WEBVTT

NOTE Machine-generated transcript; not human-reviewed.
NOTE Canonical transcript: https://opentheory.net/transcripts/neurotech-philosophy-five-models/

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My name is Michael Johnson and I'm here not necessarily to talk about the stuff that I'm researching right now, but we can also discuss that later.

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But I want to talk about... and how's the sound by the way? Is this... okay, great, great.

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I want to talk about a little philosophy today and I want to make the big claim, we can say, that when you're making neurotech, you're actually doing philosophy about what kind of thing we are.

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And likewise, when you're doing philosophy about... or neuroscience about what kind of thing we are, what kind of thing a nervous system is.

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You're also doing... yeah, the other. So, anyway.

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A little bit of intro. I wrote a book on technical consciousness research, Principia Qualia.

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And I co-founded a research institute and left two years ago. I'm in the process of founding another.

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And I'm kind of known... who here has read...

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Read some of my stuff? Okay, great. Nice.

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Cool. So, let's talk about the details.

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I think one thing that really gets easily lost in the noise of sort of talking about neuroscience, talking about neurotechnology,

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is these fields are tricky.

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And I think that's because we're truly pre-paradigmatic.

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It's, you know, we can call it neuroscience, we can call it neuroengineering, etc.

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But that doesn't make it sort of properly paradigmatic.

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And so, you know, it's not that we don't have stories about how the brain works.

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It's that we have so many stories.

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And none are as predictive as we would like.

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So, that's not to say that there's not a lot of high-quality work going on.

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It's just that there's also, frankly, a lot of bullshit.

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And the only antidote to bullshit is good taste.

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So, my second big claim here is that neuroscience needs treasure maps.

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think that's the

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That we're certainly building technological capacity much faster than we're figuring out how to improve people's lives with it.

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You know, we can have very, very advanced, you know, we can put wires in the brain.

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And then what do we do with those wires?

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And the techniques that we found are pretty simple.

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Let's just pass electricity in the wires.

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Let's use, you know, we can use a lot of electricity.

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Let's try 20 hertz.

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That didn't work.

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How about 30?

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And so, it's like our techniques tend to be fairly simple.

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And there's this term called a hardware overhang.

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And it's often used in sort of the AI safety space.

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They talk about a hardware overhang for AI or AGI.

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That if we only had the right software, well, our computers are already good enough to run it.

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And I think that today in neurotech, we have a hardware overhang.

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Our tech is usually pretty great.

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I mean, if you're following the Neuralink numbers, it's amazing.

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But we don't necessarily know what to do with this tech.

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So, one common theme, I think, that we'll see more and more as time goes on is that treasure maps are extremely useful.

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Because having a goal state, having sort of, okay, like, knowing what a good direction even is in the brain.

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And knowing what a good state is.

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I think that's just incredibly useful.

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And I think that, you know, things like Buddhism, yoga, etc. have these wonderful treasure maps.

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And this is one thing that I really appreciate about using the Jhanas as a treasure map.

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I

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think it's a fantastic approach.

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So, generally speaking, if we've spent many person centuries on building good maps

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of interesting states and wholesome states, that's worth a lot.

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My third claim is that every neurotechnology project is an implicit thesis on what kind

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of thing a nervous system is and what kind of thing a human is.

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And in kind of a compressed quip, I would say neurotech is

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perhaps the platonic form of applied philosophy.

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And that this also gives us some tools to critique neurotech projects.

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That if a neurotech project doesn't have a clear implicit thesis about what kind

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of thing nervous systems are, then it's at least partially a LARP.

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It's at least partially this sort of, well, maybe if we just stick some

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advanced technology in the brain, magical things will happen.

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And I'm not so optimistic about that.

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So...

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So, I guess, just frankly speaking, I think there's a lot of good things we can say about humans.

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I think we're awesome.

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I think we're beautiful.

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And more human, not less, I think is a very good sort of theme for neurotech.

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But this is somewhat or somehow under discriminate.

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You know, it can kind of point in many directions.

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So more on that in a bit.

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So there's a I believe it comes from Warhammer 40 k.

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This idea that if something doesn't die, shoot more bullets at it.

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And in medicine, this is called the Mordaka theme.

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And Sarah Constantine had a great framing on this,

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that the Mordaka story is common in medicine.

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You do an intervention, things don't get better,

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or only gets a little bit better,

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and the researcher says, okay, well, this didn't work.

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But often it's just, well, we didn't do enough of it.

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We didn't do it at a sufficient intensity,

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or we didn't layer different things on.

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And like antibiotics nowadays,

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single antibiotics often don't work,

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but triple antibiotics do.

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Cancer, you have, I don't know how many different cancer drugs

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at the same time that you just layer on,

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and it usually works that way.

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Same with HIV drugs.

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And with seasonal affective disorder,

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does anyone have seasonal?

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Seasonal affective disorder?

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Yep.

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So the finding there is that the lights that are sold

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for seasonal affective disorder just aren't bright enough.

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And if you just have four of them, or six of them, or whatever,

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if you get more light, it actually works.

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So I do think, yeah.

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I'm sorry, what?

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Do I?

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Oh, oh.

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Sure.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Okay, okay, great.

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Yeah, happy to, yeah, happy to chat.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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So one of the comments that I would,

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I would offer is that neurotech is generally thought of as,

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you know, you put like wires in the brain,

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and then you like do stuff,

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or you put like, at least you have to measure things with EEG,

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and so on.

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But like, I get the sense that successful neurotech,

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and I'm not quite sure that we've seen successful neurotech yet,

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but it might be pretty strange.

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And it might not be what we think of as neurotech.

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And it could be very simple.

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I really liked this.

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I don't know if you, if you guys can see it.

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I'll, oops.

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No, that didn't work.

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Okay, so Milan Sitovic had the tweet,

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the most potent legal neurotechnologies,

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dogs, music, caffeine.

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And I think that's beautiful.

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I think that we should keep an open mind

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about what exactly neurotech is.

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So, I say six, but it might be five.

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I don't know what I'm talking about.

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But I guess this, in a way,

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this is ideas that I hope people steal.

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In a way, this is sort of requests for startups.

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So, we can just kind of talk through these things.

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So, the first, oh, and,

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go back here.

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So, this is, as part of this framework,

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there's the insight, or the model,

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which is more philosophical.

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And then there's the intervention,

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which is the actual technology.

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And it's sort of, I try to present the insight

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or the model, and then say, okay,

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how could we operationalize this?

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How could we turn this into some sort of real tech?

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So, the first, I'm gonna call it an insight,

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is that there's this thing called fractal dimensionality.

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And it's basically the branching factor of a pattern.

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And, like, trees have a branching factor,

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like a fractal dimensionality,

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between 1.4 and 1.6, generally speaking.

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And, like, if it's two, then it's a complete

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line, and if it's one, it's just a line.

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So, like, 1.4, 1.6, it's like a tree branch, basically.

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And empirically, we humans really like things

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in the range of 1.4 to 1.6, exactly what you find in trees.

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And also, empirically, our nervous systems seem to be,

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to have this fractal dimensionality as well.

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It's called the Hausdorff dimension.

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And one interesting thing here, too,

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is that in studies of the environment,

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the finding is that being around trees

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has a very powerful antidepressant effect.

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It's just, you feel better if you can see trees.

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Whereas, interestingly, very interestingly, I think,

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grass doesn't.

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If you're on grass,

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if you have a nice view of a grassy field from your office,

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it doesn't help nearly as much as if you can see trees.

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So, I think that's important, actually.

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And you can do a similar analysis for sounds as well, sort of.

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So, interestingly, Jackson Pollock paintings,

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is everyone familiar with Jackson Pollock?

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He just kind of, you know,

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the story is that he just randomly slops paint on some canvas,

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and people buy it for a lot of money.

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But I think this is wrong.

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Because when you analyze the fractal dimensionality,

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like the branching factor of the lines in Jackson Pollock paintings,

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it happens to be between 1.4 and 1.6.

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And I think this is, I'm gonna have to say,

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profoundly important. So now we get to the part of the thesis here. Does everyone know

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what the Tetris effect is? Okay, so it's when you're playing Tetris and you're making these

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lines and you're getting the four dealer in the hole and that's kind of the purpose of

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your life for the duration of the game. Then you'll close the game, you'll go do something

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else, maybe you'll go rest or try and sleep. And when you close your eyes, you just see

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Tetris pieces. And it's like a very notable thing. Tetris is just very effective.

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It's very effective at eliciting this pattern. And I would say that this is a very important

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thing in that modern life in general, it isn't

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fractal. It doesn't have this fractal dimensionality of 1.4 to 1.6. And maybe this specific room is doing pretty well with all these beautiful paintings. But there are also a lot of sort of hard edges here. And our nervous systems really adapt to our environment. And I frame it like we pinch our sort of scale-free networks into

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scale-specific circuits to accurately predict things. And just modern life is just filled with sort of weirdly discrete dimensionalities. And I would call modern life just one big Tetris effect. And then so the one of the conclusions here is that one time or one reason we need time in nature is to reset this, to get back to sort of to pull our networks apart back into their normal

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shapes. So first idea someone should definitely steal. I'm calling it an Apple Vision Pro app for tracking nature seconds per hour. So imagine the Apple Vision Pro. Okay, you're wearing an Apple Vision Pro. And it can see everything you can see. It can hear everything you can hear. And then basically it adds up how much fractal dimensionality between this

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1.4 to 1.6 range there is. And then it gives you a rolling score. How natural is your environment? How stressful is your environment? And maybe an office cubicle gives, you know,

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four hundred nature seconds per hour. Maybe a walk in the woods gives, you know, almost a perfect score. And maybe a tasteful home office or like this environment gives maybe, you know,

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1,200 nature seconds per hour.

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So in terms of, it's not everything

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about what makes a natural,

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useful environment versus a stressful environment,

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but I would love to have this app.

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So please, please, someone make it.

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Happy to chat about it.

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So this is a hypothetical app, it doesn't exist.

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I hope someone makes it, yes.

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Yeah, nice, nice, yep.

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So there are also other possible variants

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for this long story, but,

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so the second insight that I would offer

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is that some people feel nice to be around,

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and there's this really,

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really important question, well, why?

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And I wrote an essay recently on this,

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it's called Presence Neurotechnology,

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sort of the minimum viable technology

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for recreating the felt sense presence of someone.

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Like could we make some technology that,

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where it felt like Shinzen Young was in the other room,

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or your wife was in the other room, or whatever,

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Like you couldn't see her, but you felt her energy. So,

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so that gets into the sort of technical stuff.

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But just as a minimum viable product,

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just kind of, not necessarily product,

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but just kind of a test of this.

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One thing that I hope someone makes,

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and again, this is just a bunch of requests

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for startups here, is an Apple Watch app

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that you install it with someone else,

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you sync up with someone else,

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and then it just mirrors their heartbeat

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watch. And whatever rhythm you're in, they feel on their watch, and you feel their rhythm.

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And I don't know what this would feel like. I don't know what this would do. But I think

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this is the sort of research that would be easy to do, and someone should definitely

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do it. So I think all the foundation is there. I just need to do it. Nice.

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and

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And yeah, there's more sort of sophisticated, complex approaches that you could take. I

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kind of like the idea of if you have a meditation teacher, if you sort of put a lot of electrodes

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on them all over their body, and then you have students meditating, well, what if you

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put electrodes on them as well? And then whatever the electrodes from the teacher are, you can

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measure, you sort of gently transmit

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to the students what would happen.

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I'm not sure, but I hope someone does it.

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So the third idea that I would share is have you guys, who here has read Neural Annealing?

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Okay, a decent, cool.

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So I wrote an essay back in 2019 entitled Neural Annealing.

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And the basic model is that if you have some piece of broken metal, like a broken shovel

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or sword or something, then you take it to a blacksmith.

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You say, hey, can you fix this for me?

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And what does the blacksmith do?

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The blacksmith heats it up.

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Until it melts.

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And the more technical term for this would be entropic disintegration.

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You add energy until the existing attractive landscape disintegrates.

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And then you hammer it into place.

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And then you let it cool.

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And depending on the rate at which it cools, some blacksmiths might choose to quench it

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in water or quench it in oil or let it air dry.

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You get different sort of microcrystalline.

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Different patterns in the material.

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But basically, you get a full reset in the microstructure.

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The sword is fixed or the shovel is fixed or whatever it was.

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And in a very simple sense, this is what I think is happening during meditation, music,

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psychedelics.

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Not only this, but I do think that this is a very good compression of that.

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So, yeah.

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So, I originally wrote Neural Annealing as a two part thing.

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One was the description of the model.

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And the second part was a product.

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Like okay.

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Let's turn this into a technology.

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And the idea that I had was music feels good.

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Turning up the volume on music makes it feel even better.

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That's interesting.

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But there's limit to that.

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You can only get so loud.

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are not so happy with it.

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But if you expand it to more senses and you touch more of the brain's sensory surface

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area, then that's like turning up the volume way over the perceptual limit.

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So we looked at light sound vibration, LSV devices, synchronized to music with the idea

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that you'd get a psychedelic trip without psychedelics if you just sort of amplified

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the music in this way.

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You can dig into a lot of interesting experiences, like going to a rave.

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Well, why is that so intense?

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Well, it kind of drives your whole brain with this pattern.

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So I think that you can just kind of naively take a piece of existing music and multiplex

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it.

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Or you can kind of...

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Do some feedback or choose, for example, some sound with a lot of the same sort of

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dimensionality motifs, we can say.

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Yeah, bioactive sound.

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Like a rave is an LSV situation.

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It's light, it's sound, it's vibration.

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I would say that it's a narrative situation and a very intense situation.

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And I think that's the reason why it's so interesting.

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Because it's sort of pushing the swing on...

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It's adding energy to the system.

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Now we can talk about brain versus body and embodiment.

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Frankly, the more energy you have in your system, the more sort of sensitive to sensory

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stimuli you will be.

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So the more things like that can get you even further.

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Okay.

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Model four, bioelectricity.

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So we have...

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My friend there, Ben, who knows a lot about this.

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And generally speaking, humans have a bioelectric field.

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And it's very important, significant for health.

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And kind of the more woo frame is we have an energy body.

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Well, yeah, we literally do.

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And I think that...

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Like the...

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The picture that the research is showing is that this is significant at

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multiple levels of the organism. So you have cells sort of function by the electrical polarity between what's outside the membrane and what's inside the membrane. And then organs also often have electrical gradients. And then your overall electrical field, it's looking like

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it's sort of a morphological field, I believe the term is. And basically, like, the signal that tells your cells, okay, grow an arm, grow fingers, but stop there, grow in exactly this shape, this is probably dominated by electromagnetic, local electromagnetic considerations.

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One core question for me, and this is sort of a precursor to talking about, well, let's, how do we technologize this? But it's trying to reimagine a lot of the normal, we can say normal wear and tear, or normal dysfunction as disorders of bioelectricity. And I think cancer is a perfect example that, yeah, actually, it is a disorder of bioelectricity.

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You know, we can talk about, you know, this mutation or that mutation, but actually, sort of the most elegant compression is that, well, something is wrong with morphogenic field. And my expectation here is that a lot of things are like this, that if we have this very central coordination regime for the body, for

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cells, for tissues and organs, and for overall morphology, then, I mean, it's got a lot of details. And for sure, things will go wrong a lot. And, you know, hopefully, it's got some error correction. But I foresee a lot of the things that we think of as very different, very disparate, not connected at all,

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will actually be connected. And then the question becomes, well, what kind of interventions are possible? And, like, one thought, and I'm, you know, looking forward to digging into this with Ben. But just like, so one kind of interesting observation here is that when you take opioid painkillers, you scar more. Your body

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becomes more vulnerable. And so, you know, I think that's a really good point.

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more scar tissue.

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And as far as I know, I'm not sure how widely it was tested, but it was framed as opioids. Part of the mechanism of opioid painkillers is it allows peripheral tissues or just kind of, it allows dropouts from the electromagnetic field. And so you don't get the pain. And I suspect that a lot of other things would be kind of fitting this pattern to you.

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I'm thinking about, like, cellulite. And maybe that's also a dropout from the EM field and so on. And so just in terms of thinking, okay, what kinds of interventions could you use on, like, the body's morphogenic field that kind of enforces shape and structure?

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I mean, if you break a bone, you can rig up a splint and kind of regrow, you know, kind of keep the body in shape.

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And so you can do a lot of things correct as it regrows. Could you also rig up an electromagnetic splint that sort of fixes your EM field in the proper shape as your tissues regrow?

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If I want to say one thing here, it's that if we could actually visualize the EM field, if we could see it with our eyes, we are very visual creatures.

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And we're our sort of intuition.

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And we can see it in real time in high resolution.

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So basically, whoever figures out how to rig up a system, maybe, you know, with the Oculus Quest or the Apple Vision Pro, where you could actually see the EM field, that would absolutely change the world.

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It would fix so many things.

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So please, someone do that.

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So just a few notes on the stuff that I'm working on right now.

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So last year I released a paper called Principles of Vasocomputation.

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And it's basically this thesis that tension regulates neurons.

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And that tension in an area, by cutting off blood flow, you force neurons, local neurons,

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into a safe mode where they don't update.

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So you can sort of think about the brain as a holistic programming environment where you

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can sort of catch patterns by clenching.

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This is not necessarily a technological thesis.

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I think that the body just uses this principle.

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There was a paper in 2007 called the Hemoneural Hypothesis.

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There were two very interesting observations made.

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And the first observation, which was pretty extreme, is that blood flow in normal brain

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tissue varies by a factor of 20.

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Not 10%, not 20%, but 20x.

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And then the second observation was that changes in blood flow precede changes in neural activity.

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So there's been follow-up work last year.

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And that confirmed the sort of causal thing.

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That it's not that neural stuff happens and then blood comes to feed it.

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It's that the blood comes and then neural stuff changes.

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I think that this is a very interesting sort of lens or window to look at the brain in.

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And that it sort of reimagines a lot of things about brain stuff.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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So...

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Long story short, I think that...

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I mean, this is what I'm spending my hours thinking about right now.

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And the tech implication that I just want to kind of share, and it's also a request

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for startups, is that technology that releases tension is incredibly valuable.

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And it'll have sort of a lot of implications.

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Yeah.

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So, yeah, happy to chat about that later.

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So, okay.

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This is just a research stub, but happy to chat with people about it later.

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So, to wrap up, there are a lot of ways to frame what is a human, how to become more

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human.

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And I think that...

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Yeah.

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I think that it would be very interesting for people to sort of see...

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Like to maybe consider doing this exercise, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow morning, et

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cetera.

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Just if you picked your three all-time favorite quotes about humans, about society, about

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the human condition, et cetera.

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And just try to write out what might this imply about what kind of thing a human is,

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and what might this imply about what sorts of technology could bring more of this into

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the world.

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So, thank you.

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Thank you.