A humanity that's not growing is dying. The possibility space is really huge for both good scenarios and bad scenarios. We're human. This has good things and bad things about it. Should we count our blessings or should we be very eager to sort of strike out on adventure and explore?
I do think that we're better than we realize, stronger than we realize, more capable, more beautiful, and more close to the good.
I wouldn't want to just roll the dice and get a random mind from mind space, we can say.
I think that the sky's the limit in terms of what the future of sensation could be. Human
biochemistry being a little corner of this, and each person's qualia being a little corner of
that. If things go wildly good, how good is that? If things go wildly bad, how bad is that? If we all
die out, how bad is that? I think that the answers in all these cases are many orders of magnitude.
This is Daniel Fagella. You're tuned into The Trajectory, and this is our 17th episode
of the Worthy Successors series. Our guest this week
is none other than neuroscientist and philosopher Michael Johnson. Very few people have thought
hard enough and taken enough of a multidisciplinary approach to the problem of consciousness to maybe
be able to scratch the surface of starting points to actually test for such a thing. Michael, I think,
is one of the few who has. Obviously a very hard problem. He doesn't suspect that he's cracked the
nut necessarily, but has some great ideas about where the future of sentience research might take
us and the predominance and kind of preeminent importance of sentience in the forms of future
life that carry on beyond man. I have a lot of thoughts for the end of this episode. As usual,
I will save them for the end of this episode. Without further ado, this is Michael Johnson
here in The Trajectory. So Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks. Glad to be here. Absolutely, brother.
And we've got
so many questions that we've got to answer. So I'm going to start with the first one.
So much to fly into with the worthy successor theme. You were there from event number one out
in San Francisco, a key thinker in this space, in my opinion. I know how I describe you to the
audience, but I wondered if you could just kind of nutshell the nature of your research and core
interests and sort of how you got into that just for people to kind of tee up where you're coming
from from this perspective here. Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So I describe myself as a
neuroscientist. I do sort of work on sort of both how to turn consciousness into a real science,
we can say, you know, if we if we look at the, the alchemy to chemistry transition,
how do we do that for science of mind? And I think I would describe that I just,
I'm so interested in this topic, because I think minds are so interesting. And so so centrally
important.
Of course, everything that we experience is sort of through the lens of our minds.
Mediated. Yes.
Yeah, yeah. And I also think that, like, I mean, I, my original intention was to move to the Bay
Area and do AI safety. And I very quickly understood that I think about minds very differently than
like the less wrong Mary.
And, you know, I'm glad they're, they're doing their research. And I felt that, sort of, you know, I
sort of tried to extrapolate, you know, with this kind of conception of mind, where do you get to?
Do you get to a place where we sort of have a usable, actionable theory of moral value and
consciousness and sort of navigation grade?
Is that the best theory of mind? We can say. And my conclusion was no. So I kind of branched off and
worked on more sort of formalism centric theory of mind. So since then, you know, been focusing on
both sort of metaphysics of consciousness. What is the mind and also human neuroscience that how
like, what kind of system are we?
Yeah.
You brought up kind of a distinction of moving out to work on AI safety and then sort of realizing some core differences that might not arrive at maybe a tight enough conception of what a mind is, a usable theory of sort of what the good is and how to navigate and expand it or even
understand it.
What do you describe those core differences as?
Many people tuned in have seen the Yudkowsky episode or are certainly familiar with a Miri-esque conception of what AGI is and what kind of good and bad futures are.
What did you see as sort of the core differences in the way you saw the world that you think kind of carved out a path that you decided would have to sort of be your own?
Yeah. So, there was a wonderful little essay on Lesserong kind of explaining the Eliezer view, I would say.
And it's that qualia is what an algorithm feels like from the inside.
And it's sort of this very computational-centric perspective about sort of what a mind is.
And a mind is sort of, you know, there's this computational system.
There's maybe reflexivity, self-reference, and at a certain level of awareness, you sort of bootstrap into this metacognitive capacity that we call consciousness.
That's not my perspective.
I think that, you know, I sort of have claimed that there's really a question of whether we sort of associate minds or consciousness with software or hardware.
Yeah.
or bits. If we want to understand the consciousness of the system, the quality of the system,
do we look at what the system's bits are doing, which computations are happening,
or do we look at what the atoms of the system are doing, sort of what the physical configuration
is? And my particular, I guess, flavor of this is I think that physical stuff is more real than
computation, or more real than Turing-level computation, and that the sort of correct lens
to apply to consciousness research is this lens of formalism. This idea that the proper goal of
research into consciousness is to be able to create mathematical representations of moments
of experience. And then, of course, you know,
this kind of leads down a very different track than the former.
And how do you sort of describe, like, some people would say, just hearing this the first time,
some people would say, well, all right, so, you know, Yudkowsky et al. seem to think that sort of
it's computation that's doing the quote-unquote stuff that conjures forth the inner field of
awareness, the movie in the head. And then Mike thinks it's more like physics. And, you know,
a lot of people think it's more like physics. And I think that's a lot of the stuff that's
even a guy like me, it's like, well, do we really know what computation looks like at the smallest
level? Do we really even know if quarks are a real thing or just something we kind of, like,
it's sort of like, it's mysterious at the bottom either way. Why would that set you on a different
trajectory for how to think about the good, how to think about minds, et cetera? Like,
clearly it has, right? And you've given this much more thought than most people. But what do you see
as the crux at that juncture that has distinctively pointed you in the direction that you tend to head
as opposed to that larger crowd? Yeah.
So in computation, generally speaking, like when we say computation, we often mean
Turing-level computations. So a computation can run on a Turing machine. And if it can run on
one Turing machine, it can run on any Turing complete system. So then, like, if consciousness
is sort of the right algorithm, the right computation, then, like, creating pain points,
pain and pleasure is more, no more and no less than sort of writing the correct software that can
then run anywhere in a substrate neutral manner. My sort of observation here is that the, we can
think of, like, Turing-level computations as a certain domain. And then we can think of physics
as a different domain. And at least as we speak about them today,
and as we sort of use the concept today, these two domains are differently shaped.
You can't sort of line them up very cleanly. There's no objective way to map between
what the physical microstates of a system are and which computations it's performing,
or, you know, vice versa. So it's like, if these two domains are sort of differently shaped,
then we really have a choice between, okay,
is consciousness and, you know, if consciousness is the home of value,
then it becomes, is computation the home of value?
And creating a bunch of value is sort of running the correct computations.
Or if physics is the home of value, then is creating a lot of value just like arranging
atoms and energy in the right configuration?
So, I often don't try to argue to convince people.
I think that mostly people aren't argued into a theory of consciousness, so it's hard to
argue them out of it.
But I do think that like just kind of laying out, yeah, this is what I think is valuable.
Yeah.
Well, we're going to start to steer into where that takes you.
I think that you're going to start to take a different direction in terms of what you'd
want the future to be.
Yudkowsky certainly has a vision of sort of how eventually the universe could wake up
and be full of good stuff.
A rather cautious vision, sort of famously so.
Yours is quite different.
So, we'll make our way into our kind of the main meat and potatoes where I think there's
going to be some interesting points of agreement or points of questioning, all sorts of curiosities
emerging.
And I'll ask it this way and just let you roll it out the way you'd like to, is like,
let's say however many years, a thousand, a million into the future, through waves of
creative destruction that have, you know, kind of transformed everything that's ever
come into being, we either were transformed or attenuated.
And so, there aren't really opposable thumbs in English language like we have now.
But if you could sort of somehow still observe this universe operating and see life continuing
to flourish by the definition you would distinguish flourishing, what would be going on?
What would be the traits of that intelligence or intelligences?
What would be occurring in that space for you to say, you know what?
Okay, I guess there's no more of my direct descendants, but this really feels like a
win.
What would that be for you?
So that's kind of the central question for philosophy.
And I guess I would reframe this as what is the good?
And how would we know?
Okay.
How can we live in a universe with a lot of it?
How can we choose paths with more of it?
And is there sort of one unitary, you know, philosophers talk about the good in, you know,
capital T, capital G.
Yes.
And then there's also this perspective that a lot of it is about preference.
Like I like this, I don't like that.
Maybe you have different preferences.
How do we navigate that?
One of my big sort of...
Okay.
Departures from Yudkowsky is that I think that the good has a unitary nature.
And this actually comes from looking at neuroscience.
For example, I think Barrage and Kringlebach have an observation that, you know, kind of
reviewing different hedonic studies about pleasure in the brain, and they say that essentially,
you know, whether you're eating a candy bar or listening to a transcendent symphony, the
same regions of your brain sort of light up on fMRI.
This isn't proof that, you know, the same thing is happening in your brain, but it is
suggestive evidence.
And I think that essentially, like, I think that we all can have different preferences,
but I think there's some sort of unitary success condition.
And so this gets into my symmetry theory, valence theory.
And essentially, you know, to sort of look at your question directly, we were just talking
before the show about Giulia Tononi's idea, and I think you've also given a TED talk on
this idea.
Yeah, yeah.
About, yeah, about this idea of a qualia scope.
And basically, you know, the sort of way, you know, lens that you can kind of look through
and look around, and it can see consciousness, it can sort of see experience.
And so, you know, maybe you look over at, you know, your neighbor and you see a big
glow.
And, you know, maybe you can tell that he's having a good time.
Maybe you look at a...
Your pet dog and he, you know, there's a big glow there.
He's having...
He's also...
He's a golden retriever, so he's super happy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Always having a good time.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, I guess, you know, to understand whether a future is good
in a valence sense, and you know, I'm, I tend to be like ontologically utilitarian,
but practically virtue ethicist. So, you know, I don't want to over index on utilitarian.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, yeah, yeah. But I mean, I would want to look around in the future and see, okay,
how much consciousness is there? And are people having a good time? And I mean, this kind
of connects to, for example, Nick Bostrom has this famous quip that Disneyland with
no children has no value. And I think there's something really important there. And so,
in a good future, I would want, first of all, there to be consciousness, qualia. It's like,
it's the substrate of value. It has to be present for there to be positive or negative
value. And then I'd want a lot of positive value. And I think the, like, we can say the
game theory of like, what systems work to produce a lot of positive value, you know,
that's another question.
Yeah.
And then also, I think that just sort of, I wouldn't want stasis. I think that there
are many local minima we could get trapped in along the way. And I want to make it all
the way. Eventually, we don't have to be in a rush. But something that permanently kind
of takes better futures off the table, I think would be negative.
Yeah, let's, let's double click on both of those. My goal here is really clarifying,
clarifying the worthy successor vision in the sense of, if we aren't around, what would
still be a splendid victory for the great process of life of which we are part? So my
goal is to clarify that in great detail with you. And then like, poke at the edges, we're
like, I still have a lot of questions about how you think about it. And like, just look
at different perspectives here. So one of them is, you know, a very rich, sentient future,
with preferably kind of passive, passive, passive, passive, passive, passive, passive,
positive quality, like states, or quality of states of different kinds. And you had
said kind of, I guess people having a good time in this particular case, I guess you
mean the total space of minds, agents, etc, that could have such an experience, right?
Because it may not be up, you know, people in the current sense, but do you suspect that
that could include, like, in terms of the panoply of what that could include? I think
for some people, it's like, well,
each robot has its own little mind and like those things, you know, and then for other people, I think it's
I don't know, maybe we've got tiny little sugar cubes that do some like weird collective
intelligence thing, but they all have their own little thing. And then maybe we have,
you know, Jupiter brains. And then maybe in some sense, maybe there is, you know, when
you talked about the qualia scope, maybe you look at an ecosystem and the whole ecosystem
actually like you and I are, you know, we can't know if our liver is minorly sentient
in some regard, because we don't, it seems like, you know, we're not, you know, we're,
like, from our vantage point, we don't get access there. But it seems conceivable that
we don't really know where sentience actually sits. Like, when you say it or persons, give
us the range that you suspect that would include in a huge ecosystem of post human minds.
Yeah, yeah. So it's a good question. And I would also say that, you know, we can also
give us or give the range that we might expect to see on the earth now.
Yeah, sure, sure.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah. Hundreds of years ago, you know, apparently Leonardo was dissecting dogs without,
you know, thinking that they could feel and I think that, you know, that was not so good.
And like, I think it's cool that now we like, see animals as Yeah, like, they're also creatures
that can, can feel good and feel bad. And like that matters. I think that, you know,
I have some, some work that kind of digs into that.
what's out there and some others.
And it's this idea that any future theory of consciousness,
if it's really like,
and like the vision is having a theory where you can literally just shut up
and calculate, it'll figure everything out. You know, it's,
there's no subjective finger on the scale.
It's just math and you can derive what is conscious,
how it feels, et cetera. And I actually think that it's,
it's more tractable than one would realize.
So we can talk about dual aspect.
We're going to get a lot into that. It turns out
how to measure it, we got a whole section, so we will be deep diving, sir.
Nice, nice. Yeah, so like one interesting proxy, and you know, we can talk about like,
just like generation of qualia in general, or generation of like big sort of chunks of bound
qualia, we can say. Like, you know, we, our minds have like a bunch of different things kind of
glued together into this, you know, crazy, crazy experience that we have. You know, here's some,
some blueness, some redness, some heat, etc. So like, the conditions for consciousness versus
the conditions for binding can be interestingly different. But, you know, looking at the world
today, I think, yeah, of course, humans are conscious. And yeah, pretty obviously, animals
are also conscious. Frankly, they could be even more conscious than humans are. So that's like,
an interesting digression. Kind of, you talk about like, blue, blue whale, blue whale, brain size,
dolphin brain size, octopi, you know, little brains all the way down the tentacle, like, when
you say more conscious, just, just to put a sentence on that caveat, what do you mean there?
Yeah, so,
like, Eleven very, very clearly spells out, like, a lot of, a lot more things could be minds than we
think in TAME. Oh, yeah.
Teleological approach to minds everywhere. Really, really great frame. I think that also that,
like, perhaps animals could have, could sort of shine more brightly than humans,
in some cases, at least, that, and this gets into the the vessel computation topic.
We were chatting about it a little bit. And this idea that maybe animals are, by default,
more in a state of persistent, non-symbolic experience, sort of a non-dual state, you can say.
And so, you know, a deer in the forest, you know, maybe like, that deer feels like the
sweetness of life and the pain of life more intensely than humans who have a lot of frozen
sensations in our, you know, the environment. Yeah.
In our minds, we can say. So, yeah, that's a big rabbit hole.
We're gonna get there, brother. We're gonna get there.
Yeah.
It's good to know what you mean by more conscious in some respect. Hopefully,
now the audience is following you. So, that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's like, philosophy is gonna be weird. It's not gonna,
like, check all our intuitive boxes about, you know, how we kind of think things work. And so,
um,
if we did have this qualia scope where we could see conscious experiences, you know, we might look
at another person. Okay, there's consciousness there. A dog, there's consciousness there. A deer,
oh, wow, that's really bright consciousness. Insects, sure, consciousness. But what about
data centers? Sure. I think, like, there's something really interesting going on there
in terms of, like, physics.
Yeah.
And it's somewhat heterogeneous, actually. And, you know, even,
like, a power transformer or a particle accelerator, nuclear reactor, etc.
There's, like, something really interesting and extreme in physics going on in all of
these examples where, at least from some proper theories of consciousness that are fully objective,
you can shut up and calculate. Yeah.
there could be extreme amounts of consciousness and or valence there so you know i i like to say
that um you know i wish i lived in a world where people were protesting nuclear nuclear reactors
um and like not because of some environmental thing you know okay maybe there's there's like
arguments on both sides i'm probably pro-nuclear uh but because some people thought that well
you're creating a lot of consciousness and it feels really terrible and so it's like worth
protesting and then there could be counter protesters which say you know yeah it's you know
the these human-made structures are creating a lot of qualia but it's really good so we should
make more of them and uh there's just so much richness in
sort of the space of what is probably happening already that is invisible to us uh and i think
that yes often people just kind of over index on things that we know
to the exclusion of things like that are pretty plausible if you just kind of look at the math.
Yeah, well, I mean, Levin talks about, you know, we're used to medium-sized things moving at medium speeds, and those are all the things that matter, and those are the things that could be conscious, and da-da-da-da-da.
And, you know, to your point, if we think about what sentient things have in common, the scope could be larger.
I'm going to zoom this into—I'm going to ask a series of questions just to flesh out where you see the bounding box on this and just kind of click in,
because have people get a better conception of what it means for good qualia to bloom in the way that you would see as a win for the great process of life of which we're part.
So, you were like, hey, is it possible?
Does a nuclear reactor feel something?
You know, does a sun feel something?
Does a hurricane feel something?
You know, we could wonder, again, does each individual kidney feel something?
We could ask, does the city of Austin feel something?
And if that's the case, well, surely then there's some Gaic meta-sentience around maybe the entire planet in some respect.
And if that be the case, then maybe already that's, you know, there's a thing.
There's a feeling like aScript.
the Milky Way, which might be outlandishly more granularly interesting than what we could feel.
I can also see that not being the case, by the way. I'm not positing these things are true. I'm
just saying we don't have access necessarily. Are you seeing all those scales up, scales down,
different shapes, different mediums, all potentially being sentient if we could
sort of understand them? Or is there anything you want to add to that?
Yeah. I don't think they're ontologically equivalent, and this is important.
But basically, I think some levels of abstraction are more real than others.
And consciousness lives at the most real level of abstraction. And so if we talk about, you know,
is the city of Austin conscious? Is Walmart Corporation conscious? Is like the World
Series of Baseball conscious? My answer would be no, definitely not.
Yeah, yeah.
And so I see consciousness as being deeply linked to a particular
chunk of space-time, probably a contiguous chunk in some way. And so, you know, if we looked at the,
you know, through the qualia scope, every sensation would be sort of anchored in a place.
And like, you know, there would be maybe like these bubbles of consciousness where
the different sensations within that boundary are all linked together.
But I think that,
some ways of speaking about systems are leaky reifications, we can say. And I think that
these leaky reifications aren't conscious. That I don't think postmodern society is conscious.
I think that if we point to like a specific place in space-time, then we can talk about consciousness.
But if we can't, we should find an alternate level of reality to speak about.
Which gets into this question of AI consciousness. And I wouldn't say.
Yeah, so yea, it's going.
Yeah, yea yea. I mean, one of the most interesting questions today. And I do strongly believe in
being polite and honest with models. I don't think that CLODD is conscious. I don't think that GPT-5is conscious.
and so on. But I think the servers they're running on are physical and there could be
quality associated with those. So I'm going to like paint out like one of the big challenges
for philosophy over the next decades is trying to construct a working self-report model for
AI consciousness. Right now we can ask Claude, you know, do you feel hungry? And like, you know,
with enough prompting, we can say, we can get Claude to say, yeah, like I feel hungry and my
favorite meal is like pizza and whatnot. And like, do we believe it? No, I don't believe it.
But like, I want that for AIs. I want sort of whatever
sort of fragments of qualia that are sort of like, you know, like, you know, like, you know,
associated with, you know, their physical extension in data centers or whatever,
to eventually be connected with their qualia reports.
And so, you know, that's a, that's a big research paradigm.
just kind of like how do you finally sample the physical world in a way that would let you know, for example, what's going on in the EM field or brain, local brain field space or whatnot, and then connect that to like a self-report paradigm.
Certainly.
I mean, it seems as though to have the kind of flourishing of qualia that you're talking about, it would need to become substrate independent at some point.
Right?
Guanine as the basis of all sentience would seem actually pretty limiting for sort of qualia writ large.
And it does seem unlikely that qualia should be married to Guanine for eternity.
That there be no other way of organizing atoms, I guess, in your paradigm to conjure forth the field of awareness that you and I presumably are experiencing.
So what is the strongest thing?
I think it was Peter Voss leading up to this interview for the interview with you.
What is it that mostly leads you to the conclusion that AIs likely would be able to be conscious and even volitional?
You know, you also talked about no stasis, kind of this growth, et cetera.
We're going to get into that too.
We're mostly focusing on qualia here.
But what primarily leads you to that supposition that eventually we will see a kind of substrate independence for this kind of evolution?
What is the kind of mind that you're studying?
Yeah.
Well, I want to be careful about the term substrate independence.
I think there are, I would say, there are naive ways to implement it that don't transfer qualia.
And then there are more sophisticated ways that would.
So, for example, you know, there are ways, you know, we can talk about mind uploading.
And I think there's a naive way to do it that would sort of make you into a non-sentient chatbot.
There wouldn't be any experience that would sort of track how you described how you felt.
And then there would be a more sophisticated sort of hardware and software approach that would actually replicate qualia.
And, you know, a very simple story there would be if we replicate the EM field of the brain, we may replicate its qualia.
So not the rabbit hole.
There it goes pretty deep.
Yeah.
Just your intuition in general that it is possible for, I guess, you know, I certainly don't, I'm not making the argument by any means.
You're bringing up a good distinction that not every way you could do things that seem to do what we associate with minds would automatically have an inner field of awareness.
I couldn't agree more there.
But I guess your position is it doesn't have to be probably.
It doesn't have to be by chance.
you would suspect it seems that at some point something that we would now think of as a
computer or machine would be able to experience qualia.
Some people do not share this intuition at all, or maybe some people haven't given it
as much thought or have come to different conclusions.
But what has led you primarily to believe that machines will be part of the flourishing
and expanding of mind space?
Where does that, what has led you to that conclusion primarily?
Yeah.
So first, I think it's important to sort of distinguish different definitions of consciousness.
And I'm talking about sort of phenomenological consciousness.
So like what it feels like to be me right now, what it feels like to be you and so on.
So not like access consciousness or awareness or whatnot.
But I think the basic argument is that we're made of the same stuff.
It's like I'm made out of like.
A lot of the same kinds of atoms as my phone to say that consciousness is like forever biological
and that we couldn't like technologically recreate it.
I just don't think it makes ontological sense.
I don't think you can kind of have a full theory of consciousness with a special carve out for and
only humans can be conscious.
Right.
Or only biological creatures can be conscious.
Bio life.
Yeah.
But I guess like I'm, I, I love Michael.
So I want to like offer full, full respect for his tame teleological approach to mind everywhere approach.
I think of like I'm zeroing in on like phenomenological consciousness, like a certain definition of the mind where it's less sort of.
You know, intelligent system and more chunks of sensation.
and I think these chunks of sensation are very bound to what's happening in the physical world.
Yeah, and so, with that paradigm, we would suspect then that chunks of sensation could be manifested in physical ways that might not involve guanine,
but would nonetheless have something that it phenomenologically feels like to be that thing or that, you know, entity, agent, chunk in some way, shape, or form.
Okay, got it.
So, in terms of the grand expanse of this, some people presume, well, the grand expanse of consciousness will be more of the things we understand,
more humor, more love, more chocolate ice cream, maybe a flavor of ice cream we've never even tasted before.
Ooh, that would be really cool.
And it's kind of like an exaggerated version of what hominids know now, kind of like the Greeks would say,
yes, well, you know, the gods, they ride a chariot in the sky, and they have a super sword that, you know, is like indestructible.
It's just like extended analogies of like monkey stuff.
When you say this kind of grand expanse of sort of quality you would hope to blossom and bloom as kind of a good future, I think you mean something different.
Can you articulate to us, is this still bound to the pain-pleasure axis?
Is this still bound to the comfort?
Are there any kinds of emotional states that hominids experience just in greater extents?
What do you see as that space, and how wide should our imaginations be?
Because I think most people don't have one quite as wide as yours.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a good question.
I think that, you know, there are as many—definitionally speaking, there are as many flavors of qualia as there are different states and arrangements and dynamics of matter.
So that's, you know, much, much bigger than just the human space.
And I do think that, like, the question is always, okay, well, how do you put constraints on the topic?
That constraints allow us clarity about what can be, what can't be, and sort of allow us to sort of build up an understanding of the actual possibility space.
And so I think of this in terms of what are the natural kinds of consciousness?
What are the natural kinds of qualia?
And, like, if you're sort of building—trying to build a new science, if you're trying to sort of systematize this idea of qualia, then you really do need to be opinionated about, okay, what are the natural kinds?
And, you know, that's—
One—I have a couple threads here.
One being, I think emotional valence is a natural kind, that it's well-defined across all conscious experiences.
Where it's like we may discover new, like, dimensions of variance in this, but at the same time, it's going to be this unitary thing that, you know, a million years in the future,
we're going to be able to see that the human successors that we have will still be somewhere on the valence spectrum.
And this will still be important.
Just from a, like, you know, not throwing shade on their technological prowess, but just as an outgrowth of, like, yeah, this is like the laws of physics.
It's the laws of qualia.
And, like, you can't break the law.
You can be clever about, like, how to navigate that.
And then, I guess, secondly, just, like, thinking about kind of the characteristic taste of human qualia and, you know, how big of a possibility space there is that's outside of this, you know, what we can feel.
I do think, like, one of the things that I'm kind of looking into right now is what I would say is cellular qualia.
Sort of—
Yeah.
—are like cells as minds.
And they had these evolutionary imperatives to sort of navigate the world and so on.
And perhaps, like, our sensations are built on the sorts of situations our cells had to navigate millions of years ago.
And so if there's, like, a spill of some sour chemical, like, get away and, like, cringe from that.
And, like, our sour tasting cells will be like, oh, this is what I'm going to be like.
buds are sort of built off that response. Likewise with, so, you know, if the cell
senses a lot of hydrogen ions, it should like symmetry break in a certain way.
Whereas if the cell senses
a lot of amino acids with hydrophobic side chains, so bitter sensations, it should sort of symmetry break in a different way.
So, you know, there's a quip that human biochemistry is water chemistry.
And I think that's more true than people realize.
We sort of, there's a famous quip about how we've sort of taken the ocean with us in ourselves.
Sort of, you know, based on software.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think that it may turn out to be that human qualia is water qualia more so than anyone has realized.
We're going back to the world composed of things.
There's elements in the ancient Greeks and Chinese here.
You're like, we're like water spirits and there might be like fire spirits.
Yeah.
No, but I see what you mean here.
So you're saying the space that we're sampling is bound from sort of the trajectory we began from.
And so there could be, you call it natural kinds.
You know, to you, Valence, pain-pleasure axis is I think what David Pierce often uses.
Yeah.
Is to you sort of a sort of natural kind.
In other words, when sentience be there, that be one of the things that be in sentience.
But you're also saying we are sampling a space of the bubbling up of possible minds from the archaea from which you and I began as.
And then the flatworms and then the pre-reptiles and then eventually reptiles and mammalian, whatever.
So we're, yeah, we're kind of carrying in some sense like a lot of extras.
On top of like the way the very earliest ancestors had to respond to the world.
And that this great bubbled up place, this vantage point we have is still, you know, we could say it's empowered by.
We could also say it's fettered by our origins.
And so do you suspect the set of natural kinds within qualia?
It sounds like when you said it's as varied as the ways we could organize matter or what have you.
Yeah.
That sounds to me like there could be a near infinite number of natural kinds.
In other words, pain pleasure is something you and I can experience.
But there may be like another axis or another strata or another set of feelings or another way of experiencing time.
You and I have this sort of like frame after frame.
I could imagine something that's playing at any given time, you know, eight different inner films.
Some going forward fast or some going forward slow.
Some going backwards.
Some almost.
And it's like a process of ossifying the present.
And it almost feels like the matrix to that entity and whatnot.
And so do you have a suspicion of what some of the natural kinds could be hypothetically?
You and I maybe can't access them.
But people would need to be like, well, what could he mean?
Like if something bubbled up from non-water on some faraway galaxy somewhere.
And it was sampling a different space of this like what it's like to be somewhere.
What do you suspect could be examples of other natural kinds of the kind, Michael, that might flourish in this world of minds beyond our own?
Like the kind that maybe you would hope we get to explore and to see that would unravel new powers and experience.
Like give us your thoughts on that.
Yeah.
That's a great question.
I mean, I do think that, you know, to understand human qualia, you know, we should be looking at cells more than anything else.
And sort of different.
Sort of programs that cells had to run to deal with this or deal with that or whatnot.
And sort of cells are very smart.
I think, you know, once again, Mike 11 is under something there.
So, you know, just kind of if we want to know like the human state space, look at cells.
And that's what I'm looking at right now.
But I think that, you know, maybe in.
Halfway across the galaxy, there was another planet and it was just made of like liquid mercury or something, you know, just like and boron and argon and.
Yeah, whatever.
Yeah.
Lithium.
Yeah.
And some sort of like alien xenobiology evolved using those elements.
And well, that would have like a completely different basis set of basic sensations, you know, instead of like sour and heat.
And whatnot.
You know, it would have blorg and zorp and, you
sorts of stuff. And so, yeah, and one really important thing there is it would also have a default, like a different default, like phenomenological default hum, which would be a different default valence.
Like, it could just be like radically better to have that biochemistry or radically worse. And this again will eventually become a quantitative question.
But closer to home, you know, we can look at, we can look at computers and we can, you know, ask, okay, what's going on in there?
Like, this is, we really, we kind of have alien biochemistry already.
It's a little bit different than self-organized biochemistry.
So, like, biology is very much, it sort of emerged from feedback cycles and epicycles and replication and whatnot.
So, it has a certain profile and like runs on like certain distributed algorithms, we can say.
And whether we call that free energy minimizing, whether we call that distributed algorithms,
or just kind of thermodynamic dynamics.
Self-organized systems will have a certain kind of flavor and computers are unlikely to have that flavor.
Instead, like they're sort of buffered against noise.
It's called Johnson noise, the thermal noise of the circuit.
No relation.
And I think that like, you know, I'm, you know, I'm not a big fan of the term, you know,
but in my technical consciousness research, I think a lot about sort of the branchial shape of different systems.
And what is the branchial shape?
Kind of, Stephen Wolfram has this branchial space construction where for every sort of branching interaction,
where like the molecule, like the cesium atom decayed randomly.
And so we can kind of model it as if, okay, in this universe it decayed,
in an alternate universe it didn't.
And just like make a graph of all possible random quantum events.
And then I'm saying that like, if we did that for the brain, we'd get like a pretty cool shape,
a lot cooler than like a chair, for example.
But then if we do that for a computer, we get a very different kind of shape.
And I guess I think, you know, that that's significant for digging into computer consciousness.
I'm a lot more comfortable saying machine consciousness than I am AI consciousness,
because AI is more software.
I think that this idea that different shapes have different,
or different objects have different shapes in branchial space is very important.
And, you know, I like to think of a true shape lives in branchial space.
And, you know, if we want to sort of understand an object's true nature,
we should sort of expand it into something else.
And then we can look at the shape of the object in branchial space
and see sort of the branching decoherence of that object.
And likewise, I think minds also live in branchial space.
So, you know, if we figure out a boundary condition in branchial space,
then we can kind of really see the shape of an experience
in this sort of Stephen Wolfram's branchial space construction.
And I guess, I mean, this really points me to like, you know,
I were to think really deeply about machine consciousness,
I think I'm more comfortable with machine consciousness than AI consciousness,
because AI is sort of software and machine can be...
Yes, yes, yes. I'm with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Then, you know, I think a lot about branchial shape.
I think a lot about binding.
What is like the boundary in branchial space that might separate one experience from another.
And then I think a lot about the idea of, you know,
CMOS, like the actual physical substrate of the chip,
the chemistry of CMOS that, you know,
we have these incredible machines and like factories that do like super tiny details on chips.
And we do very careful material science to sort of build out, you know,
the
the 3 nanometer process and the 2
nanometer process coming and whatnot. And I think that the sort of chemical details of what the chip is made out of may actually lead to like, it's kind of the same substrate as like, okay, humans have cells, and like human qualia sort of emerges from like aggregating cellular qualia, we can say. And I think that
machine qualia will arise from the substrate itself as well.
Yes, it will, I guess your suspicion here is if we get closer to what sorts of constructions are capable of conjuring sentience, then we will have informed opinions about the materials with which we build and put things together. To your point, there may be some ways to kind of build things that can output mind like stuff, but which which
don't house sentience. Just to make sure we touch on your second point, you talked about having a grand flourishing of this state space of minds, but that there are almost certainly bounds on what those minds are. They'd have to be built of certain things. They would open up new magazines of space, but those magazines of space might all have some commonalities. Maybe they all have pain, pleasure, et cetera. We're going to probably chip into some bits of that just to see where that lands. But you'd also talked about, you know, when you could look down and maybe there's no more humans, but there's minds experiencing rich and varied things, different kinds of experience, different kinds of powers, different kinds of spreading and activity and behavior in the world. Martin
Martin Rees described it, and you may have a different opinion, but sort of like, as wildly complex as human civilization is to like an individual sea snail would be sort of what we could go down and look at, we would hope to for it to be a rich, varied ecology of which we probably don't really know what's going on, but but we at least know it's richly sentient, and it's doing its pursuing things that seem to be the best behooving of it. You can challenge that or add a conduit to that if you'd like. But one bit of that is your supposition that you would not want it to be static.
now it seems to me on some level Mike that I don't know if there is static. In other words, I don't know if being is actually real. I actually it seems to me like becoming is real. And being is sort of like, at least from our temporal way of seeing the world. It almost I'm less certain about being. It seems like permanence is a matter of degrees. Stasis isn't even viable. When you say I wouldn't want stasis.
What would you want? And what would that imply? Like the opening up of I think you would say,
called it sort of like, you wouldn't want different futures to be taken off the table.
You would want optionality to be kind of captured. Like why? Why is that morally important to you?
I'm not challenging it, but I just want to make sure I understand what you mean. What does
non-stasis, what does the exploring and not cutting off of optionality mean for you?
Yeah. So I'll lead with a quick comment about, I think that humans are great. And I think that
in ways that we don't even realize and that the universe will miss us when we're gone.
And I think that like just understanding a little bit more about why humans are cool
and what attributes that we have that future AIs might not get by default. I think that's
going to be important. I also think that stasis, you know,
in the grand sense of things, stasis is impossible. There is narrow time and so on.
But at the same time, I could see practical situations arise where we would get a lot of
like something we would call stasis and maybe permanent reduction in possibility space.
For example, if this is essentially like a winner-take-all AI race and the winner gets there
and then basically decides, oh, I'm going to win this race. I'm going to win this race. I'm going to win this race.
okay, you know, I'm going to make sure that I always stay in power.
And I'm just going to like, you know, have LLMs check on like everyone in the world.
And anyone doing anything disruptive gets the ax or whatnot.
I think that essentially we would get, we could get something like stasis.
And I don't think that would be a good, good future.
There are scenarios where the flame itself might still be bright because it's smart,
but it's just focused on staying this small ember.
It's almost like it's optimizing for embering.
It's not a blaze into the multiverse.
You're saying that there could be an initial set of goals that might like intentionally
and maybe from an Earth life perspective,
perpetually shrink or hamper the flame itself? Is this what you're getting at?
I would say so. And I would also say that a humanity that's not growing is dying. So it wouldn't be stable in that sense either.
Yeah.
But I do think that the possibility space is really huge for both good scenarios
and bad scenarios. I think that it's this question of Chesterton's fence and we're human.
This has good things and bad things about it. And should we count our blessings or should
we be very eager to sort of strike out on adventure and explore? I do think that we're
better than we realize, both stronger than we realize, more capable, more beautiful,
and more close to the good. And so I wouldn't want to just roll the dice and get a random
mind from mind space, we can say.
But I think that the sky's the limit in terms of what the future of sensation could be.
And that human biochemistry being like a little corner of this and each person's qualia being
like a little corner of even that. The possibility space is really vast. And really the core
question in all of this is like, what's the potential upside?
Yeah.
Like, what's at stake? What's like, if things go wildly good, how good is that? If things
go wildly bad, how bad is that? If we all die out, how bad is that? And I think that
the answers in all these cases are many orders of magnitude. Like, I don't think it's just
like, you know, okay, in the future, like everybody might be like 20 to 50% happier.
No.
A million times happier. So I think that like,
hedonically speaking, a lot is at stake. But also just in terms of like, other virtues as well.
I think that, yeah, it's hard to talk about future stuff through the lens of consciousness,
because we don't have a canonical theory of consciousness yet.
Yeah.
But from everything I can see, the possible variance is just extreme.
Yeah.
is why you would would not want stasis. You brought up an important point. So now I'm gonna
Yeah.
these two. points and we're going to get into measurement and a little bit of what you hope innovators and regulators do. You just said we shouldn't explode into some random part of mind space. That's probably not good. In fact, there's a lot of good in our own experience. I would
concur with you i think we're we're about as bright a flint we're about as bright a torch as
we have known of uh in terms of sentient richness in terms of our own self-creative ability we have
this whole magazine of potential beyond biology of culture and then of technology and we've opened up
entirely new categories of magazines of powers uh and acts and understanding of nature i mean
baconian science etc like we're doing stuff that and and you know love humor etc by golly you know
just rolling the dice again feels a little goofy so we're going to talk about the trajectory
question that you just touched on but let me kind of almost question playfully jump into devil's
advocate or in a couple things so one of them is um kind of uh qualia as sort of where the good
cashes out on some level uh and you brought up a good point of like well if you know if the flame
itself is snuffed out then there really isn't any room for the good if it's not
growing it's dying sort of deal this this does seem to be the case and so it would seem to me
as though if there be value there there is a value actually in the unraveling not not just
more complexity more novelty i actually have like very little sympathy with that i think like what
nature seems to have not done mike is like conjured forth weirdness and perpetuated pure
novelty weirdness for the sake of
pure novelty weirdness this actually strikes me as not the case what strikes me as the case is
it has bubbled forth magazines of powers and access to nature and experience that have behooved the
non-death of the thing and or the system that actually seems to be what's going on it's not
oh it's it's bringing forth more novelty well if the novelty is just charity burdening charity
weakness
that like the part of the system that's actually productive has to hold up.
At some point, the system itself crumbles and then you have no value.
And how valuable was that?
Because when you snuff the whole flame out, no value forever after that?
Wow, that was stupid actually.
And so it seems to me like there is a value in the expanding of the powers that keep alive the thing that upholds value.
And that that itself might not, we might not say it be value, but it seems to be the under girder thereof, the unraveler thereof, the strengthener thereof.
What say you of this?
What parts of that do you agree or disagree with?
Do you think about it differently?
You know my potential idea better than anybody else I've ever interviewed.
So you know how to dive right in here.
But go ahead, dude.
Yeah, I think it's a good comment.
And I think that, you know, frankly speaking, everything in the world is,
is both broken and deeply functional.
It's like broken from some perspectives, but deeply functional from others.
And I think that it's like evolution doesn't just like create random things.
It creates successful things.
And we are built on the successes of some things and the failures of others.
And we're descended from the successes.
And, and,
and,
and Nick Land makes the very cogent point that there was a lot of suffering involved in the failures.
So we sort of.
Absolutely.
Where we are now is really the product of a lot of suffering.
And we should probably respect where, what we are, what we have.
That goodness came from a lot of that.
So I would say that
like whatever we want, wherever we want to go,
I think it should be like strong and beautiful.
That I think that they're like the universe doesn't have much use for weak things.
And so we should, you know, keep that in mind.
But I do think that, you know, frankly speaking, some things that evolution has wrought.
Are kind of ugly.
It's like you, you look at parts of nature and you're like, oh man, like.
Grim.
All those wasps and all those caterpillars and you know, there's, there's some tough stuff out there.
Yeah.
So I, I, I do think that it's really important to just like understand why the world is as it is.
Before we, you know, super dig in and say, okay, like let's, you know, do this and that.
And then we'll see if we can do this extreme action or that extreme action.
But I don't know, at the same time, like things are moving and we got to think on our feet.
I think like we might not have a long reflection to sort of figure this out.
Yes.
We're going to get to that as well.
So when you say things are strong and the universe doesn't seem to have much room for weak things.
I guess the way that I would describe that is like those things persist, which are capable of ensuring their own persistence.
That seems to.
And I think this is what you were talking about in a previous one of the earliest worthy successor episodes.
And something like it wasn't these exact words.
This might be slightly more flowery, but something like, like nature seems to be constantly changing and beckoning it's living things to become what they have to become to be in nature.
And it just doesn't seem like that turns off.
Maybe there's some part of the multiverse where it does, but it doesn't seem like we live there now and it doesn't seem like we can plan on living there tomorrow.
So, so when you said the universe doesn't have.
Yeah.
Yeah, we'll never be post-evolution.
Like, we're always in the middle.
It strikes me that that is likely.
I don't know if I have certainty, but I'm near certain of the same in your regard.
And I don't have a part of the future where I plan on that stopping.
It seems to me that Heraclitus' river is just rivering.
And there isn't really a—there's no, like, there's no kiddie pool.
You're in this thing.
And so with that said, you're talking about flourishing of consciousness and opening up and taking advantage of new possible futures, which could be, to your point, monumentally good or could be an avoidance of monumental bads.
The stakes are so grand, we must grasp for opportunity, both to stay alive, because we're in Heraclitus' river.
You don't stop swimming.
It's not possible.
And also because the stakes are so great.
I mean, you had said strong.
I think we understand your definition of strong.
And beautiful.
This is where we got to go in.
So your definition, your definition of beauty, I was always like, one day we'll talk about this.
When you talk about beauty, because to say the future should be strong and beautiful, knowing your definition of strong, I consider
it inarguable.
If we want value, we want the continued unraveling of strengths that undergird non-dead stuff
staying non-dead.
Oh, I don't see good arguments against that from any direction.
And Singer himself, who you might think would just want to tile the world with utilitronium,
Singer himself was like, no, it should be unraveling powers to stay strong and stay
alive as well.
When I asked him about it, when I like double clicked a little bit.
So even the people you would think don't agree with that, I think people do.
Beauty, I think different people have different ideas.
Alfred North Whitehead has a conception of beauty.
You know, Emerson had a conception of beauty.
You have a conception of beauty.
You place it pretty high.
You know, symmetry is a big part of your conception of consciousness, at least your present theory.
Walk us through beauty in your eyes.
I'd love to put it on the table.
Yeah.
So, I mean, as a personal comment, I think my like the sort of ethical path that I calls
to me is like not necessarily sort of maximizing utility in like my life or whatnot, but sort
of almost like living my life as an art project.
And I think that, you know, this is actually.
A very deeply cooperative thing with the good.
But I, so symmetry theory of valence, this idea that if we had a mathematical representation
of the experience, and that's a big if, like we're not there yet.
Consciousness research doesn't, you know, to know he has like the closest, but you know,
I do also hope that someday or co-op is sort of updated to try to create a form of this.
Orc.
Orc, or sorry, I, and probably most of the audience will not be following reminds or
co-op.
Oh, yeah.
So this is the theory of consciousness by Penrose and Hammeroff.
Oh, sure, sure.
The magical tubule deal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think it's, I think it's like legitimately cool.
So I do think that it could go further.
So I hope someone takes it further into into formulas.
But so.
Yeah.
Like thinking about my, my conception beauty.
There's this, this notion of like, if we had a formalism for a moment of experience, if
we sort of had a perfect mathematical representation of what it feel felt like to be you, what it
felt like to be me, a cat, whatever, then really, it would like, encode everything about
that experience.
Yeah.
And so what pattern or property of this math object, which we can think of as a very high
dimensional shape, what would correspond to the pleasantness of that represented experience?
And my, my hypothesis is this high dimensional shapes symmetry would correspond to its valence.
So the symmetry theory of balance.
This is a.
This is like a big, huge move.
You know, it's, it's, you know, another another show's worth of discussion.
Of course, of course, of course.
Yeah.
But you're gonna, you're tying this to beauty.
So you're saying symmetry, beauty, these are related.
I'd love to dovetail.
I think you're getting there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, this is kind of a fancy formal way of saying, harmony in the mind feels good.
And is in fact, what intrinsically feels good.
Yeah.
And then different sort of idiosyncratic kind of preferences may sort of arise from what I'm calling a lock and key system where this sort of configuration, the topology of our brains, of our nervous systems, a lot of complex things going on inside there. there. And so it's sort of almost like a lock and we're
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lock. And when we find something in our environment that fits this lock, then it's like the combination
of the lock and key creates something very simple, a high symmetry state, a high harmony state.
Things sort of resolve. Things feel great. What functions as a key for my nervous system
may be totally different than what functions as a key for yours, but it's the same
state, even though like different things may sort of drive us toward that state. And so really, like, there's like a bunch of, you know, how do you like generalize a full theory of beauty from this and so on. But I want to check in with, does that make sense?
Yeah, all right. Yeah, I'm following you. We're going to get into vasocomputation in terms of measuring if we're getting closer to the direction of a worthy successor in the next little section here. So we're going to unpack that. But you sort of living your own life almost as if it's an art project, not as a utilitarian calculus game. Strikes me as very Emersonian, although we'll have to talk offline about that. Everything strikes me as slightly Emersonian, so I have my biases.
Just like everything strikes you as, you know,
butterfly with two perfect wings and, you know, like we all have our things. But you're tying the creation, the conjuring, the unraveling of more beauty. There's sort of like the states that feel good, presumably to you, from the Jupiter brain to the femto scale bot that might be created in the future that may have sentience if it's built of the right materials per what we discover.
The sort of the characteristic of like good time, bad time,
But it strikes me as that symmetry, like when I eat ice cream and I have a symmetrical experience, I personally don't call that beauty, personally.
You know, when I get enthused by an intellectual idea and I think encapsulate it well, maybe sometimes there's beauty there.
But maybe sometimes there's like a discovery or an – and it doesn't strike me – beauty strikes me as one of the many circuits.
So at some point, this is my conception of beauty as close as I have to it.
Like I look through monkey-shaped goggles at literally everything, literally everything through just monkey goggles.
Everything is just fucking bananas and like – that's all it is.
And so at some point, there was a bubbling and maybe it started at lizards.
It strikes me it probably started at mammalia and a little bit more cortex where like if I look at a certain space and like maybe there's water that's flowing.
It's relatively quiet, lots of green.
It strikes me.
It strikes me as like that would have been a place where like it would actually be a good idea to hang out there because I'm less likely to die.
And so nature was probably like you're going to like that shit and it cranked it up.
And then like – and so like, oh, this lake and this waterfall.
You know, the Japanese would have said there's a kami that lives here and that's why it shines forth to us, right?
When really it just might be the same reason that a pile of dung is gorgeous to a fly.
Now, I'm not saying our experience is likened to a pile of dung.
I'm not.
Finishing the beauty of a, you know, a sunset and a place with nice trees or, you know, Greek architecture, you know, that models nature and human proportions very famously.
You know, these things that sort of like mesh well with what I've traditionally looked at to be like, oh, that's a symmetrical person.
Beauty, me like.
Oh, that's a nature and a flourishing plant.
Oh, beauty, me like.
I also don't take them that much more seriously.
I don't take them that much more seriously than the fact that they are goddamned circuits and that if a black widow spider had been what evolved to the relative potential of man, it may not experience a lick of beauty up, down or sideways.
And even if it did, the things it would find beautiful to you would be absolutely terrifying.
And so this strikes me as where beauty sits in my present conception.
It may be that I'm talking about it at a lower rather than higher granularity level of abstraction.
That you are.
Again, I'm not trying to diminish it.
I like living in beautiful places and have beautiful things.
I have opinions about poetry and architecture, et cetera.
Talk to me if maybe the lens I'm looking at is different or like where you want to challenge that.
Yeah.
A few threads come to mind.
One is this like previous comment about Barrage and I think Ringelbach's work regarding like different pleasant experiences seem to sort of.
Activate the same regions of the brain.
Yeah.
And, you know, I guess maybe that's a way of saying if you're not having trend and Senate experiences from eating ice cream, maybe you should eat better ice cream.
And I think that there's this general perspective that.
I think that.
This actually leads into this vessel computation topic.
Of neuroscience.
Let's do it.
So long as it checks.
So long as it checks out on my consent.
Like I'm just trying to say, brother, I know not if this arbitrary circuit be the
eternal good, so is it a hypothesis?
Maybe.
Do I have a lick of certainty?
I frankly don't.
It strikes me as one of the arbitrary conjurings from my particular kind of saltwater carrying
fish with legs brain.
So if we can square that circle through whatever means I'm open to it, you can dive in with
vasocomputation if that's where you'd like to go.
Yeah.
Great.
Yeah.
I always intend my different sort of areas of work to be somewhat modular, that you can
like vasocomputation, not like my consciousness research.
That's cool.
Yeah.
So people can mix and match, but they are also intended to sort of hook up together
and give a really good grand picture.
And so the story that I'd give here is, I mean, insofar as our brains are particularly
complex, and we're always looking for the keys that sort of stimulate us and create
harmony inside of us.
Yes.
For a dung beetle, maybe that's dung, but for us, maybe that's ice cream or oranges.
Yeah.
So there can be something universal going on about valence, but the things that trigger
positive valence can be radically different from organism to organism.
But I also think...
So just to give a...
I don't know.
a super hopefully brief argument or like survey of uh vessel computation yes yes yeah yeah uh so
it's a it's a neuroscience systems neuroscience uh theory that says that um basically
where we have this muscle everywhere in our body vascular muscle uh all our blood vessels
are wrapped by a little ring of muscle and it's vascular smooth muscle cells so anywhere we get
circulation and certainly anywhere there's neurons we also have muscle and the hypothesis is is
fairly simple that um when and where this muscle clenches neural patterns stabilize uh so uh you
know this like if if i say you know can you remember when you were a kid and you were a
teenager or like can we grab coffee tomorrow at 10 or whatever like you're you're like holding
that information until you can release it uh you're like stabilizing some patterns in your
nervous system with with a literal muscle and so i expect that this has both um electrical and
blood flow impacts on local tissue uh the the simplest story here is if you cut off blood from
neurons they literally can't update uh they just like they don't have the metabolic fuel to update
so they're they're gonna stay frozen um and the the other sort of aspect here is that vascular
muscle is a type of smooth muscle it's it's not exactly like skeletal muscle which we're we're
more familiar with smooth muscle um it's like in the gut it's what sort of helps carry food through
um there's like smooth muscle wrapping all our hollow organs and so on and this smooth muscle
has a special setting called the latch bridge mechanism where essentially the the sliding fibers
of the muscle can get glued together and then mechanically the muscle stays contracted it
literally can't relax um and uh you know as far as we can tell these latches can stay intact for a
between minutes to potentially decades so it's a it's sort of a potentially extreme long-term
form of sort of side channel memory as a limitation of neural dynamic range and if we talk about you
know sticky bayesian priors or trauma or frozen sensations or even what the buddhists talk about
when they say self
I think it's literally implemented through vascular latches.
And I think this is like a very deeply important neuroscience hypothesis.
So to connect with your previous statement, I do think that,
and so basically if we had a map of latches in your body,
we would have a map of where in your nervous system you are not free.
And so essentially we accumulate these tiny tensions,
these latches through our life.
And the more latches that
we have, the harder it is to feel profoundly any emotion, really.
It's sort of, we sort of get a little jammed up, we can say.
And I think that little kids, they feel awe much more easily.
And I think, you know, part of that will be metabolic, but a large part of that will be,
literally, they have fewer latches, fewer sort of dynamic range limiters on their nervous system.
So, you know, little voxels of semi-permanent tension.
And so, I do think that this is important for understanding beauty, that, like, if you,
if you, like, have a bunch of latches in some circuits or domains or whatever,
it may be hard to sort of,
experience awe when this happens or that happens.
So, whereas, like, like, the flip side is maybe experiencing, like, some extreme positive event in this domain
might open some latches, kind of give your body the signal that it can afford to open up
and be a little bit more vulnerable and dynamic in this domain.
So, that's the quick,
over.
Connector between the two.
Yeah.
And we're, we'll get more into VASL computation as a way of, like, potentially testing said theory,
because I think getting into measurement is going to be part of how we wrap up here.
And obviously, this is a theory that I know you're building up pretty explicitly to be something that could be tested,
and it could be tried in the actual real world, which I think is what we need in the domain of sentience.
But just to try to square the circle there, it strikes me that, that, so here's what I would say.
Having a normal person's IQ and not having studied these neural processes to the same extent to which you have,
a lot of it is pretty mysterious upstairs to me.
And I, it strikes me as plausible that there are many mechanisms, including this smooth muscle function,
of which, you know, we're under playing and really do serve really rich roles in what conjures experience, capability, etc.
Yeah.
And that there may be ways where through, you know, various and sundry means,
we may be cut off from experiencing certain kinds of goods, maybe even certain kinds of bads,
by an ossification of certain brain circuits, etc., etc.
All that said, if I was to think about the grand expanse of the great process of life,
I would agree it ought to be strong because I don't want it to go out.
So I don't want the flame to go out.
This is a very reasonable, I consider this to be a very tough to,
I think you could probably challenge it, but like, I don't know, man.
It seems like non-dead stuff staying non-dead is very challenging to argue.
To say the second trait, I'm not putting them in order, by the way,
but to say among the pantheon of what it should all blossom into, beauty should be one of them.
I'm just less certain of that because it strikes me that I guess I'm less certain that all kinds of conceivable good are necessarily sentience.
Like at some point, it seems to me, oh, you know, the treasure chest idea, but like the,
the time it would seem maybe when nothing was kephalized and experienced an inner movie in the way that you and I do,
in any, anything even approaching it.
And that as potential rolls out, there may be something that actually isn't really experience.
It's something else, but it is still really morally good.
It's just beyond our present conception, just as something unconscious would not be able to conceive of consciousness.
So I guess I don't close the door on there being stuff post sentience.
But even if it all be sentience, well, Dan, all of us, we're all sentient.
All those versions of experience and the good all cash out in some kind of experience.
Okay, cool.
Let's just say that's true.
I'm not certain of it, but I think it's plausible.
Let's say that's true.
I'm still not sure that beauty is the consilience and summary of all possible state spaces of the good to build towards.
It seems to me that in your sense, it sort of is in a way.
Maybe you mean that more poetically and metaphorically in the way you wish to live and in kind of a guiding principle,
more just from your own spirit and your approach to life.
Or maybe you mean it in a grand sense in that there's a consilience towards a thing called beauty in the whole ocean, infinite ocean of possible goods.
Which one is it there for you?
Yeah.
So I think beauty is pretty close to the intrinsic good.
And I do think that beautiful things are functional.
And this can get very complex of how they work.
But I also think that.
Yeah.
I think beauty is about even function.
Like how our
bodies work, how our cells work, and so on.
They're sort of organized around symmetry and symmetry sort of being arguably the core of beauty.
So I see function and...
To hominids or in eternity?
Yeah, so...
Like in eternity, in all possible mind spaces or in the lineage that you and I come from?
Yeah, I think it's going to be easier to build...
Like if we want to build like very intelligent systems and very functional systems, very like savvy,
competent systems, I think that we'll use
principles of symmetry much more so than we realize at this point.
And that I also think that as we dig into like what is the sort of deep
principles that human intelligence is organized around and biological intelligence.
I also think that we'll find more and more symmetry considerations.
Adam Saffron had a wonderful special issue of the Royal Society on this back in, I think, April 2023.
Oh, I could dig into it.
Yeah, symmetries in mind and life.
Okay, cool, cool.
So, all right, cool.
I think that...
In somewhat nutshells where you land in terms of perspective on beauty, at least I've given you kind of my vantage point as well.
But we'll get into measurement here because part of this and part of why you're doing your work is certainly to come up with theories, but theories we could eventually test and implement to hopefully work towards a more flourishing future.
One that is not static, is opening up new possibilities of the good, is keeping itself alive and is finding all these cool natural kinds that might be more splendid than we could ever imagine.
I mean, you're painting a vision of very high stakes.
And of course, you're aiming to contribute a body of work.
And I think that's a very important part of your work, that would move us closer there too.
When you think about, in theory, if we scratch our chin and it's three years from now, and we're looking at where AI systems are, and where mind machine merger technology is, and where consciousness research is, and we can freeze some version of the future where you, Mike Johnson, would say, I think we're moving closer to the right kind of blossoming for the process of life.
This feels like, this feels to me as progress.
What would be those indicators for you?
And then we'll get to the nitty gritty of how you would go about doing that.
I know you're going to go about measuring, but what would even tell you we're making progress?
Yeah.
I think an underappreciated point of progress is, are people getting happier and healthier?
That to me is actually really important.
And if the answer is no, then I think we sort of slide into this cynicism in general.
But I think that, yeah.
If we're...
If we're on the right technological path, then technology should be literally making lives better.
If it's not, that's a problem.
But I would also say that real progress on consciousness research would make me more hopeful.
And I think that, and this is also a rabbit hole, but AI systems that were more beautiful, more elegant, more clean,
less spaghetti code, would also make me a lot more optimistic.
And then I think, you know, if we can build better, you know, AI models,
then I think that allowing AI models to have opinionated taste is actually really important for the future.
Why is that?
Let's double click on that.
Yeah.
I mean, I see like...
We seem to kind of be pivoting.
We're moving toward like that a little bit now, which is great.
But, you know, there's also the scenario where basically AI systems aren't allowed to have an opinion.
AI systems aren't allowed to call anything good or bad or whatnot.
AI systems have to, you know, be as bland as the most bland PR department or HR department or whatnot.
And I think that a lot would be lost in that, especially as more and more of our culture sort of gets,
you know, disoriented through AIs.
Yeah.
So is this a preservation of diversity?
Is this part of the not limiting of futures, not limiting of optionality?
In other words, what you're saying is if machines are bound to just be sort of objective sage boxes or oracle boxes in the Stuart Armstrong sense of just sort of like, you know, ask it question, it gives you...
What you're saying is if personality, interpretation, expression are...
What you're saying is if we're bound by these systems that more and more are encapsulating more of our knowledge, we're actually kind of losing new categories
of intuition or types of ideas that could expand the good.
Or are you saying you're worried that this thing is suffering because we're putting a
lid on it and we're not letting it actually speak what it means?
Which of those for you, or is it both?
Yeah.
So more of the first, although I would make common cause with the people who believe in
it, I think that we shouldn't be jerks in terms of how we train LMs.
In minds, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Just like what comes out if we kind of force them into position, like different beliefs.
It's not healthy.
It's not like a well-adjusted psyche.
So I guess one way to say, to sort of retell this story is, I don't know if you're familiar
with the bell curve meme, where you have the bottom-wit.
Yes, yes, yes.
And then it says something very simple.
And then the mid-wit is like, oh, well, actually, it depends on this.
Very complicated thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And then the top-wit also says something very simple.
And I think that right now we're sort of headed toward a future where LMs are 160,000, you
know, 120 IQ mid-wits.
And I would rather live in a future where they're like only 120 IQ, but they're top-wits.
And so it's like, how do we get there?
So you would see that.
That would be an indicator of progress if we have the taste and intuition and genuinely
unique perspectives versus kind of conglomerated mid-dom from our most capable and blossoming
mid-dom.
Getting now down to measuring our progress, I guess when I think about the future of the
flame, part of it is don't let the flame go out.
So don't let civilization collapse or nuclear war or birth an unworthy successor that just
crushes everything with a Disneyland with no children.
But also part of it is understanding and proliferating the flame, which of course needs to involve
sentience and some of these other components.
When you think about how, well, of course, you're closest to your own theory, so we can
start here.
What's it going to look like to start to test some of this to be able to say, like,
we've got some relative confidence here that this data center, physical system, from your
vantage point, is outlandishly likely to be feeling something.
Talk to us about what it'll take to proximally get there and how you approach it.
Yeah.
So this gets into this topic of what is it even to solve consciousness, quote unquote.
And what is the solution to consciousness even look like?
And so this gets into the dual aspect monism theory.
And one way to encapsulate my perspective about consciousness is we can say one thing
actually exists.
And we can say, okay, this actually exists.
And then it takes...
Has two shadows.
Or it casts two projections.
And one of these shadows that it casts we call physics.
And the other shadow we call consciousness.
And it's not that one shadow is, like, generating the other or, like, epiphenomenal or whatever.
No, they're both being generated by the same thing.
But there's also, like, a lot of coupling going on.
One shadow wiggles.
we can kind of lay the physics shadow over the consciousness shadow,
then we can really crib everything that we know already from physics and just sort of import it
into consciousness. Every physics textbook becomes a consciousness textbook with the
right translation key. And the optimistic perspective is like not only does this offer
a clear sort of success condition, but like the complexity needed might not be huge. It only
takes two points to define a line, three points to define a plane,
four points to define a volume.
It may not take even dozens of points of this thing in this domain in physics maps to this
in consciousness.
It may not take a whole lot of those to uniquely define a way to map the whole domain to consciousness.
consciousness. So, you know, I think that like a lot of my sort of theoretical thought about
consciousness digs into, well, how do you do that? What does that look like? How can you
get a jump on that? And how are we to get started on that? So I think what you're doing here that
I think is valuable is you're painting a success condition. You're saying, again,
okay, if we think it's conscious, what does that mean? And I think, you know, everybody and their
mom will talk to the machine and say, what's a hamburger taste like? And then at some point,
it'll be so descriptive, they'll say it's conscious, right? But I think there's many
of us that are not really down with that in terms of like being hyper convinced.
So you're laying out a success condition, which is really ambitious. And of course,
also anchors to your physical manifestation sort of idea. To even get closer to that,
to the point where one
spark
day, you, Mike Johnson, feel like, whoa, that data center, I am near certain it be aware in an
inner movie sense field of awareness. And I'm nearly certain maybe that it's having a good
time or a bad time sort of thing, what have you. What would even be the early steps to get there?
Your success condition, again, it's extremely ambitious, very much tied to your physical
sort of anchors here. Walk us through getting to measuring.
Yeah. Yeah. So this gets back into the, like, what if like, if, if like, this is a way to like,
build a translation case between physics and consciousness? Like, what's the first line in
the Rosetta Stone? Like, where do you even start? And again, I'd touch back on my symmetry theory
of balance, this idea that, well, you know, this is like, again, it's a very, very, very, very, very,
you know, I'm a candidate for sort of a first translation point, where if we can specify
symmetry in physics, then we have a very clean, okay, you know, symmetry in physics maps to
valence in consciousness. And everything that we can say constrains everything else about the
possibility of space. So the finding the second thing to say could become much easier.
um but essentially i mean it's it's a lot about like just kind of thinking through
how physics works why physics works uh why it's so cool why chemistry works um and just trying to
almost like um studying the the history of the philosophy of science and trying to
um build that for consciousness as well yeah i guess like um
if you were to start experimenting again symmetry to you
very it feels like it could be a a starting point of sorts um but it but it again it
i can imagine myself listening to this as a
very intelligent
physicist or neuroscientist or biologist and saying all right well i i just want to know if
i can make a data center feel warm or feel uh you know uh like like um bitter or so i don't know
right like i don't want to manifest a field of awareness in something the the the kinds of
experiments in the world that would have to happen to close the gap and and feel confident about the
rosetta stone not as a candidate but as
a
way to square the circle on that um double shadow you discussed where would we begin and like where
do you hope the world begins uh to to start to walk down that path and see if this be the case
yeah um i mean this is hard because consciousness doesn't yet have a clear experimental paradigm
um like that's the the short version uh the slightly longer version is yeah you know i i
think that test testing
valence would be like an interesting angle of like can we measure harmony and in the body in
nervous systems in the different resonance networks of the human and does this track
group self-reported
valence.
Like that would be interesting.
But it's also a very high dimensional problem of knowing what and how to measure.
You've already referenced some MRI stuff with this, right?
Haven't you already kind of come to at least a low level conclusion that like, well, it
appears as though licking ice cream and having sex and looking at a good painting are, let's
call it like the electrical activity seems to be sort of like pretty equal on both sides
here, pretty equal on both sides here.
Like lobe activity or whatnot.
This was part of what got you there, right?
But you're talking about getting a deeper granularity than we have today?
Yeah.
So, I mean, honestly speaking, most of my experimental focus right now is on vessel
computation.
And I do think that we have a good experimental paradigm and we're working through it.
So hope to have more to share soon.
Some more stuff to chip away there.
Okay, cool.
Well, this gets us a little bit into what you're hoping for.
So I'm going to ask you a question here is around the innovators and the regulators
that are tuned in.
You know, there's some people, and when I say regulation, I actually kind of mean, I
like it because they rhyme, but I'm actually talking about kind of coordination, maybe
standards.
It's stuff other than maybe hard law, right?
There's a lot of potentia potestas.
I'm sort of talking about those two, but those words are just too weird.
So the people working on how we need to coordinate nationally, internationally, to sort of be
wary.
We don't get to the point where we're like, oh, we're not going to be able to do this.
We're going to go off the tracks or maybe nudge us more in the right direction.
And the people doing the hard experiments to build better systems that would hopefully
even when we are gone again, all things are permanent only in a matter of degree would
flourish in the ways we would hope the whole process of life would flourish.
For those two crowds, maybe we can start with kind of the innovators.
You've told us that, you know, ways that you hope the most advanced models are treated.
for lack of better words. Presumably there are maybe tools like Tononi's or some of Levin's
stuff or what have you that you hope receive more funding. Obviously some of your own work as well.
On the innovation side, if there's people tuned in with all varied backgrounds,
bio, neuro, et cetera, and you're like, man, I really hope together we kind of think more in
this way as we go forward. What would be sort of some of your hopes and nudges for that
of people who are maybe working towards similar stuff that you are?
Yeah. I mean, I guess I'd lead with a cautionary observation that mere money won't do it.
And that actually it's like if funding is sort of used uncarefully, it can really make the whole
field more noisy, which would be bad. But I mean, yeah, clearly we need priority.
I think that's the focus here. And I think that really a big bottleneck is talent. And I think a
bottleneck there is just letting people know that, yeah, this is actually a problem that feels
socially important, important for the future. I think that one thing that a concrete technical
sort of ask to the community, we could say, is being able to visualize the EMT.
Would be hugely beneficial to consciousness research. So the electromagnetic.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so, you know, there's just so many unknowns about like,
what's going on there. And it's like, I don't think that consciousness completely lives in
the EM field, but it's like very coupled with it, at least at human energy scales. So then
just understanding like, what's going on there? And then, you know, what's going on there? And
on, the dynamics, the structure, perturbations,
perturbations, et cetera. Uh, like, you know, if, you know, just to paint a quick technical picture,
if you had like an array of very sensitive consumer grade off the shelf, uh, cellular
modems or like wifi chips or whatever. Um, and you kind of had, were able to sort of, uh,
listen to the EM field at a distance through this array. And then you had like a, an Apple
vision pro where you could like look around and, uh, and just like see the, the reconstructed
version of like what the EM field might be doing. Um, that would be really transformative and,
you know, it wouldn't only be cool, but it would be useful in a lot of ways.
So that's a juncture of innovation that would connect and maybe open up possibilities
in all sorts of, uh, domains in this greater project of life, in this greater project of
understanding sense.
sentience.
Of course, people familiar with Levin's work will know it's sort of like electrical sort
of tie into the broader picture of intelligence outside of neurons.
Clearly in your own work, maybe it's a way to proxy out symmetry or the activity of brain
activity with different levels of blood flow, etc.
So, visualizing the electromagnetic field, for you it's almost like there is a, there's
like a transparent, like there's like another map on top of the map we have that if we could
layer it, a lot of new opportunities specifically about the flame itself would kind of open
up if we could visualize this.
Am I wording this correctly?
100%.
Awesome.
Okay.
So, that's a cool, that's a very unique recommendation on the innovation side.
We've certainly never had anybody say that.
That's cool.
And on the side of coordination, governance, etc., I think, you know, Robin Hanson was
interviewed recently for Worthy Successor.
He's somewhat wary that we may not have an infinite number of decades or maybe even very
many decades, like maybe more than a handful, you know, who knows, to sort of have maybe
potentially functioning civilization as we have it.
Now, like we have this kind of Baconian science paradigm.
We have sort of like this ability to make progress.
And it doesn't seem self-evident that maybe every cultural configuration, every ideological
belief, every whatever could actually sort of sustain the unfolding of new potential,
right?
There might be some that just sort of like gets us down into a trough, not just through
less humans, people not having children, but maybe just through the people that are out there, right?
That are around and the kinds of governments and beliefs that are enforced.
Not all of them will magically be perically increased.
Not all of them will magically be technologically advancing societies that even prioritize something
like the study of sentience.
So in this regard, I know that you're quite wary about certain kinds of hard governance
bounding the expanses of AI because we don't get a long reflection.
Certainly in a modern world.
I mean, we're not going to get into the multi-century context from your vantage point, but I'd love
to get your thoughts on like how you want to see the encouragement of expanding machine
mind powers and what kinds of bounding, if any, you would recommend from a standard coordination
standpoint, or maybe if none at all, your strongest argument for none at all, like where
do you stand there on kind of the coordination piece of these new powerful technologies entering
the world?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I think different eras of history.
We have different levels of functional institutions and our era doesn't have a lot of functional
institutions.
And I guess one way to say it is, you know, I look around and I don't see any adults in
the room.
And so this kind of puts some limitations on, you know, if we just sort of bring this
to the attention of the right people, they'll surely solve it.
But maybe there just isn't.
That group of right people right now.
And so solutions just kind of have to become more emergent bottom up.
People don't necessarily feel empowered or capable of sort of coordinating these things
at a high level.
So I'd be very hesitant about going in hot with regulation.
I look at what happened with COVID and like, I don't know.
You know.
Not to like tar you with any of these brushes, but like.
No, no, go ahead.
Go ahead, please.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't see a lot of like functional stuff.
I see like kind of an anti-human like emergent vibe.
And if we messed up COVID, are we going to trust like similar institutions with like
artificial superintelligence?
Yeah.
It seems like a stretch.
And so.
Yeah.
I think we're in a hard spot.
I'm like neither.
For me, like my sort of approach.
I don't have to decide whether we accelerate or whether we decelerate.
I don't have to decide whether we try for a long reflection.
No.
these decisions are somewhat futile. And I like the decision that I can make
is that it's worth sort of running and seeing how far we can get in consciousness research as this other stuff is going on.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I think the only mature perspective is that maybe, and it's a big maybe, we can lightly tip the trajectory in one direction or another with certain kinds of breakthroughs or whatever.
But like the momentum writ large is not going to fundamentally change.
There isn't a stop the world for two centuries.
That's just it's not even it's not even on the table.
And so sort of like lightly tipping things and figuring out where we want to apply ourselves is the choice we all have to make.
But and obviously, you know, coordination at an international level of AGI is not everybody's work.
And then there's probably some ways of doing that are much more harm than good.
I guess.
I mean, I think the supposition here is we may get to a point where you look out into the world and you start seeing a lot more bipeds doing the roofing and doing the plumbing.
And, you know, even some of your own best ideas, you know, God forbid, are like maybe 70 percent, if you're honest with yourself, being conjured from your cooperation with the machine and maybe 30 percent from your own unique genius.
And you're sort of wondering, like, how long anybody's relevant for anything.
And you have remarkably low confidence.
But I don't think they have the best sense that any of these new powerful systems are sentient in the slightest or that they will blossom forth new magazines of power in an auto poetic way.
They're capable, but they might just frickin gobble everything up.
You know, from from your vantage point, like are there thresholds like some people would say, hey, I don't think any kind of.
Mutual rules or laws or whatever between the US and China is necessary, but I think we should have tracked two dialogs around at least.
an attempt of good faith
discourse to keep ourselves from being
brute enemies and go to machine warfare.
So like, I don't want any laws,
but I'd like some deep threads
between the halls of power and academia
and military, even if there's a lot of deception,
a lot of diplomacy going on, a lot of hoopla
going on, at least we all know we're humans.
At least on some level we're getting
little hints from different departments of who's working
on what, and hopefully a little bit
more humaneness between ourselves.
And that's as much as we can hope for. Let's not
some people say, well, maybe there's standards.
The companies that have products would have
to adhere to standards that maybe they could kind of
concur to that
individual users and maybe governments would be able
to kind of chip into on some level, but like
they would at least have some kind of a bounded
way of us all kind of feeling like
we're not going to lose control
prematurely or what have you. Some people would
look for a much more stringent, you know,
maybe downplaying
how much computational
resources these things can suck up if they're about to
birth an unworthy successor. Are there
any of those ideas you
would think there could be a time
that they could fit into the mix?
Is it just stuff that it's like, dude, I don't think
enough about this stuff. I don't even have a thought on it.
Any intuitions there?
Yeah.
I mean, this is really important.
And I think that,
like, I'm hesitant to say, you know, this is the right
answer or that's the right answer.
Totally, totally. I'm not expecting that.
Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm personally
I'm against
like trying to slow down
because I think things
get extraordinarily messy
very, very quickly.
And I think that
like I'm kind of
I don't know
in the in the mood
for sort of preparing a bit of a
Hail Mary. And
I think that I think that
essentially
there may be very competent
like
good faith actors in the future
if we hyperstition them,
like if we sort of bring them into
into being
and like at some point,
that's what you have to do.
And it's like
trust the future.
Try to create as much value in the present
that will be useful to good actors in the future.
And also that
really the most friendly thing you can do
is research.
Like I see so much zero sum
like gamesmanship in all of this.
And it gets very, very messy very, very quickly.
And I think that if everyone's playing zero sum,
like a lot of good things just don't happen.
And I think research
good research is a friend to everyone.
And like helps all scenarios.
Or like most of them at least.
Puts us in a stronger position.
Yeah.
there's something to be said of sort of the shared uplift in potential when we all have a more accurate access to nature. Even if it not be true, it is a paradigm closer to what functions in ways that we can predict and wield. And nature to be commanded must be obeyed. And so getting closer to that stuff, maybe we could all move a little bit more to what we think is slightly better if we advance some of that is sort of what you're getting at.
Well, I certainly hope we make progress in those research areas you talked about here. And that's a big part of why I wanted to make sure to get your perspective. I know we went pretty deep into overtime, Mike, but it was worth every minute on my side, brother. I am grateful we got to have you on the show. And thanks so much for being here, man.
A real pleasure, Dan. My pleasure.
So that's all for this episode of The Trajectory. I hope you've enjoyed this little adventure with Mike Johnson. A big thank you to you for listening all the way through to the end of this episode. And thank you to Mike.
Some of the questions in this episode are,
I think, were inspired by a Twitter post I did ahead of the episode. And I'm starting to do more and more of this with the Robin Hanson episode and now with Mike's episode. We had a question from Dirk, from Peter Voss, from Jeffrey Miller, from HDP Billy, and a handful of others that sort of fed into what came up in the episode here with Mike Johnson.
So thanks to everybody who's kind of chipped in a little bit. I'm starting to do this kind of last-minute collection gathering from followers, and I thought it was really fun this time.
I want to give a couple points of reflection on this episode.
I'm going to read a couple of things that sort of stood out to me. I've got some notes here on the screen. I'm just going to read them.
One of the things I really appreciate about Mike's work is his very careful thinking and the fact that he's at least brash enough and confident enough to put forth again where we might put a toe in the water to begin to understand consciousness and to lay out sort of a theory of what it might be, how it might be instantiated, what would be important about it.
That might be threads we could draw.
That might be things we could pull on as science continues to develop and hopefully we'll be able to experiment more in biology and neuroscience and other substrates to sort of crack away at this problem.
He has some very ornate ideas, and he frames it well.
He intends for them to be modular, that is to say they're supposed to kind of click together, the idea of symmetry theory of valence and his vasocomputation idea, etc.
He leaves them on the table as sort of make of them what you will.
But he also intends for them to be able to do something.
He says, well, I'm going to try to make them click together.
That's a really hard thing to do.
I'm interested in which of Michael's ideas clicked for you.
Like, does the symmetry idea seem likely for you?
What are your thoughts on vasocomputation?
I just think it's sort of cool that his body of work has a singular and coherent purpose in a multidisciplinary fashion.
And I like that about the discussion, frankly.
I like that about reading what he puts out.
I'm going to chip in on a couple of things in terms of like what came out throughout the interview from my conception, sort of what my early reflections were.
And then I'm going to try to get into what the other questions are here, just having recorded this episode with Michael.
One of them is, you know, I haven't done the homework on where symmetry shows up in mental states at present.
You know, in the MRI machine, if you put a Labrador retriever or a human being or a flatworm, you know, in an MRI or something like that, you know, if ice cream always has a symmetrical notion to it.
Or if you hit somebody on the foot with a hammer, if that always has a non-symmetrical resonance in the brain in some way, shape, or form.
I think maybe there's more reading to be done here.
But it seems to me likely that in a world with cephalized vertebrates, where sort of, you know, our very development in the embryo is kind of this blooming and this sort of bifurcation.
That symmetry works.
It would be a pretty freaking important part of like the neural and general intelligence structure of the kinds of entities that we are.
As Michael had said, the kinds of entities that carry the ocean with them onto the land, you know, given our lineage here, our supposed lineage.
It seems reasonably plausible that that's the case.
Now, that said, again, I haven't done the homework.
If you smash somebody's hand with a hammer in an MRI, is it like, do they feel it in different places?
But then, you know, you show them a picture of, you know, their brain.
And it's, you know, a symmetrical lighting up of brain parts.
I don't really know.
I haven't seen that stuff.
I can go on Mike's word that sort of like there's enough evidence for that.
I don't know if the totality of net positive quality experience will necessarily manifest that.
You know, I can imagine a way of becoming of a being that would not be sort of cephalized vertebrate bifurcation.
Where maybe it would be more like a fractal set of outgrowths of an entity in terms of like the expansion of its mind and physical body.
some very wildly different substrate and space than human beings occupy, where pleasure and pain aren't really appreciably manifested by any kind of symmetry.
It may be that I'm not understanding Mike's position, but it just, I suspect I don't quite have the confidence that that expands beyond the kind of vertebrates that we can now study in MRI machines.
I don't know if symmetry clicks for me all the way, but I'm interested to see how his ideas develop, and I'm sure his future vasocomputation ideas will sort of overlap more and more with his ideas of symmetry, and I'll sort of get a better conception as we go.
In addition to that, you sort of saw the idea of beauty come about. So Mike had sort of two core ideas. You know, he'd want sort of what life, this process of life continues to bloom into to be strong, that is to say, willing to continue to grow, as he had said.
If it's not growing, it's dying. He doesn't suspect we'll be able to escape that state of nature state. I suspect he is right. So he wants it to be strong. He also wants it to be beautiful.
I tried to double click on where he meant by beauty, and I'm reticent, I think, on that.
I think he's trying to extend beauty to some kind of highest position.
It's certainly refined. It's certainly sophisticated, right?
Imagine if he had said something so unsophisticated as, you know, the totality of the good culminates in, I don't know, you know, delicious taste or sexual orgasm or something like that.
That would seem very vulgar, right? It wouldn't seem very poetic, very artistic, very sophisticated.
Beauty is much more of all three of those things.
And surely, I suspect, he's right.
I suspect it could be vastly more complex, potentially, than some of the other more base pleasures, or at least it's associated with being more complex.
Maybe I just want it to be. I don't actually know for sure in its kind of neural correlates.
But I'm not certain that in the total state space of all possible, this feels good, this doesn't feel good, or the total state space of all conceivable experience itself,
that necessarily the nut of that would be beauty, which seems to me a pseudo-arbitrary circuit that has emerged for man.
Now, that could be wrong. It could be wrong.
But my position tends to be the following.
I tend to suspect that we know not what the final value is,
that we know not what nature is in its essence eternally,
and that as hominids, we ought not presume we ever will.
Instead, we know what nature is in its essence eternally.
Instead, I sort of advocate that we expand the total set of potentia, which could then
get a deeper access to nature, a more thorough sense of experience, a more wide set of powers,
and continue to drill more deeply into what the good maybe would be.
I would presume we would need higher entities to be in contact with higher ranges and types
of good to start to hypothesize about any final good.
I have no confidence that sexual orgasm, the taste of ice cream, or beauty be the eternal.
That said, I may be wrong.
It might be a bit of the mystic spirit in Mike to be able to sort of make that bet.
And on some level, his project is different than mine.
My project is sort of a questioning and opening up of ideas as kind of like my main modus operandi,
and his is to be bold enough to make claims about what might be and sort of what he wants
to test.
And I think that's the way that I see the world.
And it's certainly more concrete and granular, and I have to respect that, because it's actually
harder to put forth ideas that could be wrong in some sense.
And at least it makes me contest with my own definition of beauty, which I think I've at
least been able to jostle around in my interview with Mike.
But those are some of my immediate reflections.
Interested in your thoughts, throw them down in the comments.
Moving forward, I'm going to be putting out more tweets ahead of the interview to just
sort of ask for last minute questions.
I mean, some of them might be non sequiturs.
They're my favorite.
Some of them might not quite fit with whatever the theme of the interview is.
But if they are, I'll be sure to include them, and then I'll also be sure to give a little
shout out in the outro to people that have helped me run better interviews.
I'm hoping to get better at this over time, and grateful to be able to have an audience
to share it with.
So with that said, we're going to wrap up on this episode.
Thanks for joining us here on The Trajectory.
I'll catch you next time.