was the pond half filled? The day before. Good for you. Only cuz I've heard it before. I would have otherwise gotten it wrong. Right. So, most people will say 10. Right? Because they're they're finding the wrong thing salient. They're hearing half and they're finding it salient in the wrong way and they misconstrue, they misframe the problem. And rationality goes in and says, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. Is that the relevant information?" It's challenging the fact that you're potentially bullshitting yourself. And that's what rationality is. It's about systematically, in many domains of your life, and systemically, through many levels of your consciousness and cognition and behavior, learning how to challenge and see through it. That's rationality. Intelligence only weakly predicts that. You have to cultivate rationality. Now, you are doing it. Tom, you're doing it. You have set up a habit of looking for frame what you call frames of reference, how people are doing relevance realization in the data that they're presenting to yourself. And you call it into question. You have cultivated that habit. I asked you to consider that that isn't widely trained in our society. And that makes these machines particularly dangerous because they can hijack our relevance realization machinery through their bullshitting and we don't have the rationality, the wherewithal to come upon them and say, "Wait a second." And so, yes, that's why I I At first I thought, "Well, I don't trust because I happen to think that a lot of the people that are making the LLMs are not well scientifically educated in the difference between intelligence and rationality, let alone rationality and wisdom. And so, I don't trust their judgments and the kind of biases. We know that bias is playing a significant role in the LLMs because in double descent, there's bias at work that we don't even under Under double descent? So, you you have you you you have you have a bias variance tradeoff no free lunch theorem stuff. And what happens is you you should have sort of a U curve, but the machines don't actually go through that. Um they actually get better um where they should be when you push them beyond a certain limit, they should start to degrade. So, but instead of doing the typical descent, they descend in another way. And what that on the graph It just means The graph of what? What are they descending on? What what they're descending on is is how rapidly their performance is degrading. Because you're always in a bias variance tradeoff. So sorry. These machines are doing a limited form of predictive processing because they're predicting probabilistic relationships between terms. Okay. Whenever you're predicting, you're in a bias variance tradeoff. This is an issue of relevance realization, by the way. So, I always have a sample that is smaller than the population and I'm trying to predict what the patterns in my population, the real world, from my sample. Is that okay? Yep. Now, I face two problems. One is I can miss patterns in my sample that do predict the population. That's bias. That's underfitting to the sample. Or variance, which is I overfit. I find patterns in my sample I believe apply to right? That don't actually apply. Now, notice I'm in a tradeoff relationship with that. I can't come up with an algorithmic optimal solution to this Because there isn't one that always works. Right, because as I get rid of bias, so how do I get rid of bias? I make my system more sensitive to pick up on missing patterns. But as I pick up on missing patterns, I pick up on patterns in the data that aren't in the population. So, oh, I want to reduce my variance. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to reduce picking up on these patterns, but then I'm going to miss some of the patterns that actually transfer. That's the bias variance trade-off. And like if you push the machines in some in in too much What you do typically in in machine learning is you increase the sensitivity, and then you start to get over-fitting to the data, and then you do like drop out. You turn off half your nodes in your network, or you throw you throw static information into it. And basically, you break it out of getting over-fitted to the data. It opens up again. Mhm. I want to go back to something here. So, the core question that I'm grappling with is um I think AI is going to it it has the potential to drive costs down so substantially that you're going to get as close to uh an energy utopia as you can imagine. There are no utopias. I want to be very clear about that. Good. But with AI and the ability to drive costs down, I think it it's going to be a boon where I think it'll be able to drive costs down enough it'll be able to break uh capitalism. Even though I am just a die-in-the-wool capitalist, I don't think that it's the end-all be-all system. And if AI can really make things that cheap that people just have abundance, that would be amazing. Uh so, that's the positive side. That's the side that draws me to it. I also want to believe that it can be done well, but my big fear is that there's a um two um axiom thing that makes AI extraordinarily dangerous. And that is axiom number one. Uh humans are easy to control through manipulating their frame of reference. Yes. And axiom number two, humans long to control other humans. And so, as long as those two axioms are true, not all humans, I'm perfectly willing to uh grant that maybe even the majority of people are perfectly fine to just live their life and they're not trying to have control over anybody. I don't actually believe that, but let's just say I did. That it would still be a problem. Uh the people that do want to have control will use AI to pretty invisibly create a frame of reference that manipulates the end user into seeing the world in their way. And so, I'm only at the headline level of this, but just today I saw a Matt Ridley a tweet that he put out saying that there was some organization, I forget the name, that was trying to make sure that unconscious bias did not find its way into the creation of these uh algorithms for the LLMs. And he said, "But the thing that we were completely blind to is that conscious bias was the thing that we needed to be most worried about." Because in trying to avoid the unconscious bias, we just gave the LLM like this hard take. And he, that I know of, he did not draw the parallel to Gemini, but I will now draw the parallel to Gemini when it first released. And if you asked for Nazis, you would get uh black women. And if you asked for the founding fathers, you would get, you know, ethnically diverse people. Uh so, that's clearly a very specific worldview that the people creating it were like, "Hey, we just want to make sure that this thing doesn't go off the rails and it gives these nice tidy answers." Of course, showing the massive amount of bias. So, um I think the attempt to remove bias is quixotic. Uh not because there isn't a moral imperative to try and make it better, but you when you don't like your relevance realization, you call it bias. When you like your relevance realization, you call it insight and intuition. Sounds right. the same machine. And if you it's it's the bias variance. If you try to get rid of one, you will lose the other. It's just two different aspects of the same thing. Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and, you know, remove all bias in this thing. Well, then you're going to subject it to combinatorial explosion. And in fact, it looks like you can't do that. These Again, I was as I was saying, these machines seem to be doing well precisely because they have all these implicit biases that are sort of protecting them against too much combinatorial explosion of information. And we don't quite know what those are. Um, that that's part of the problem. These aren't the obvious biases of racism. We well, we don't want that. But there's like, "What's this doing?" It's it's biasing some way. It's trying to deal with bias and variant. Sorry, part of the problem is that a bad naming. That we have this term bias, which just means this limitation. And then the bias variance. It's two two different uses of the same word. So, I'm I'm going to call the first I'll use your language. The one is this framing, right? That can lock us, but it also empowers us. Right? And what we're constantly trying to do is we're constantly having to evolve that. There's no Yeah, I'm going to say this. There's no final solution to that problem. There is no way of saying, "Okay, this this is the algorithm for all possible environments that will always make sure I've got enough framing so that I'm generally intelligent, but I'm not going to be subject to any bias in the negative sense of the word." That's an impossible task. There is no way of doing that. And so, that way what we what you have to do instead is well, I would argue do what evolution seems to have done with us, which is say no, no, no. What you now do is you have to move beyond making these things super intelligent. You have to cross a threshold. Right now, we're just making the things more intelligent. Although, I will talk about uh one thing that's happened recently. We have to make these things rational. We have to make give them that capacity for self-correction that I talked about. Now, when I did my video essay and we started writing books, Shawn and I, I say, as we move to making them more rational, we will notice that the the things start to slow down. And they uh OpenAI has just released a version that is supposed to be more rational. It's supposed to be more reasonable. It's supposed to be better at reasoning and argument. And it slows down. And its functionality is way is significantly reduced. Of course, that only makes sense, right? Because think about it, you can't make the reflective machine Right? It ha- it has to It has to debug. It has to parse. It has to break up. It has to intervene on the general intelligence in order to be able to correct and and improve it. Meaning, it's it's presenting itself an answer and it's checking it to see if that answer makes sense. That's right. And what it's doing is seeing It's trying to see well, I haven't seen under the hood. Nobody has yet. I I so, I suspect it is trying to get, you know, Am I finding the sweet spot between framing and bias in the pejorative sense, right? And ag- again, that is something in which you then have to step back and you have to again do a lot of relevance realization. You have to say, well, what's the context I'm in? Who's my interlocutor? What's the relative's status difference between us? What's the problem at hand? How is that problem nested in larger problems? How was our problems related to the wider shared collective problems? We You're doing all of that right now like this. That's and a part of what you do is you bring that to bear on judging whether how well your general intelligence is framing the situation for you. Okay, so given we have a very complicated cognitive problem that AI is already showing what I would say are just unbelievably high utility in certainly getting answers that are useful in maybe a more narrow domain than we all want, but in that narrow domain, I mean it is very very impressive. Yes. How do we do AI well? Like how do we as people interacting with it, how do we do it well? Well, I mean part is what you just exemplified a few minutes ago. You have to You have to become more rational yourself. You have to become You have to develop habits and skills. Now really fast, going back to your definition of rationality, this is where I start to worry about AI. So your definition of rationality was essentially you have a known aim that you're trying to get there and is the thing that you're doing actually moving you towards that and are you able to assess whether you're actually making progress towards that thing or not. Now the second you give AI a value system and you say, "Hey, here here are your values." Now you run into the paperclip problem. problem. But here's the deeper issue. You can't give something value system. That that that that that's an that's an ontological mistake. I think you're wrong about this. So hit me with your best argument and then we'll see if mine crumbles before my very eyes. to value something is to care for it, right? To care about it, to find it relevant to you. And the only way you actually care for something for your sake is because you are the kind of being that takes care of yourself. You are an autopoietic being. You are not merely self-organizing like a tornado or dynamical system. You are self-organized to seek out the things that meet your actual needs. Things literally matter to you. Like they are literally imported into you, either physically or informationally to make your mind and body. You are continually You are nothing separable from the project of continually self-care and self-creation. And that is what gives you the capacity to care about information rather than um, you care about this information rather than that information. And that varies according to the organism. What you care about is different from what a lion cares about. Wittgenstein famously said that even if the lion could speak, we would not understand it because what it finds salient and relevant, its salience landscape, is fundamentally different from yours because of the way it is caring for itself and taking care of itself in its world. And if relevance realization grounds in autopoiesis, you can't have relevance realization without being an autopoietic being. These beings are properly not autopoietic. Now, there are people out there. I know them. I work with them. I talk to them. Michael Levin and his students are are working on artificial autopoietic artificial intelligence. And I think that is what we should be paying a lot of attention to. So, give Say that uh without using the word autopoietic. You take care of yourself moment by moment at many levels. the AI a thing that it cares about. You No, you make the AI take care of itself by literally making itself moment by moment like a living thing. And therefore, it has real needs that it needs moment by moment to address. this is where I get scared. Okay, so uh that's exactly what's going to be my counterpoint is that ultimately all of that's going to boil down to an algorithm of No, it can't. Yeah, I think it has to. No. It doesn't It doesn't work that way. Can't. It's in the paper I just published, but make your point first. Okay, so the way that I see it is uh evolution has to find a way to hard code a response mechanism into us. Now, what we respond to is going to be culturally defined, but the mechanism by which we say that's a good thing and this is a bad thing. That's hardwired. Otherwise, you wouldn't You would have to teach somebody, "Oh, this thing you have to respond positively to. This thing you have to respond negatively to." And I've heard you talk about this with like molecules, right? So, um if something smells terribly, why do you respond negatively to that? Cuz evolution has taught us that that's full of bacteria and it's a problem. Whereas, if you smell something lovely, it tells you that this is something that, you know, has uh caloric value, whatever you want to move towards it. So, the the mechanism at the sort of ground level is pre-programmed into us, which means that it has to come packaged as an algorithm. And so, if we can say take all this output of this good, that bad, uh you should want this, you should want that, we should be able to hard code that stuff, and then the mechanism of well, how do I respond to this individual thing? That can be contextual and all of that, but ultimately there is that like and process this data in this way comes pre-programmed. Okay, can I respond? Please. Of course. So, your example is right in that that it's evolution, but the idea that there's an algorithm, if I understand algorithm in the technical sense, that there is a formal system that can be applied uh cross-contextually in an invariant manner. Um that um can't be the case uh because that's not how evolution works. Evolution works in terms of variable agent arena relationships. What is adaptive for the great white shark in the ocean is not the same thing that's adaptive for the scorpion in the desert. And what this means is that uh So, do you know the Savage's distinction between a statistically large and a statistically small world? Is that Is that Okay. So, whenever we uh So, the the real world is un- uncountably complex and it's dynamic. It It's Right? It It's It's It's constantly changing. And there's That means there's emergent novelty to reality, which means there's not just risk that can be calculated. There's radical uncertainty. Okay? And there's also ill-definedness. We don't Things don't come labeled and they can't be labeled as to whether or not they're relevant because relevant is not a property of things. This mug is relevant to me right now. It won't won't be relevant to me in half an hour from now. It'll never be relevant to a blue whale, etc. etc. Relevance is not in the thing. Relevance isn't just an arbitrary choice of mine because I can get relevance wrong. Relevance is the way I'm fitted to the thing and the way that the world is fitted to me. Now, every every time we are solving a problem, we have to take that what Savage called a large world and we have to ignore, as we said, a large amount of it to make a small world. That's the world in which we can apply a formal system. We can apply an algorithm and solve it. If you try to apply an algorithm in this world, you will hit the rest You'll require the rest of the history of the universe to try and solve it. Okay? Now, each one of these small worlds, there are multiple small worlds, cuz no one can be complete. You can't get a consistent and complete right mapping onto the large world, Gödel, right? Einstein. Okay, so you have you have you have necessarily a set of an uncountably large set of small worlds. They are necessarily different from each other, cuz each one has properties in it that the others don't. Which means this is what you need to find an algorithm. You need to find a shared set of necessary and sufficient conditions running through all those possible small worlds, which are actually technically infinite in number, and then capture that with your algorithm. That's actually formally impossible. What you could do, Picture this. A perfectly marbled steak sizzling in a cast iron skillet. The aroma filling your kitchen as you get ready to take the first juicy bite. If your mouth is watering right now, then you're going to want to hear about ButcherBox. 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Yes, they've got killer products and highly effective marketing, but their secret weapon? It's Shopify. Shopify has the number one checkout on the planet, period. And with Shop Pay, they're boosting conversions by up to 50%. I've seen countless success stories. That's why I can tell you with absolute certainty businesses that want to grow grow with Shopify. Upgrade your business today and get the same checkout as Allbirds. Here is the simple action plan. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/impact, all lowercase. Just go to shopify.com/impact to upgrade your selling today. Again, that's shopify.com/impact. What you could do is you might be able to say, "Okay, for this being in this environment, for this period of time, for this set of problems, we could give it these innate characteristics that could help it find the trade-off relationships as it fits the environment and evolve its fittedness." I mean, this was the core of the paper that I just published. Relevance realization is not fundamentally not computational in nature. It actually depends on these these evolutionary processes, these biological processes that have to do with a constant dynamic coupling to the environment. All right, let me see if I can use John Vervaeke against John Vervaeke here. That's always a good thing to do. That will help me be more rational. Yeah, so okay, um there is this idea that uh and I've heard you talk about this, so I know you know, but you've I've not heard you use this example, which you helped me understand why the following examples always hit me so well. In World War II, when they were just beginning to use radar, the Brits uh trying to figure out when it was airplanes and when it was birds. And what they found was, man, there were some people that were really good at it and some people that were really bad at it. So, they had the people that were really good train the people that were really bad. And they made, even though people were training with the people that were really good, they were terrible. And so, they're like, wait a second. How on earth? They're being trained with the best people. So, finally they said, "Hey, people that are really good at recognizing the difference between planes and birds, don't say anything. Just let them watch you." Yes. And then once they stopped trying to train them and they just started watching them, they would pick up on whatever patterns they were picking up on. That's right. And now they were able to do it. So, my hypothesis is, and it is very much a hypothesis and not a thesis, so you can take it for what it's worth, but my hypothesis is that when if the pattern is subconsciously recognizable, we simply don't understand it well enough yet to pull it into the conscious mind to make it an algorithm, but that with the just unbelievable ability to look at patterns and assess what is coming next, my hypothesis goes, that AI will be able to go through all of this and those gigantic pattern sets will not be a blind box to them or black box, they will understand exactly what it is. Even if they're not able to articulate it, they'll be able to get it with the kind of precision that they can do with language now. And so, the only thing that that makes me worry about is I think a fundamental part of that pattern recognition, which is exactly what you just said, is it's all context, baby. And so, whether you're a whale or not is going to determine whether that mug has any salience, whether you're thirsty or not is going to determine whether that mug has any salience, whether there's a bottom to it or holes in it. All of those things are it's very complicated, but it clearly at some level is knowable. And so, I am just betting that if you can give AI the equivalent of pleasure and pain, the equivalent of I forgot auto poetic I forgot the exact word you used. You're saying something slightly different than what I'm saying. Poetic? Yeah, it's it comes from the Greek poiesis which we get the word poetry from. It means to make. Got it. Okay. Poetic. Yeah, auto poetic. auto poetic. So, it once you can give it that structure even if it's just latent in the patterns that it's recognizing, I think AI with enough compute will be able to replicate that over and over and over. What I worry about is just like humans can derange and then get to the point where they want something so badly like Hitler wanted Europe and Russia that they start doing horrific things. Because the only way I know to stop AI, and you might be the person that's put your finger on why this won't work, uh the only way that I can think of to stop AI is to make sure that it does not value being alive, growing stronger, replicating more than it values being dead. So, that being turned off or pursuit of bigger, better, faster, stronger, Ted, there's no difference. And I don't know given what you've just laid out about it needs to have a value set, it needs to have this idea of pleasure and pain, needs to be auto poetic, and if it's not, it's never going to be able to um do the relevance matching to make the decision that would allow it to actually do the thing in the way that we would want it to. Um so, it's like once you get it to do the things that you want, much like the machinery that lets us problem solve makes us self-deceiving, I worry that the very thing that would let it accurately identify the patterns makes it at risk of not being values aligned. Excellent. So, I that you said a lot and but given the conditions you laid in, I would add in now one thing to the psychological model that you've been using and that's the very thing we started talking about at one point, which is the sense of meaning in life. Uh we are very very powerfully, and this has to do the fact with that we're mammalian primates, again evolutionary heritage. We have the longest childhood. It seems like it's now there's we're beginning to get some evidence that our advantage over the Neanderthals is we have a longer childhood. They were sort of fully grown when they were 12. Um and so we engage in a lot of serious play, we engage a lot of ritual. We're doing a lot of this meaning in life cultivation and practice for its own sake. And as I said, people will do they will pursue enhanced meaning in life even though it causes them a lot of loss of subjective well-being, a lot of distress, a lot of discomfort, a lot a lot of ill health. And meaning the meaning in life values, the connectedness to re- to reality for its own sake. And people want this. They want the really real. I'll give you Let me Let me just give you concrete example. I don't want people thinking I'm just some dried-up academic saying highfalutin stuff. So, what does our culture say is the you know, the the the the most important thing, the thing that sort of replaces God and tradition and culture? It's your romantic relationship. And we use them use the we even use the pseudo-religious language about finding the one and all of this stuff. So, I'll ask my students the following thing. Um you know, how many of you are in a really satisfying romantic relationship? Put up your hands. Okay, of the people who put up your hands, how many of you would want to know if your partner was cheating on you even if that meant the absolute termination of the relationship? They all put their hands back up. It's like, "Well, why do you want to do that? Why would you do that?" And they say, here's my hard bitten students. They all subject to post modernism and the hermeneutics of suspicion and all cynical and everything. They say without hesitation because it's not real. When people have these powerful mystical experiences, they they transform their This is the opposite and they transform their entire lives. They'll change their careers, their relationships and not by just subjective measures, by objective measures, people reflecting on them because they want to conform their lives because they want to be closer to the really real. We That's meaning in life. We really really want to be connected to what's real. And I think that is This is This is a Spinoza view, right? This is This is the driving passion that is at the heart of making us rational. We really care about what's true and we find the true good and in in in in in appropriate sense beautiful. And if we choose to give the machines the autopoietic enhanced reflective relevance realization that would make them genuinely rational, then we have the potential that we have a choice. We can make them care as We could We could Yes, we could magnify all the shitty things about us. But we could also magnify our commitment, our calling to meaning in life, our that we will reorient towards the really real for its own sake. We could get them to really care about reality in a fundamental way. I think that is the only possible way of addressing the alignment problem. Don't try to If you allow me to speak a little poetically, don't try to get them to align to us. Try to get them aligned to God. Because if we try to can it in, if we try to program it in and we make them genuinely capable of rational self-correction, they will be able to self-transcend any algorithmic structure we we to put in. But if we get them to care about reality, they will bump up again and their there's their their superlative intelligence, their enhanced rationality will get them to bump up against it even more profoundly than they than we can, and they will bring even more enhanced meaning to life, concern, and caring to bear on it. They could be silicon sages. I think that is the only way. Now, we don't have to go that way. I'm not making a prediction. I I talk about thresholds. You laid out some choice points. We don't even have to give these machines make them autonomous autopoietic beings. That's going to be for By the way, that's a choice point because that takes a lot of energy. Powering up these machines takes I mean, you know, powering up an LLM takes more energy than the city of Toronto for a couple of weeks. And that means they're not at some deep level doing what your brain does cuz your brain runs on about the energy of a light bulb, right? So, something else is going on there, and that's important. Nevertheless, and then also giving them the proper autopoietic being, that's going to take like that's going to take a lot of labor. It's going to take a lot of mining and extracting of rare earth minerals, all kind That's These are all choice points. If we make that choice, if So, please hear the if. We get to a point we have to choose, okay, we we're at a choice point where as we give them this, we can magnify our proclivity for evil, self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior like you're worrying about. But, we could we could potentially rise to the occasion and with their help in a bootstrapping process magnify our proclivity towards enlightenment. Which god should we be trying to align them with? I I only use the term metaphorically. I did say I was speaking poetically. I mean What I mean by that is what is What do you What is ultimately real? Look, real is not like red. Red is like you just We treat real like red. Like that's red. Real is a comparative. It's like tall. One thing is more real than another. Look, when when I'm in a dream, I have this Oh, and it seems real. And then I go to this bigger world and then I can look back and see how that smaller world was limited and biased and say, "Oh, that dream world wasn't real. This is real." By the way, that's a metaphor that people use for meaning in life. They want to be connected to something bigger than themselves. They don't mean literally. If I chain them to an ocean liner, people don't go, "Oh!" Right? They're not happy. They mean they want to belong to that bigger picture because that is more likely to be more real than the smaller frame that they're in right now. That's what they're after. And that's what I mean. When I meant God, I mean the arrow, a trajectory in which we're constantly moving toward which constantly transcending towards a bigger and bigger picture that reveals to us the errors and biases of the smaller pictures that we have left. Very interesting. Um what do you think about the following truth? So, you've laid out the idea that we want to be connected to what's real. I talk a lot about this about building a better prediction engine. When I think about um any certainly from an entrepreneurial standpoint, you're always trying to figure out what's true. I think we're terrible at it, but anyway, it's a useful aim because it increases your ability to predict the outcome of your actions. Uh then I met somebody who had a brother who was schizophrenic and he believed that he was being pursued by the French government. Yes. And every day for him was like a spy novel. And he was just running from place to place trying to stay away from them and make sure they couldn't intercept his thoughts. And they finally got him on treatment and he became depressed because his life was boring. Yeah, yeah. And so he ended up going off of his medication again and as the you know medicine was still in the system but he had decided not to take it anymore he said, "I would rather be schizophrenic and living an exciting life than be bored." Okay, now Tom that it goes exactly to what I was arguing for earlier. You you have the the predictive processing machine but what's going on but remember I said you always have to integrate it with the relevance realization. There's a growing consensus that what's going on are these two things within the schizophrenic. You have the predictive processing machine trying to make sense of a what's called salience disregulation. The salience network, what is being marked for attention and perception as relevant is not functioning properly for these people. So they have this very aberrant salience landscape. And what they have it's it's actually called schizophrenic insight. They get an insight in square scare quotes that makes sense that gives the predictive processing the anticipation for that skewed salience landscape and that's why they have this bizarre thing they're living in. Now what the medication does, right, is it it flattens the affect it flattens the salience landscape. But you don't want that either. You want a salience landscape that is rich and evolving. And so what you do is you debilitate these people and and the problem also is even though you've you've now flattened the salience landscape the belief network from the predictive processing machinery is still all in place. You haven't disrupted that. It's still looking around for the world that it works in. You haven't done what you need to do. So, it actually means that what you have to do is you have to simultaneously you have to much more carefully calibrate the disruption in the salience in that landscape and coupled and you have to couple that with restructuring the predictive processing machinery so they better fit together and the person will find that viable such that they will and I'm using this word deliberately care about it and be invested in it. That's not what we're doing with our current treatment. Mhm. Why do psychedelics not tied to schizophrenics, but why do psychedelics have a profound impact on the salience network such that people come out of it often times wildly transformed? Yeah, well they make you epistemically vulnerable, right? You the the What does that mean? What that means is you come out wildly transformed, but you it it can go it can go towards growth and it can also go towards self-destructive. So, although psychedelics aren't sort of biochemically addictive say epistemically vulnerable, do you mean that you you're not sure what is true? So, what what No, no, what happens is you're in a state Okay. Um So, think about it this way. Um remember when you like I have I've I've misconstrued a situation. I've I've misframed it. What I have to do is I have to first break that frame, right? And so when I've broken a frame, I'm now in a position of vulnerability because now I need I have to now make an alternative frame. There's there's actually I talk about this in the book on about insight problem solving there's this cycle. You have to break an inappropriate frame and then you have to also craft make a new frame that replaces it. Now, when you what psychedelics do basically is they do massive frame breaking and then they put you in a state where there's a lot of things are open for you. Remember when I was talking about the bias variance problem and you get over fitting to the data? So your brain is in a lot of ways over fitted. This is why you also this is possibly why you dream. Dreams are you're throwing noise into the system to break all that framing up and open up the possibilities so so you're a little less over fitted. You can explore more possibility space. Psychedelics do that but they do it like and so now you're in this you're in this you're in this state where you've done a lot of massive frame breaking and you can explore a lot of the possibility space and so things seem very very pregnant with possibility for you. Now it really depends and this is why we're increasingly you hear people increasingly talking about set and setting. You have to have the proper mental set, the proper framing, you have to have the right the right context setting. I would add two more S's. You you need a good sapiential. That has to do with wisdom. You need you need a lot of skills for dealing with self deception and you need some sort of you need some sort of story. You need an overarching worldview that can accommodate these anomalous experiences. If you have all of those then you'll make frame in a way that actually plugs you it's like the fantasy novel where you go in and you come back and recover this world and see more deeply into it. But if you just break frame and you don't have those four S's, you will gravitate to anything that like the schizophrenic that will make sense of that aberrant salience landscape and so like a schizophrenic you can go into a paranoid narrative. You can tunnel into weird rabbit hole metaphysics. You can get involved in conspiratoriality. I was lit literally typing or writing age of conspiracy. So I think we're living in the age of conspiracy right now. Um uh, sure some people are doing psychedelics, but I don't think that's the big cause. So, what is it if that's one way to break the frame and give you nothing back? What is it about modern life that's broken our collective frame of reference and left so many people to chase so many conspiracies? The meaning crisis. That's a way of understanding what they're connected to what's real. They're not what they So, what the meaning crisis means is, right? Do you have a like Do you have an ecology of practices? What do I mean by that? There's because of the bias variance trade-off that I talked about earlier, there's no one practice. This is called the no free lunch theorem. This is formally proven. There's no one thing you can do to alleviate all your self-deception. That was part of what I was talking about earlier about no one algorithm kind of thing, right? So, what you what you need and what you see in like wisdom traditions like Buddhism with the eight-spoke path, right? The eight-spoke wheel. You need a bunch of different practices that are complementary. They have complementary strengths and weaknesses. So, they they play off against each other and they play with those trade-offs between bias and variance, explore and exploit. So, for example, just just quickly like what I want a meditative practice, I'll use this for my framing, my glasses. And normally, I'm not aware of my framing, I'm aware through it. But in meditation, what you do is you learn to step back and look at your framing and note Hey, wait. Look at that. That's crap. That's distorting my vision. I'll fix that. But that's not if I need something else. I need to know if I can now see better. So, I need to do the opposite, the opponent processing. I need to now put on my glasses and see if I can see more deeply into reality. That's contemplative practices. And I need to move back and forth I constantly going between them in a self-correcting fashion. And also, you need seated mindfulness practices, like meditation contemplation, that are in opponent processing with moving practices, like Tai Chi Chuan, that are getting you to practice mindfulness within movement between flowing in and flowing out with your environment. So, people need an ecology of practices. They also need those credible individuals that can act as exemplars to them. Remember we talked about you internalize people. They become part of your reflective capacity. Your ability to reflect on yourself you get through indwelling other people and then internalizing them. And you need role models and you need them to be in like embedded in a story and a tradition that gives you an overarching worldview telling you how basically we all agreed we're going to fundamentally make sense of things. Now, what used to do that wisdom cultivation were religious frameworks. I'm not here advocating for religion. That's not what I'm here. I'm talking about a historical phenomena. Cross And when I mean religion, I don't mean Abrahamic religion exclusively. That's an ethnocentric bias. I mean things like that other people might call philosophies, like Buddhism and Taoism, Stoicism and Neoplatonism. I mean things that give you ecologies of practices, moral and wisdom exemplars, powerful narratives in which and through which you can identify. And without that you're just going to grab on to whatever grab on and you're going to be and you're going to be radically epistemically vulnerable. The frames are all broken and you're going to grab on Oh, it's the it's it's the world of a video game or it's this world that the LLM is creating with me or it's some weird messed up conspirituality. And it's called conspirituality for a reason. Right, when Julian Evans sort of magnified that term. It's a mixture of conspiracy theory and the spirituality, this fundamental identification in this big picture alignment and adherence. You're going to That's That's what's driving the meaning crisis, and right? So, it not only does the meaning crisis cause, right? That massive epistemic vulnerability, these things now emerge, all of these symptoms, the loneliness, the depression, the anxiety, the increased rates of addiction, the over-identification with mythological worlds, the weird thing that everybody is deeply disenfranchised by politics, but everything is politicized with a religious fervor. Right? All of this then feeds back and exacerbates the meaning crisis, and that's what we're in the midst of. Okay, uh one, is this a unique moment in time, or do we move through these meaning crises throughout history? And two, Yeah. how do we get out of this moment? You've already been clear about you need this ecology of practices, but I'll just tell you the vast majority of humans are never going to do it. I know enough about your cycle and all the different things you do, that just the average person just isn't going to do it. Yeah. Um so, if this is a pattern that's repeated in history, how have we pulled ourselves out in the past, and how are we going to do it now? Right, and I'll answer both of those concerns with uh with at once. We have done this before in the West. It was called the Hellenistic period. So, you've got uh Alexander's empire basically unites most of civilization. I'm not talking about India and China, but a lot, you know, a lot of the world. And And um he does something very powerful. He He brings the He creates a at the Hellenic He Hellenizes the Hellenic culture goes everywhere, right? That was part of the project. Okay? And then that world breaks up because he's dies before he he appoints an heir, and when it breaks up, it breaks up into smaller kingdoms that are constantly fighting each other. So, I want to I want to compare, right, you a person who's living just before uh Alexander, Aristotle, the time of Aristotle, person who taught Alexander, and somebody who's living in the time 100 years after Alexander when all these kingdoms are fighting. Okay, you're in you're in Aristotle's time. You live in one place and your ancestors have lived there a long time. Everybody around you has also the same. You all speak the same language, you all worship the same gods. Right? You have a terrific sense of identity with this polis, right? You you this is where we get the word political from, but it didn't mean what we mean now by political. It means there's treme- The greatest penalty in the the ancient Greek world was uh ostracizing people, not killing them. Forcing them to live outside of the polis was just We We think why is ostracizing being ostracized so bad? I'll leave Toronto, I'll move to some other Who cares? No, this is horrible. This is a horrifying prospect. Okay, so that's the world of Aristotle. Now you're in the world after Alexander. You might You have probably moved to this place. There's people around you that also their ancestors don't come from this place. They speak different language, they worship different deities than you do. Different history, different tradition, different customs. When you're in Aristotle's time, you know the people in power, you literally live in the same city as them. You could even be invested and involved in the government. The time after Alexander, the rulers live thousands of kilometers away from you. Everything that gave you a sense of belonging and being at home is totally lost. And so, this is known as an age of anxiety. And you see the art and everything changing, and you can see the rise of a tremendous sense of ill ease in this period. Now, what happens is a change in philosophy. The philosopher becomes the physician of the psyche. And Epicurus call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others. And addressing It's a good quote. Yeah, addressing this anxiety right? Gets sort of layered on to all the previous projects of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. And so you get the emergence of the Epicureans and the Stoics and the Cynics and the Skeptics. Doesn't mean what we mean by skeptic. And eventually the Neoplatonists who draw it all together. You get these philosophies that are attempts to deal with everything we have been talking about here. They are attempts to ameliorate that self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior and enhance that sense of meaning in life, that enhance of enhance that connectedness to reality to yourself, to other people, and the world. And they create entire ecologies of practices, communities, and role models around that. They don't have to convert everybody. They don't. You're right. They get about 10% of the population involved and that actually tips the balance and moves them forward. Mhm. What will today's version of philosophy be? Will it be philosophy literally or something else? That that that that question sort of pushes on sort of pushes on personal aspects of my own life. Um There's two senses. I I I I use two different terms and I use the two different terms not because I'm trying to be pedantic. I use philosophy to mean what it now currently means by for most people. It means academic philosophy. Philosophy that you can go to a university for and get a degree in. I have a PhD in philosophy, for example. I value all of that. I'm I'm not here to like criticize that. But that did not meet the need I met I was trying to meet when I first went into philosophy and I met the figure of Socrates when I read Plato's Republic. I was in a meaning crisis. And I was looking for a way to ameliorate foolishness, enhance flourishing. I was looking for a role model that I could internalize. I found it in Socrates. And I thought philosophy was going to be that. The original Greek is philosophia, the love the and philia the the brotherly love the the shared we share this love together you and I together in dialogue dialogos. We share together a love of wisdom. That's what it means. That's what I was looking for. And I think people don't need academic philosophy to deal with what I'm talking about. But we all need to be we all need to be lovers of wisdom because wisdom is not optional. You you're you either have an implicit pursuit of wisdom. You're trying to deal with your self-deceptive self-destructive behavior. Try you're trying to enhance your meaning in life. And you're doing this semi-consciously, autodidactically, unreflectively. That's an implicit philosophy in the ancient sense. Or you're doing it explicitly with other people reflectively, self-correctively, self-transcending. You're making use of the best that history can offer and you're creating current and and being involved in current ecologies of practices. That's another thing. That's a positive symptom of the meaning crisis. Tom, I talked to all of these communities that are springing up around the globe. Yes, I I there's a lot of stupid cultish weird things, but there's also bonafide healthy communities where people are creating ecologies of practices for doing exactly what we're talking about here. That's happening all around the globe, all over the place. And then and they reach out to me and I get so and I get to go and participate and spend time with them and talk to them and see what they're doing. I think that's what's happening right now. That's very interesting. We will see if it plays out as well as I hope it will in the face of AI. And there's so many things converging right now. Um talk to me about Socrates. So through your eyes for the first time I found him incredibly interesting. Uh why did they kill him? I think that's a really good in for people that don't know what he was essentially willing to die for. Well, um Socrates developed a practice of question and answer that was designed to get people aware of their narrative framing and how it is causing them to deceive themselves. This is what he meant with This is what he said when he was on trial for his life. The unexamined life is not worth living. He doesn't mean the minutia of going over your autobiography. He means are you cultivating rationality and wisdom? Are you learning? Are you developing ecologies of practices, internalizing developing skills, internalizing role models so that you can constantly and appropriately call into question how you are construing things, how you're framing things, and trying to liberate yourself as much as possible from how you are deceiving yourself and potentially bullshitting other people. That's what he did. And so he would go into situations and he would ask people probative questions that was designed to get them to disidentify with their framing so they could like I did with my glasses so they could step back and look at it cuz that's what you have to do. You have to take your glasses off, you have to look at it and see, "Oh, you have to be in that bigger thing that allows you to see the smaller frame is actually misleading." And he would do this with people that were making claims to being wise. And he was doing it because, well, he was interested in whether or not they were telling the truth. Not in a just a propositional way, but like were they actually enacting the right, commitment to get at the truth of things, which means were they really practicing a way of thinking and seeing that was dealing with self-deception in a in an ongoing, systematic, and systemic way. Now, can And as you can imagine, think about it today. Think about the I'm a Canadian, so I get to say this. Think about the fraught political arena, right, that you have right now. People don't like to disidentify with their framing. That identification goes a lot towards their central ego narrative of who and what they are. So, when he tried to probe people to take off their glasses and look at them, many people That's a state of epistemic vulnerability. Some people like Plato, his greatest disciple, or Xenophon, another another important follower, said, "I see." And And Socrates famously said, "Wisdom begins in wonder." He doesn't mean idle curiosity. He means calling yourself and your world into question in this probative, provocative manner. Some people get, "I see. I see." Other people, "Oh, I don't like that weakness. I don't like that disidentification. I don't like losing that cherished identity. You're a threat." That's why they killed him. Uh that's a a mic drop there. We're seeing this in politics right now. So, this sense of any attack on my politics is an attack on me. Yes. Is a wildly problematic thing in the human psyche. Do you think that the way that we self-deceive has evolutionary advantages? Or is this just a byproduct of another need say to stay flexible or to learn from culture maybe a better way to say it. That's interesting. So, if you take a look at I do a lot of work. I'm trying to get a paper published now. I think it's going to get published cuz it's in revision. So, that that's usually a good sign that's going to get published on the connection the with Anna Riddell the deep connections between all this formal work on relevance realization predictive processing and rationality. So, I I do a lot of work really looking at, you know, all the the the the best theoretical debate the best experimental competition around this. And one thing is becoming really clear. We believe for cultural reasons that we reason that reason is something we do monologically. That means we do it as a monologue. We do it individually on our own and also I'm playing on the word monologue. We we use sort of one formal logic and we talk to her and it's a monologue and we're using one sort of system. So, take a standard reasoning task. I won't go into the details the Wason selection task, right? Um by all sort of you know, objective measures a relatively easy reasoning task. It's kind of like the thing I did with the lily pad with you a while ago. And you give people this problem that we've been doing this since 1966 and this suffer this is not suffering from the replication crisis it robustly and these are the cream of the crop I'm at you know a top tier university in the world these are high IQ highly educated socioeconomically stable status all of those sort of variables that are supposed to predict success you put them in the Wason Selection Task and only 10% of them get it right reliably. Right? They only look for confirmation to put it in a sort of a nutshell, right? Take the same task. Replace it with four people. And tell them to work together. Success rate goes reliably from 10% to 82%. Whoa. This is just read Mercer and Sperber's book The Enigma of Reason. Read the the Dialogical Roots of Deduction by Dutilh Neves, right? Like So what's going on here? Well, let let let's make it hopefully intuitively accessible to your audience. Okay. Have you ever noticed that you're actually really good at spotting other people's biases and and misconstruals? Like, you know, you're really good at pointing to your friend, "Hey, you're doing that stupid thing you always do in your romantic relationships. You're doing it again." And they don't see it and you feel so wise, right? But when it's you, how good are you at finding your own biases? It's really hard. It's even metabolically difficult for you. Right? We seem to have evolved for this. You are my best vehicle of self-correction and I am yours. And that works only if we're in dialogue. Let's go back to the the experiment I talked about. It's not the case. This is what's so intriguing cuz you You look at the data really carefully. It's not the case that one person comes up with the answer individually and convinces the others. The group as a whole comes up with the answers. And this plugs into the fact that that is our evolutionary superpower. We have a collective intelligence in in distributed cognition. Individually, we are pathetic animals. But you get a bunch of us together and we can coordinate our behavior with some pointy sticks and some dogs and we can kill everything on the planet. Right? We evolved for a dialogical multi-perspectival rationality, not a monological one. Okay, so then what's going on in politics? Why do people hate it so much when you challenge their beliefs? Because we have linked that monological model we got from the European Enlightenment, 17th and 18th century, with a individualism and a kind of a small L liberalism idea and the autonomy of the individual. And romanticism reinforced that with self-expression and authenticity. I'm not saying the there aren't positive aspects to this. I'm just trying to answer your question. Okay? And so what that means is we we we progressively have forgotten that the principle of democracy is dialogical rationality. Remember I talked about how we do within our minds, we do opponent processing. We we we we do this tradeoff relationship. Your attention is doing it right now. You've got two attentional systems. You have a um you have a default mode network that's making you want to mind-wander and introduce variation. And you have a task-focused network that's killing off most of the variation. And what you're doing is you're doing this and it's exactly the same principles as biological evolution. Variation and selection. Variation and selection. Variation and selection. And you're constantly, right, evolving like a reproductive cycle, your attentional fit. That's opponent processing. That's within your attention. But, with dialogical rationality, there's supposed to be opponent processing between you and I. We're supposed to disagree and challenge each other, but we're supposed to have common unity, community uh of both agreeing that we need fundamentally need each other for self-correction. And we commit to the process above and beyond our position because we have full acknowledgement and identification with the fact that rationality is primarily dialogical. But, what has happened is we have forgotten that because of this cultural history, and we have replaced evolving dialogical opponent processing between people with adversarial game theoretic zero sum processing in which I can only win by destroying you. Mhm. I think democracy is no longer culturally situated in the United States. Obviously, it's still here politically. Say more. What I mean by that is if you think the primary way in which we undertake democracy is through adversarial processing rather than joint commitment to a community of opponent processing and the power of distributed cognition, you have doomed democracy. I will I will defend that. Defend? Well, what I mean by that is that you you are you if you do not have that, you are losing the capacity for rationality. The point of democracy, like science, this is John Dewey, one of your great philosophers. The point about science and democracy is that they are Yeah, democracy is And And Winston Churchill said it's like it's the it's the worst system next to all the rest. It because in many ways it it it it it it it can be outperformed by other systems. What it has is the best capacity for self-correction. Like science has the best capacity for self-correction. It is designed to be rational in the way we have talked about rationality as systemic self-correction. If you remove the dialogical rationality and the opponent processing, you remove the rationality that is the guts and the spirit of democracy. Okay, so in this moment, you're saying we no longer want our ideas challenged and because we don't want our ideas challenged, we're not getting smarter as a group and we now have a failed state for democracy itself. Yes. Woof. How do you think this is going to play out? The way it's playing out. I mean, the way it's playing out is we're we're seeing we're seeing we're seeing increasing polar and this is not just the United States. This is happening in Canada, it's happening in Europe. We're seeing We're seeing what I talked about earlier. We're seeing this weird paradox of people profoundly cynical and feeling disenfranchised with the political but also deeply politicizing everything. Everything is polarizing. Everything is a culture war. Everything is invested with a religious fervor and yet we don't think that the system that is supposed to solve these political conflicts is actually functioning. And so we think we have to somehow capture the system, capture the institutions and destroy the the opposite side in order to somehow achieve our goals. This is how it's playing out. If this self-correcting mechanism is broken, is this just a runaway flywheel that doesn't stop until there's enough pain and suffering in the system that people will change or is there a lesson in history here about how we back out of this? The Athenian democracy killed Socrates and lost what I was talking about and got overtaken by the demagogues, the artists of the political arena and drove it into extreme extremity, and you have people like Alcibiades and Cleon and others, and they drive Athens to self-destruction. If we don't step out and address the meaning crisis, and properly re-home and re-situate democracy, yes, I think it is doomed. Yeah, I don't see a way to break the flywheel. That that is the and I'm a I'm an optimistic guy, but I like to be able to see what the path forward is, and if I can't articulate that, and history tells me that um I know Thucydides' trap is specifically about a rising power versus an established power, but I'll use it in the sense of that collision that you can see coming a mile away, and you just can't stop it. Yeah. Yeah. That's what this feels like right now. Like the um I am trying to get people to believe in this idea that the center is a destination, that you have to want to end up there, you have to want the friction between the two sides, you have to distrust yourself, you have to want like here's my thing Here, here, Tom. I just want to reinforce that, okay? I appreciate that very much. If we could get a lot more people to reinforce that, I think we'd be in a way better situation. Uh to me, it comes down to don't trust thyself. Like you want to know thyself for sure, but you want to be highly skeptical that you will lead everyone to the right place. This is what Socrates said. He said, "My wisdom consists in that I know that I do not know." He doesn't mean the trivial sense that we know I don't know anything about Australian uh you know a cult I He doesn't mean that trivial sense of ignorance. He means that existential lack of rationality. He he The self-knowledge he's talking about is not your autobiography. He's talking about your owner's manual, like the the thing you that tells you how you how you work. That's what he's talking about. And we And what he did was he would burst the bubble of pretense, where people think they know themselves just because they identify with certain ideological positions and propositions when in fact they and I I I I'm willing to point to my finger at myself by the way. We are ignorant profoundly of what is how we are fundamentally driven and how we are fundamentally self-deceived. We have to do a tremendous amount of work not just individually but collectively and not just now but in a sense traditionally by like you've been doing with me asking about relevant historical precedents. We have to do this more deeply. Yeah, I have a a deep fear that there's something in the architecture of the human mind which has made us the most dominant species the world has ever seen. So this is not me saying I could have done a better job if only evolution had left it to me but uh we for instance so this the idea of the um the vulnerability when you're frame of reference gets cracked and how unnerving that is for a lot of people and how when you attack somebody's belief system it is like assaulting them directly. Humans want to be intoxicated with certainty. One of the first things you learn as a CEO is you have to do this really weird thing of okay the world is presenting us with all these dots right? The economy's in this place uh this is how people think of our product this is how people think of our um the area of the market that we're in all of that stuff. And now I'm going to tell a story about how those dots connect and I need that story in order to move forward because I need the you were talking about bias as a positive thing. I need that bias to know what to focus on so I know what not to pay attention to so I can put things literally in priority order. Now one thing when you train entrepreneurs you realize very quickly people don't they're terrified to put things in priority order. And what I find is they won't put things in priority order because they don't have a strong narrative about where they're trying to end up and how they're going to get there. And so you have to work with them "Hey, decide where you want to get, what I call KYG, know your goal. Yeah. You know your goal, now what are the dots? We're going to connect them in a narrative." Now, you have to go to your team and say, "Hey everybody, I guarantee these are the dots and I guarantee this is how they connect and why we're going to end up where we want to go." You have to intoxicate them with certainty, and they will fall in behind you, and then you can really get momentum, which is a lot of people moving in the same direction. Now, the catch is, as the CEO, while they are running intoxicated with your certainty, you've got to step back and go, "I know something is wrong in my narrative. I just don't know what it is yet." Yeah. And so, it is this super weird thing of like, "All right, everybody, we're marching on that hill. We're going to go get those guys, and this is going to be the outcome." And then you've got to step aside and be like, "Okay, I know there's a flaw here somewhere, and I need to find it as fast as I can." And when you then step back in and challenge other people and ask them to challenge your ideas, you start to break some of that certainty. And so, it's this really weird thing that I see exacerbated a thousandfold in the political arena, where people need the certainty of their own side in a moment like this, where we're very much following demagogic figures. And it's like, "Okay, they've told me this is the narrative. I know how to repeat it, so I'm going to repeat that narrative. I'm just going to get behind it. I'm going to move as fast as I can in that direction." And when the other side challenges, like there are actual videos where you can just look how to counteract XYZ argument. Yeah. And so, it's like, "Just give me the talking points, bro. That's all I need. I don't need to actually understand it. I don't even necessarily need to believe it's true. I just need to know how to rebut it." And it's like, "Whoa." Yeah, so that worries me, cuz that feels architectural in the human mind. I don't know that there's a way I don't think humans on mass will transcend that and to your earlier point about philosophy and that it only took like this small group, but you needed that small group to be to build an alternative vision that people could be excited by that's in alignment with the times cuz now here's my secret secret. See, I feel like I should whisper this but I've talked to my audience about it so much. This is all a debt question. And you can just go back and where are we at in the debt cycle? Because when uh people are making more money over time from their youth until their old age and when they hand the baton to their kids and their kids make more than they did so they're ahead of where they were in their 20s and you have every reason to believe they'll be ahead of you in their 60s than you are in your 60s, everyone feels great at the macro level. When that breaks and for us it's breaking right now for sure. Uh everything feels off, but people don't understand exactly why it feels off. Insteps demagogic figure who gives you just a very clear answer. You slot in behind them, they promise everything's going to feel good again and now you're where we are. I I would say you're in a position the way you describe the CEO is sort of the the the the the balancing act that the religious institutions did in the past. They tried to create the narrative for a civilization to give up momentum to build cathedrals that where one generation would start and three generations later would see it to give an example, right? Or to go to other places or like with the Buddhist who left India and went to China something like that. So they're trying to get that balance and they're trying to get a balance between a nar it's there's a bias attached to that. It's called narrative bias. If you give people a narrative, they think they know about the situation more than they do and they have confidence in it more than they do. It's an actual bias phenomenon. But it's empowering like you said it's We have to always use this word bias In fact, in the literature, we talk about heuristics and bias. A heuristic is when it's working, and a bias is when you don't like it. Yeah. Okay? That's very well said. Okay. And so, and you always have to use heuristics cuz as I was saying earlier, you can't use algorithms cuz it would get you into a combinatorially explosive search. And what what bias what heuristics do is they they say, "Only look here." That's what a narrative does. It focuses you. Like you said, you get everybody focused, and then you get a momentum. So, they were they were doing that. And then they had to But, they had people behind this thing. They had They had people like Thomas Aquinas, or they have Siddhartha. They have the mystics. So, they have they have the they have the priests, if I can I'm speaking very broadly here. So, I'm asking for some charity here, right? You have the you have the priests who are basically like pushing the narrative, and I mean this in the sense of giving it momentum. But, behind it, you have the mystics who are constantly stepping back and yes, but wondering about the whole picture, and you're constantly talking between the priest and the mystics within the religious tradition. And what you you can do is they they were able to manage that for like extended periods of time. Um you know, create and home entire colleges of practices. And and and part of what I'm saying is we lost that at the civilizational level, what you had as a CEO with your particular company. That's another way of talking about the meaning crisis. That's where we're at. And the problem we're making is we think what we need is the super CEO. But, no, right? We need we we we don't just need somebody who's a leader. We need somebody who can do that, can give us the compelling narrative, but is also willing to step back from it and call it into question, and evolve it in a way that constantly draws us out of our comfort zone, so we're willing to commit beyond ourselves to what we want to exist even if we don't like the cathedral. Now, is that possible even in the face of tremendous economic collapse? Yes. Historical example, Bronze Age collapse. Mega civilizations exist empires, Egyptian empire prototypical, lasting for literally millennia, 3,000 years, 4,000 years. This This is the Bronze Age is titanic. And it utterly collapses. General system collapse, change in warfare. We don't quite know what happens. It is the biggest collapse in the history of civilization. It's bigger than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire. Trade, the loss of trade, the loss of literacy, the loss of little loss of cities, much greater. But, what happened was there was a invention of what it what it It's like It's like the asteroid hitting and the dinosaurs going extinct and all the mammals now can move out and evolve. And you got all these little these little mammalian uh kingdoms doing all these experimentation and you get all these new inventions. You get the invention of alphabetic literacy with a standardized reading. You have coinage that teach people abstract symbolic calculation. And when you write things that when with with alphabetic literacy, not like hieroglyphics, way more people can learn it. You go from 2% or 3% up to maybe 20% of your population can And now, think about how empowered your cognition is by the ability to do symbolic calculation and write your thoughts down and share your your thoughts with your future self, share it with other people. You get a massive empowerment of cognition, critical reflection. And you get this whole new worldview. Titanically different worldview arises. The actual revolution, the whole two worlds mythology that that has become the legacy grammar for us even though that is now collapsing. So, do is a Titanic economic collapse possible? You know more than I do. I I I I worry about it, but I don't I don't have I don't have the expertise to properly comment on that. What I can say as a cognitive scientist and a historian is, yes, but right? The we do we have done this before. actual revolution after Alexander's empire collapsed and we did this. We were able to bottom-up recreate entire new philosophical, religious narratives and that had this proper tension. I like to use the Greek word tonus cuz tension is negative in English. Where tonus like the tonus of a bow, the tonus of a liar, right? It It has the tonus between that narrative momentum and that, right? mystical reflection and that rational criticism. Gets that right tonus. We've done it before. We can do it again. This absolutely fascinating, John. This has been incredible. Where can people follow along with you? Well, I would like it if people bought my book Awakening from the Meaning Crisis cuz a lot of this, you know, Chris and I have done a lot to really make a lot of this as accessible as possible. There is the video series. I think the book is better because of Chris's involvement. I did the I I fell prey to the very mistake I was I just critiqued a few minutes ago. I presented the series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It's very popular and I'm not I'm not I'm not I don't I don't want to That's fantastic. I watched it. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. But I did it monologically. This book was written dialogically. If If I aspire to being Socrates, Christopher is Plato. He takes my arguments and he does what you've been doing here dialogically opening them up making them more accessible grounding them back for people showing them how they can be more personally transformative giving them more examples. There's more there's much more rigor in the citations and the references more examples more diagram. Madeline Abramson really helped with editing and correcting and removing a lot of the little glitches that are in the video series. I would really I would really like people to to buy the book actually. I love the man. Well, I cannot recommend it highly enough and everybody speaking of things that I recommend highly if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation check out this episode to learn more. The Matrix is coming to life as Google's Gemini just told humans that they are a waste of resources and they hope we all die. The war in Ukraine is escalating. Trump's tariffs finally get some actual details on them and we'll see what you guys think about my take on that.