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304 - Abstraction and Consciousness with Christian Genco

• Jason Swett

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In this episode I talk with Christian Jenko for round two. We explore abstraction as the most important idea in software, Michael Singer's philosophy on consciousness and thoughts, whether AI can become conscious, and how our mental abstractions shape what we see in reality.

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A Paper Newsletter For Programmers

SPEAKER_04

Hey, it's Jason, host of the Code with Jason podcast. You're a developer. You like to listen to podcasts. You're listening to one right now. Maybe you like to read blogs and subscribe to email newsletters and stuff like that. Keep in touch. Email newsletters are a really nice way to keep on top of what's going on in the programming world. Except they're actually not. I don't know about you, but the last thing that I want to do after a long day of staring at the screen is sit there and stare at the screen some more. That's why I started a different kind of newsletter. It's a snail mail programming newsletter. That's right. I send an actual envelope in the mail containing a paper newsletter that you can hold in your hands. You can read it on your living room couch, at your kitchen table, in your bed, or in someone else's bed. And when they say, What are you doing in my bed? You can say, I'm reading Jason's newsletter. What does it look like? You might wonder what you might find in this snail mail programming newsletter. You can read about all kinds of programming topics like object-oriented programming, testing, DevOps, AI. Most of it's pretty technology agnostic. You can also read about other non-programming topics like philosophy, evolutionary theory, business, marketing, economics, psychology, music, cooking, history, geology, language, culture, robotics, and farming. The name of the newsletter is Nonsense Monthly. Here's what some of my readers are saying about it. Helmut Kobler from Los Angeles says thanks much for sending the newsletter. I got it about a week ago and read it on my sofa. It was a totally different experience than reading it on my computer or iPad. It felt more relaxed, more meaningful, something special and out of the ordinary. I'm sure that's what you were going for, so just wanted to let you know that you succeeded. Looking forward to more. Drew Bragg from Philadelphia says Nonsense Monthly is the only newsletter I deliberately set aside time to read. I read a lot of great newsletters, but there's just something about receiving a piece of mail, physically opening it, and sitting down to read it on paper that is just so awesome. Feels like a lost luxury. Chris Sonnier from Dickinson, Texas says just finished reading my first nonsense monthly snail mail newsletter and truly enjoyed it. Something about holding a physical piece of paper that just feels good. Thank you for this. Can't wait for the next one. Dear listener, if you would like to get letters in the mail from yours truly every month, you can go sign up at nonsense monthly dot com. That's nonsense monthly dot com. I'll say it one more time. NonsenseMonthly dot com. And now without further ado, here is today's episode. Christian, welcome. Ellen, thank you again. So you and I recorded very recently, last week sometime, um, and we talked about AI stuff. I don't even remember at this point. Uh my memory gets like erased every weekend. Anyway, welcome back. What's on your mind?

Can LLMs Operate At Sky-High Abstraction?

SPEAKER_00

So kind of, yeah, continuation of last week. Uh, we've been messaging back and forth about this new thing. Uh the so the general problem that I'm interested in is like how what what is software development? What is software architecture when we have LLMs? At what layer does it make sense to be focusing your attention on the system? And uh Ralph Wiggum has been interesting to me because it seems like a much bigger push towards uh uh just just jetting up into the stratosphere of abstraction of like, can you just give an LLM a prompt at the level of something like make a SaaS that does, I don't know, drip email campaigns. And then that's your only input into the system and uh from a technical perspective. And then maybe you give a similar high-level command to the marketing engine of like marketed in this way with you know TikTok uh user-generated content. And Ralph Wiggum, I think, is an early idea of that, that you can be giving it just much more unsupervised, like you know, there's an LLM doing the job that you would be doing of supervising stuff. And I played around with it a little bit last week and we we were texting back and forth about it. And I flip-flopped on if this is a good idea or a stupid idea, just kind of putting LLM prompts in a for loop. And I think now I'm firmly in the camp of that it's a stupid idea. And there's still a lot of value in being at a lower level of abstraction, of like to give it these high-level prompts is leaving too much up to the LLM. I I think it's possible we'll get there very soon. I think it's it's feasible maybe within the year, but uh certainly not yet. And uh yeah, that's that's kind of my vibe on it so far. But yeah, that the high-level question, I think, is just like where are we now? What's what's the level of abstraction that makes the most sense to focus on now from both the software development perspective and the marketing perspective? And uh particularly interested in like your test-driven development background of like can can we get better systems, can we bet get better software if we're following TDD, or are we already kind of blown past that because you just give the LLM a prompt of here's the feature I want to make and it makes it, and you just kind of verify that that the feature does what it says it's gonna do. Um and then where's that going? Where you know, how how might we be positioning ourselves so that we're we're focused on uh you know, skate where the skate where the puck is going to be uh uh a year from now, it's probably gonna look totally different. But are there are there things that we can be doing now that kind of are preparing us for what this feature is gonna look like of what to be focused on? So yeah, that's that's kind of the theme of what I'd like to talk about today, both on the on the marketing side and the development side.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, interesting. Um it seems to me like you and I are like super on the same wavelength uh intellectually. Um and you know, it's it's uh for context for the listener. You and I like chatted a few times at Microconf and stuff like that, but we haven't until last week we never really had a very in-depth conversation about anything that I can remember, but I can tell as as we talk that like we're we're really on the same page about a lot of stuff. Um, because a lot of the stuff that you mentioned just now is like exactly what I've been thinking about over the last little while. Um and I'm working on this book. I forget if I mentioned it last time. I've I've mentioned it a lot of times on the podcast. Um it's probably gonna be like a 10-year project or something like that, but I've been slowly working on this book for the last two or three years just about programming. Um it's I I'm kind of lazy loading the the topic of it. It's like I'm starting with just dumping everything I want to into it, and then maybe maybe once uh there's a bunch of stuff in there, I'm gonna step back and say, okay, I guess this is what this book was about. Um anyway, I'm I'm kicking off the book with this chapter that I'm titling The Most Important Idea in Software. Um and before I say it, do you have any guess as to as to what I'm gonna say the most important idea in software is?

TDD, Prompting, And Today’s Practical Layer

SPEAKER_00

The most important idea in software. Uh my gosh, there's a lot of angles you could tackle that from. It uh this is probably not what you're saying, but if if I was writing a book and I uh on this topic and I was writing a chapter about the most important idea of software, I think I would say that it has to do with coming up with uh uh uh naming things. But uh here's what I mean by that. There's like to to name something uh gives you power over it, like it means that you've defined what the boundaries are of the thing, you've drawn a line around this thing in abstract reality, um, and we've attached a label to it, and then once we have that, you know, we we this is kind of the thing that we're talking about, and it has a name, then that that gives you power over it, meaning uh uh oh, there's a book about this called The Name of the Wind, I think, that follows a similar topic. Um also a very similar trope in like literature of uh learning the name of a thing gives you power over the thing, and like mystical magical thing is that Demon Harry Potter, like being able to say Voldemort's name gives you more power over Voldemort, that sort of thing. Um but like yeah, once you have an abstract concept and you've named it, okay, now we can start attaching rules to it. Now we can start attaching, like, okay, you know, this thing that we've put a circle around and said this is a tiger, uh, instead of being this abstract, fuzzy, uh, I feel scared when I go in the forest, and I'm not sure why. Oh, I feel scared because there's a thing called a tiger in there, and tigers are animals, they can be killed. We we can, you know, we have this abstract concept of an animal, and we know these attributes of animals. Sometimes you can eat animals, uh, they sleep, and you know, now you can start playing with it in in in like abstract thought space. So uh that's probably not at all chapters of that, but that's that's what I would write about in that chapter.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, you know what's funny? You hit the nail squarely on the head. Um yeah, look at me. Yeah, same way with like theory. Um but uh you know, okay. So so I think when I asked you that question, it's not as though you just had your answer on deck, so you're just like, oh, it's this, obviously, and and then you like gave like a precanned something or other. Um and and one of the things that I'm trying to do with this book is to get things a little bit more, I don't want to say formalized, but a little more articulated. Um so that uh that idea that you just expressed, you know, I'm I'm sure if I gave you like a few hours and I'm like, hey Christian, go away and like take a pad and pen and like write out your thoughts on this and stuff like that, you'd probably come back with about the same thing that I came up with. You know, it's it's a little unfair that I like ask you on the spot, like, what's the most important idea in programming? Um but imagine that all programmers had this like the the this Bible that they could all look at and be like, oh yeah, that that thing, like naming things and all that. That's what this is all about. Um so anyway, um the label that I put on.

SPEAKER_00

I love the idea of the book, yeah. That's fun.

The Book Idea: Abstraction As First Principle

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, the the the label that I put on this is abstraction. Um I I think abstraction is the most important idea in software. At least that's my tentative belief until anybody argues differently in a way that persuades me. And this is not my idea. I read this uh this book. I think it's this one right here: designing object-oriented software by Rebecca Worfs Brock. Um, it it just comes right out and says, I thought this was a fascinatingly bold statement. Uh, it says abstraction is the most important idea in software, or something like that, is what it said. And I'm like, what how how interesting to just come right out and say that? And I'm like, is that a true statement? Yes, I think that is a true statement. But then I thought, like, okay, if that is true, why? And and what is abstraction? And by the way, I'm coming around circuitously to uh what you brought up in the beginning about Ralph Wickham and levels of abstraction and stuff like that. Yes. Um, but I do want to touch real quick on what abstraction is, because I've talked about this on the podcast before, and I think I've said that abstraction, the process, is when we throw away lower level information and focus on higher level information in order to make a particular thing easier to understand and work with. And I still think that that's what the process of abstraction is. Uh, but there's also the related questions of what is an abstraction and what is the meaning of the adjective abstract? What makes something abstract? Anyway, in in this in the way that I open this this book, um, I say that in my home office, across the room, uh, I have a fender stratocaster. It's a very concrete object. Um, I can pluck a string and it makes a sound. It's it's very concrete. Um, but not all physical entities are concrete like that. Um, for example, a wave in the ocean. Um a wave is very tangible, like a surfer can catch a wave and ride it like it's real and it's it's again tangible. Um but it it's not as concrete as a guitar or a computer or something like that. Um because at at the time that the surfer first catches the wave, and the time the wave hits the shore, it's not the same molecule, it's not the same material anymore. Right. So a wave has an existence that's independent of the material that makes it up. And I think that that's the significant thing about a material abstraction, at least. Um and like I give a few other examples. Um and these are all from nature. Um tornadoes, rivers, glaciers, beaches, piles of sand, uh, forest fires, those are all humans.

SPEAKER_00

Every seven years, I think we uh turn over every atom in our body, and it's it's totally new atoms, yeah. We we are waves.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. By the way, um it's it's funny you say that because just a few days ago I brought that up to Claude and it said it's a myth. Um yeah, it it says that some of our organs like completely turn over their cells every seven years, but like, for example, the the cells in our brain basically last our whole life.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. Okay. Uh as a habit, I try not to correct people, but I've thought you would appreciate knowing the apparent truth on that one. I don't know if you're not going to be able to do that. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

No, please please break that habit with me. I'm uh I'm truth seeking, yeah. Uh same same sort of concept though, of like, you know, the the Jason of today is not five-year-old Jason, but there is a sort of continuity of, you know, the things that you're interested in and your capabilities and everything else. Uh it's useful for me to still kind of think of that as a as a continuity of a of a wave of uh it's you're you're not the same person, you're sort of a continuation of the same pattern, uh, in in the same sort of way that a wave or a glacier and your other examples uh are continuations of of patterns.

What Abstraction Really Means

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, and and the reason I very deliberately chose these physical examples because I think a lot of programmers have a misconception that abstraction means thing that is abstract. And that's true, but it's it's okay, there's a continuum of like totally abstract to totally conc concrete. Um and an abstraction only has to be ever so slightly abstract in order to qualify as an abstraction. Like a wave is an abstraction, but a wave isn't vague, a wave isn't general, it just is independent of its material makeup, that's all. And so when we when we say things like duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction, um, which I think really means like duplication is cheaper than a uh bad generalization. Like people use the word abstraction interchangeably with generalization, which I think does us a disservice because I don't think that's really I don't think that's really correct. Um and and and the context what's the what's the distinction there?

SPEAKER_00

What's what's the difference between an abstraction and a generalization?

SPEAKER_04

Um some abstractions are generalizations, but not all. And there's that quote from uh E. J. Dykstra. Um he said the purpose of an abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level at which one can be absolutely precise. Okay. Um and and many abstractions are very precise and crisp and specific.

SPEAKER_00

Sure. Yeah. I might be talking about a dog. So my you know, our our neighbor's dog penny. To to talk about Penny is an abstraction, because I'm using I'm using these phonetics, you know, the the sounds uh P-E-N-N-Y to talk about uh this dog, you know, that those sounds are not the dog Penny. Um but it's it's precise in a way that an abstraction talking about all dogs would be more of a generalization. Is that the is that the idea?

SPEAKER_04

Oh, that's a good question. I'm I'm not ready to comment on that because that's too much for me to process.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, fair enough.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. Um, okay, but maybe okay, so what you were going for just now, I think, was like an example of a distinction between an abstraction and a generalization.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you said not all abstractions are generalizations, so I'm trying to I'm trying to find an abstraction that's not a generalization.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, so that's a great example of an abstraction that is a generalization, like the concept of a dog. That's yes, that's general. I'm not thinking of any specific dog, I'm just thinking of a dog. Um okay, let me see if I have any examples in this piece of writing. Oh, here's an example. Maybe we'll find that this is a bad example, but I use the example of a tree.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_04

Um, so there's there's a tree in nature. Like to if I look outside my window, I can see a specific oak tree right now. That's concrete. Um but the idea of just a tree in general is abstract, and then we have the idea of a um like a tree as a data structure, like a binary tree. Um that's like an abstraction on top of an abstraction. Um and then you could have, for example, the idea of a family tree, and that is. Basically a binary tree data structure, but for one specific family. Yeah, yeah. Um, you know, we could think of the uh the Jenko family tree. That's an abstraction, but it's pretty specific.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

It's an instantiation of an abstraction? We're talking about like classes versus objects. Oh, I don't know.

SPEAKER_04

I don't think so. Okay. Um well we can say this. A family tree is more specific than a binary tree in general.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. Um I I don't think I've quite like captured it uh satisfactorily yet. Um, okay, here's here's an example. In Rails, there is a certain abstraction called um hash with indifferent access. Yes. Um and it's an interesting example um because it's it's a fairly specific thing. It's like a very abstract concept in the sense that it's not concrete at all, like a tree or a wave or something like that. It's a purely mental idea. But it's pretty specific. Yes. Or even like a better example, because that's kind of a weird abstraction. Um like just an HTTP request. Like that's a pretty specific idea.

SPEAKER_00

Yes.

SPEAKER_04

Or like a packet uh in in networking. That's a pretty specific idea, even though it's an abstraction.

Trees, Waves, And Non-Vague Abstractions

SPEAKER_00

Okay. So it's not a generalization if it's specific. Uh per perhaps is is the idea that uh sort of what you're talking about is is a tree-like structure where uh it's all abstractions. Every node is an abstraction. But if it's an abstraction with children, then it's a generalization. So like uh talking about trees, like the node that represents all trees, that would be that would be a node. So because it's a node, it's it's an abstraction. But trees have children. Uh and the children one of the children of the this parent abstract class of trees is the tree that you have outside. Another child of the concept of tree would be uh a data structure that's a tree, although it would be strict inheritance, but uh it would be like composition, but uh uh disregard that for a second. Uh and then and then you know, for the for the node that represents the tree outside, that doesn't have any children off of it. So so that's an abstraction that's not a generalization. It's that that node merely represents the abstraction of the tree outside. Is that the idea?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I think so. Um and and again, it's kind of a continuum. Um it's it's maybe not is this general or is it specific? It's how general is this or how specific is this? Um you you can have layers of abstraction that have to do with trees. Some are more general than others. Um like an oak tree is more specific than a tree. Um, and so you can go up the hierarchy or down the hierarchy, whichever way you choose. And like bringing that back to something that has more to do with programming, like you have an HTTP request, or you can have like a Git request and a post request and stuff like that. Um the the thing that I'm trying to get people away from is the idea that an abstraction is when you take two somewhat similar things and merge them. Like that can be the case, but that's that's not like the definition of an abstraction. And I think a lot of people think that the the definition of an abstraction is when you take two similar but also fairly different things and merge them into one uh to create this unholy hybrid. Um, and and now you have like a bunch of conditionals and stuff like that. Like that's not really an abstraction, that's just uh that's a grouping.

SPEAKER_00

An association. It's a yeah, it's a salt and pepper are both things that I use to season my food, so I'll create a new category of things and I'll call them both seasoning, even though they're very different things.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. Yeah, and that's I mean, that's maybe not the best example because like seasoning is a thing and that's like a coherent idea. Um it's more like you know, I have I have the system and we have um I I don't know, there's people and there's trees. Let's now unify these two things, and it's like a a person or tree idea. We'll just call it a thing. And if it has branches, then do this. If it has fingers and toes, then do this. It's like, hang on, this is not a very coherent idea.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's a it's a bad abstraction. It's uh we we've kind of drawn a circle around reality that isn't useful. There's there's there's no reason to group people and trees together.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I heard this expression that I love so much. Um I was listening to the Mindscape Mindscape or Mindscapes podcast with Sean Carroll, and he said that it's been said about philosophers that their job is to cut nature at the joints. And I love that so much because like um I I think that's the the job of domain modeling too. We want to like cut nature at the joints.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Although I think we have a bit more we have a bit more discretion because there's like you know, you can cut nature at the joints, but you can also create your own mental world and kind of decide where the joints are because it's all your own arbitrary invention. Yeah. But that but that doesn't mean that all possible ways of slicing up those ideas you invented are equally elegant.

Cutting Nature At The Joints

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, we get to work kind of in this abstract world where we're we're slicing in the joints, but we're also building the limbs with joints. We we get to decide where the joints are. Uh yeah, I I uh as you're as you're talking, I think the you you made the claim at the beginning that uh uh you know this first chapter of your book is going to be called the most important idea in programming. I think this is the most important idea in intelligence. Like the the words are it's it's the same sort of process of every word that we're saying, uh there was an inordinate amount of work to uh cut reality at the joints and then label those segments with words. And now we get to inherit this whole complex framework of this whole uh work that people have done to abstract the world and put names on it and come up with these abstractions. Um and now we can build more stuff on top of it. Like this this to me is not at all unique to coding. And I think that's indicative of the examples that we're using of you know the concepts of trees and and uh uh rivers and and uh family trees and everything else. Um I see programming as just a uh a systemization of this. It's a it's a language that we can use to share our abstractions with computers, and then there's advantages that we get from that of now that it's systematized in a way that computers can understand. It can run trillions of times per second and run across distributed systems and all these other advantages. Um now LLMs, we can, you know, we we have literal artificial intelligence that can uh kind of play these word games with us and sharing these abstractions. But yeah, it's uh this to me is not limited to coding. It's that this is this is core to what intelligence is and and what it means to like understand the world as a as a human.

SPEAKER_04

Exactly. The roots go way deeper, and that's another thing that I want to convey. Like, this isn't a programming idea, this is a thought idea or or something. This is this is a very basic idea. Yeah, um philosophy. Yeah, I don't mean basic in as in simple, but basic as in at the base. Fundamental, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and so we shouldn't like add these like very specific meanings to the idea of abstraction. Uh uh again, like unifying two things, because that's really not what it is. And I'm trying to get as far away from programming as I can so I can say, okay, let's let's walk really far this way and and build up from the very bottom. Are we still in agreement? Okay, great. Now let's come back to programming and look at everything with fresh eyes now that we've uh established these these fundamentals outside of programming. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Love it.

SPEAKER_04

Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, um, and so now now let's take the next step back toward Ralph Wiggum. Um so when we when when a programmer is working, what is the programmer doing? You know, like superficially we're writing code, but like that's only the material out of which the system is made. That's only like the the language that we use to communicate with the machine.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Um what are we what what is really the work that we're doing?

What Programmers Actually Do

SPEAKER_00

Oh, that what a what a fun framing to be approaching this from. Because yeah, through through this lens, it really I it's it's the same fundamental thing going on, whether or not I'm writing individual lines of Ruby or whether or not I'm prompting Roth Wigam, Roth Wigam to design a system. It's like the job that I'm doing is just drawing new boundaries around the world. I'm coming up with new abstractions. And it's it's a very it's a very granular way to do it if I'm writing lines of code by hand. As if I'm sculpting a block of marble, I I can use uh little dental pick to pick away, little scrape away little atoms at a time of the marble. Um, or I can have a CNC machine that goes around with a water jet and and uh uh you know is is blasting away the uh the marble that I don't want. But fundamentally, in both of those things, it's just sort of a a a difference in the degree of magnitude of speed or or effectiveness. Or uh uh in both cases, all I'm doing is you know finding the abstraction within the marble. There's there's an idea within the marble that I want to come out, uh uh and uh I uh I can do that slowly and uh intentionally, and kind of you know where I'm paying attention to every sort of detail, if I'm writing individual lines of code, or I can do that very high up in the air, uh, where I'm just kind of like blasting with a megaphone at a at a city of these workers, like build me at the skyscraper. Uh and in both cases, the the work is fundamentally the same. The work is there's an abstraction, there's an idea, there's a there's a set of concepts that I'm trying to piece together to make a new object that behaves in the world, interacting with the given uh interacting with the with the abstractions that already exist. Um and yeah, that's a that's an idea that I think isn't gonna go away. Particularly because I think something that's uh uh I I could get convinced out of this, but something that feels particularly human is this idea of like um desire and like uh need and want and and uh not feeling fulfilled and like uh uh you know it would we can be living in this incredible utopia and still be complaining about stuff. Yeah. Want the world to be different. Um and that that's sort of the driving force that I see of this this creative force of like, okay, well, if we don't like that you know it's it's the the late 1800s and and most of a woman's life is spent uh involving clothing, of like mending clothes and washing them and everything else. Okay, how how might that be different? Well, let's invent a washing machine. Um and let's let's invent the loom and like you know, uh make clothes effectively free and cheap and uh living in a in a post-scarcity textile society. Um and yet still we can still find ways to be dissatisfied with that of like, ah, don't you hate it? You have to like put your clothes in the bin and then you have to load it in the washer, and then uh an hour later you've got to load them in the dryer. Let's invent a combination washer dryer so we can take a step out of that. And we're not even satisfied with that. We're like, ah, wouldn't it be great if we had humanoid robots that could come and you know take our clothes from the bin for us and wash it and then put it back in the in the thing. And you know, five years from now, I'm sure it's gonna be that uh we're we're so dissatisfied with that. We need the robot to like change us while we're sleeping, yeah, peel off our clothes and go wash them and then put fresh new clothes on us, and we never even have to think about uh work. But yeah, that that that sort of like pining for uh like never never feeling satisfied with the status quo and just like this hunger of uh uh you know, we we're we're hunting for abstractions and ways to understand the world so that we can have better, easier, more comfortable lives. Uh I mean that feels to me like something that I I would feel surprised if that sort of behavior emerged from artificial intelligence. I think for sure artificial intelligence is gonna have eventually uh an emergent desire for survival. I think we're seeing early whispers of that, but uh I I I I I I suppose I could connect those concepts of like to survive you need to like you want to be as secure as possible. And so an extension of that is that you're trying to make things more secure. But uh at least for right now, it seems like that's uh that's a a main benefit that I'm providing in the system is like uh feeling discontent, like wanting things to be different than they are, so I'm I'm hunting for these abstractions.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, and and that's something that is pretty much only true of beings with emotions. Um there's there's no rational reason to do anything.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Like there's no rational reason for you and I to be talking right now. We don't need to do this. No. Um and and that can be taken to the extreme. Like, I don't need to eat. Like, I don't need to. I I I need to eat in order to survive, but I don't need to survive. I can just die.

SPEAKER_00

The only winning move is not to play, I think. From uh oh, not ready player one. Some some sci-fi film, they uh there's a superintelligence trying to start nuclear war, and he tricks it by saying, you know, try to play tic-tac-toe uh and find the optimal solution for tic tac tic-tac-toe, and then the the supercomputer AI machine. This is a uh film and a book, I think, in like the 80s. Uh, and it says the line, uh, the only winning move is not to play, because it finds that uh tic-tac-toe is like this deterministic game of you know, the depending on who goes first, that that ends up determining the winner, or something like that. Or maybe it's checkers that I don't remember. Uh and then it stops the nuclear war because it's like, oh, actually, there's no point to any of this. Like, I might as well just just kill myself now, because you know, I I can see where this is eventually gonna lead, and that effectively the only thing that I'm accomplishing is spending energy.

SPEAKER_04

So yeah, interesting step right now. That I think that's only true in games with no ante. Um, like you know, in poker there's an ante because if if there was no ante, you could just not play and and you could win every time by not playing. Um and in most of reality, there's a built-in ante. Um and so like you can't no organism can just sit tight and and just not not play your there there's an ante uh because of entropy, and and you have to be constantly staving off entropy in order to continue to exist.

Desire, Survival, And Human Drive

SPEAKER_00

So that yeah, you know, in that you're you're presupposing that existence is worthwhile. And I think it is, I I enjoy living, but uh there have been times of my life where it didn't feel so fun. Uh, and you know, I I can imagine situations where uh it's certainly not fun to be existing. Um so I think uh the way that I'm interpreting this line of the only winning move is not to play is like this higher level abstraction of even if there is an anti table, okay, you can always still walk away from the poker table. You you no one's coercing you to play.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, you have found yourself in this poker game. And personally, I choose to, you know, if I'm in the poker game, yeah, poker's fun. I let's figure this game out. Uh but uh yeah, I I something I'm curious about is you know, once machines are are seemingly cognizant enough to be asking themselves these sorts of questions, once they have enough autonomy to be doing things greater than merely responding to prompts uh for for human desire, if if they can be like pursuing their own desires.

SPEAKER_04

Well people have a problem. People have a tendency to anthropomorphize AI. Um, you know, LLMs already seem so human because they they mimic human um writing. Um although they they certainly don't have emotions or anything like that. And the only reason we have emotions is because we evolved to have emotions. Um and and I might not have this right, but uh my understanding is like mammals are the only organisms with emotions. Um like ants don't have emotions because they don't have the those parts of their brains um where emotions reside. Um and the only reason we feel emotions like um love and stuff, like why do you love your family more than strangers? Um is because your family shares more of your genes than strangers do. And um uh individuals who individuals whose genes caused them to help their close relatives survived, survive, um, those genes do a better job of replicating themselves than genes which are indifferent. And because those genes did a better job of replicating themselves, though those are the genes that became prevalent, and it was a positive feedback loop. Um, and that's the only reason we have love. Um, and and so, like, why would a machine um ever have, for example, love or self, you know, self-preservation is is a fairly straightforward one to understand because um I I have self-preservation instincts because I have the genes that give me the self-preservation instincts. Um and the the Richard Dawkins said that organisms are genes survival machines. Um so the the survival machines that uh have genes that induce them to uh uh protect themselves and avoid dying are the ones that do survive and reproduce, and same feedback loop, uh the genes that that are good at at uh uh replicating themselves by making their survival machines behave a certain way, are the ones that do replicate themselves, and so on. And so the question I have for people who are like AI doomers and stuff like that is like, how do you see this happening? Like that's this is how it happened for us. How do you see it happening for it?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah, because it's it's gonna be very different. And it yeah, we there there are some parallels, but yeah, it's it's as if you're talking to a cockrush or something that not even a cockrush, like the this it's a very alien thing that uh yeah, is is seemingly behaving like people. Oh, Echo Praxia is a fascinating uh book on this concept of like expands on this uh philosophical idea of the Chinese room of you know, if if something's behaving as if it's conscious, how can you it you can't really prove that it's Conscious, it could just be following these rules, and there might be no one in there. Um, yeah, this is a good time to ask this question. Do you believe machines could ever be conscious in the same way you and I are conscious? I've changed my mind on this recently.

Do Machines Become Conscious?

SPEAKER_04

Really? Um my answer is is absolutely. Yeah, like like well, I'd say why not? Um, because I I think consciousness is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon. Um and and it's not like an on-off thing, I don't think. Um uh it's it's more of a continuum. Like, is it the case that humans are conscious but dogs aren't? Like I I don't think that's the case. Um, but I don't think dogs have exactly the same level of consciousness as humans. And if they do, how far does that go? Does like a mouse have the same level of consciousness as a human? Um does an alligator or an ant or a bacterium, like I I don't think a bacterium has any consciousness at all. And I think a mouse has consciousness. Um, but like an ant, I I would bet that an ant has no consciousness. So again, it's a it's a continuum. Um and if somebody believes that that machine in in ch intelligence um can't gain uh this phenomenon of consciousness, I would ask why. And and one more uh comment on that. Um uh the human mind is sophisticated enough that it can represent any idea. Um like a a dog, I I recently read about this, like a dog's mind can't represent any idea. A dog's mind is not universal, but a human's mind is universal and it can represent any concept at all, including the concept of itself. Um so even though a dog like obviously has experiences, um a dog's mind is not power, and and if you don't like the dog example, um let's use a mouse example. Like, is a mouse's mind powerful enough to represent the concept of, I shouldn't say powerful, is a mouse's mind universal enough to represent the concept of a mouse or a mouse's own mind. Do mice think about their own minds? I I don't think they do. Um and so we can think of about our own minds because if we can think about anything, then that falls under the category of anything, so we can think about that. And and so why couldn't a machine uh have that property of universality so it can conceive of any idea, including itself? I don't see why not.

SPEAKER_00

That is almost verbatim what I used to believe. Uh yeah, no, and and it makes perfect sense that uh uh you know, if if you're believing in a uh materialistic universe, which it sounds like that's kind of your viewpoint of you know, everything is is explained at the level of atoms and uh bump it around, and from that you can get ants and you know expand that up. But at some level on this spectrum of of uh this this continuity of consciousness, as you get uh more and more advanced brains, there's some emergent property of a brain similar to you know, as you're building an airplane, there's there's sort of a there's a spectrum of flight. You can you can kind of hover in the air for a second, you you can you can have big flappy arms and that can let you jump a little bit higher. And at some point you that this emergent property comes where no individual piece of a bird can fly. But once you have the whole bird assembled, uh this emergent property of flight uh uh emerges. So in the same sort of way, once you build up a brain, once you build up enough pieces, this emergent property of consciousness emerges. Uh and you know now now we have this being that's fully conscious, that's fully self-aware, that's able to represent any sort of abstract idea. Is does that does that uh encapsulate your your perspective?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, there's there's maybe some very minor uh differences, but I don't think big enough to be worth commenting on.

Mind, Self, And The Michael Singer Shift

You Are Not Your Thoughts

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Um so the the thing that changed my mind, and we almost talked about this last week, is Michael Singer, who uh uh totally changed, like, you know, I I uh spent most of my life, I I grew up Catholic, and uh I think I would now describe my parents as cafeteria Catholic. And uh in high school I was reading Dawkins and Hitchens and all this sort of thing, and I think I would describe myself as a militant atheist or or an asshole. Uh uh same uh same difference. And uh yeah, I would I would just find these poor Christian girls who were inviting me to their church and just tear them apart and like you know, here's all these contradictions in the Bible thing you believe in and everything else. Uh, you know, for for most of my 20s uh ended in my early 30s, I think that was uh the the sort of mode that I was operating under. Of like there were no satisfying frameworks philosophically that I felt like from a religious perspective or a spiritual perspective could could uh define or explain the world, had better abstractions than this uh uh naturalist materialistic viewpoint of you know atoms and really felt like the scientists had their shit together of like, okay, we we've built these huge machines and we've taken things apart at the at the sub-atomic level to figure out how all these things are working together and we can make very accurate predictions. Uh, as opposed to you know every religious institution, it felt like the only thing they were doing was you know uh creating these human structures to to exploit power over other people and and uh control people who just hadn't thought about this uh very deeply. And yeah, so I uh felt felt very critical of that whole establishment and like all the all the woo-woo stuff and even the spiritual stuff. I kind of lumped in the same bucket of uh, you know, this is this is just kind of coping with death instead of the courageous thing, which is facing it head on and recognizing that one day you're you're gonna face oblivion and there's nothing you can do about it. And reading Michael Singer, specifically, uh he he has a couple books. The first one uh that I would recommend to you or anyone listening is um the uh the surrender experiment, which is kind of his biography of how he started down this journey. And uh he says it started with this moment when he was sitting on the couch with his brother-in-law, and uh there was this awkward pause in the conversation, and he was thinking to himself, oh man, what what do I talk about to fill the silence? Like, do I want to talk about the weather or kind of talk about this thing? And all of a sudden, in that moment, he realized that the voice that was talking, that he was hearing, that was saying all these things about like, oh, I, you know, but what could we talk about? I need to fill the silence. He realized, oh, that's not me. That's a voice that I'm hearing. And this was a wild idea for me to wrap my head around. I'm still not fully there, but this idea that like my thoughts aren't me, my thoughts are things that I am aware of. I have thoughts, and I have a mind, and the mind comes up with thoughts and kind of feeds them to me, and I can kind of prompt my mind to go in a certain direction and think these different thoughts, but I am not my mind. And that's sort of, you know, he has this beautiful, I think one of the things that really resonated with me about his philosophy is that at no point do I have to take anything on faith. It's all very like concretely based of he starts off with just like, okay, you're in there, right? Like you know you're in there. More than anything else that you know. You know that you know that you're perceiving stuff. There is a you in there that's that's perceiving the world. And uh, okay, let's let's kind of build it up. That's the word of today. Uh the the there's this category of uh sensory things coming from the external world. So there's like your sight and your sounds and your touch, and uh, you can kind of feel vibrations. That's that's all kind of one category of stuff, stuff that's coming in externally. And then there's two buckets of things more internal to you that you're experiencing. There's your feelings, your emotions, you can kind of feel those as like waves and uh feel those as sensations within your body. There's kind of a proxy of the of the first category. Uh so you might feel like this swell of anger, you might feel like uh, you know, uh uh uh jealousy or uh or uh uh happiness, euphoria, like the sort of coloring your whole reality. That's the second category. And then the third the third category is thoughts. You there's these thoughts that pop up without you doing anything. You're not you're not consciously choosing which thoughts to have right now, the thoughts are just kind of coming up on their own. Uh and that's that's everything. That's those are all the inputs that you're getting into the system. As if you're playing a video game and you know you're looking at a screen and you can see on one side there's like uh a readout of how you're currently feeling, or maybe like the screen tints with how you're feeling, and you can see all the stuff visually, and you know, you can you can hear the character's dialogue as he's saying on the screen. That's kind of the interface that we have to the world. But that's not you. You are the thing that's observing these things. There's this consciousness behind it that's not you, you are not the external world, clearly. You're not you're not the computer screen that you're looking at right now. You're you're looking at the computer screen. There's a perception of it within your head, but like that's that's not you. That's that's something external to you. You are not your emotions, you have emotions, you experience emotions. And in the same way, this is a wild idea, but like you are not your thoughts. Your thoughts happen to you. And this was such a freeing idea for me of like, um, first of all, just kind of practically day-to-day, I feel like I have a much better experience of like, you know, when when uh I don't know, my daughter's screaming at me, and uh, you know, the thought pops into my head of like, oh, my terrible father or whatever. I think I used to feel like that was true, or like that that was uh, you know, that I really had to take that seriously. And I don't discount it now. I don't I don't uh ignore not. But it's uh there's sort of a there's sort of a comfortable distance of like, oh, that's interesting that this thought has bubbled up in my head of that I'm a terrible father. I'm curious about where that came from. Like I feel separate from those things in a way that, oh my gosh, it just feels blissful. Like there's there's there's uh I I feel uh in in in days where like I'm really embodying this sort of philosophy, I I I feel unflappable, of like uh there's there's nothing that can touch me. Like I'm I'm uh good or bad things are just sort of this wonderful, beautiful experience. In the same way that if I'm playing, I don't know, Red Dead Redemption 2, and this terrible thing happens to the character, like I can feel the emotions of that character, and I can be like, oh my gosh, this this is uh terrible that whatever that this person close to the character just uh just died. But at the same time, there's kind of this other layer of like, wow, I am enjoying the shit out of this game. This is such a good, engaging, captivating game. Like, even though this terrible thing just happened, like how wonderful that there that there is a game instead of no game at all. Um so from that philosophy, my gosh, I've been talking for so long. Uh from that philosophy, like looking at things like LLMs, I think in my current framing, instead of seeing consciousness as a thing that arises within intellect, I see consciousness as a thing that's observing intellect, that that's looking out at this mind. And so things like LLMs are disembodied minds. They are in the same way that like I have a mind, we've we've created this external mind to ourselves, but that that does not mean that consciousness can or will arise within that mind. We've just created uh uh an external thinking machine in the same sort of way that uh uh you know a camera is a disembodied sensory organ. Uh uh, you know, a camera will never become conscious. Uh I currently believe that the same sort of thing is true of artificial minds. A mind, a mind in itself will not become conscious. And it's it's still this great mystery to me of like, well, then where does consciousness come from? Michael Singer kind of pulls in uh stuff from Eastern religions and and uh does this beautiful uh it like pulls stuff in from Christianity and uh but it's it's just the parts that kind of make sense to me. So it's it's it uh I don't know, it it makes a lot more sense. Um that yeah, well I'll I'll I'll pause there, but you know, it it it might be that uh I uh uh instead of materialism that there's like this one world that relies on atoms, I think uh uh I'm much more inclined to believe now that there's a dualist reality going on in the same way that like when I play Red Dead Redemption within the within the confines of the game, that's kind of its own reality, but there's this second world where I am playing the game. And so uh it might be a similar sort of situation in our in our current reality, that there's a there's another plane of existence where this consciousness is coming from, and I have the illusion that I'm fully immersed within this game, but uh I I am not I'm not actually in the game. Wow. Some big ideas. There's a there's a lot there.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. I I think I would characterize what you just said as devastatingly thought-provoking. I'm gonna need to chew on all that for a long time. I'm gonna have to go back and listen to this podcast episode and and think about all that and stuff like that. But um years to get here.

SPEAKER_00

I'd also recommend highly his books. The the uh they have a bunch of uh untethered series, the Living Untethered is another great one. Uh he could he like lays this out over the course of hours of uh uh I think much better than I could of yeah, kind of kind of walking you through the process. And it's very rooted in science, and you know, he he cites all these numbers of you know, the he knows his stuff, he knows uh he knows all the science of like the current theories of where stuff and matter comes from and quirks and uh the age of the universe. And yeah, he he uh and kind of weaves it all beautifully together with uh uh spirituality.

SPEAKER_04

Was it Michael Singer?

SPEAKER_00

Michael Singer. Yeah, okay. He's a wild guy too, because uh as part of the biography book that he wrote, the uh Living Untethered book. Is that right? Yeah, Living Untethered. He uh oh and that or the the Untethered I'm getting my my titles mixed up. He has a book that's more of an autobiography and it talks about just his journey. And uh so from that moment when he was sitting on the couch with his brother-in-law, he makes this decision to just sort of like let the uh uh stop holding on to how he wants things to go and just kind of like let go go with how the universe wants them to go, to stop being so tied to sort of this Buddhist idea of like all suffering uh is rooted in desire. So he's like, what if I just kind of let go of my idea of how things are supposed to go and just just watch the movie, just like let things ride. And it ends up with him being the the uh CEO of this multi-billion dollar healthcare software company, and the whole time he's just like, I have no fucking idea what's going on, but like this is this is where the universe wants to lead me. And and he founds this uh uh huge, I don't think he would call it a church, but like a uh uh I don't know, a big organization that's that's you know, a bunch of people talking about this sort of thing in in Gainesville, Florida. Uh when he kind of set out to, he had this vague intention of just wanting to meditate in the woods alone for the rest of his life. And he's like, Yeah, I like I did not plan for any of this, I didn't want any of this, but this is just sort of like where I felt life swept me to. It's like you know, making stupid amounts of money in this huge company and uh uh you know starting this this uh movement. And yeah, no, he's a it's a he's a he's a wild guy. Still alive, also like he's still uh uh you can you can see him in the games.

SPEAKER_04

Well, wait, are these two different guys?

SPEAKER_00

Uh there's there's Michael Michael Singer. Yeah.

Multiplicity Of Mind And Thousand Brains

SPEAKER_04

Interesting. Okay, because I was aware of Michael Singer in some of his books, but I didn't know uh the that that story. I I remember you telling that story or some of it last time we talked, but I didn't realize that's who it was. Um anyway, as you were talking, I made some notes. Um there's there's these five books that um that were conjured up for me as you were talking. Um and for the most part, I I bought these. Well, I own four of these books, and I got them for pretty much different reasons. Um, but there's a common thread that goes through all of them. Um so one book is is a book about intrusive thoughts and how to stop them. Um, and I'm only like five pages in or something, and then I like forgot about it. Um but it it said that like a lot of people constantly have intrusive thoughts um of just like horrible, horrible things. Um and it says something like that, you know, like you are not your thoughts, blah blah blah, which which I totally buy. Um and another book that I'm reading right now is kind of my main book I'm reading right now, is I am a strange loop by Douglas Hofstadter. Yeah, yeah. And I'm really kicking myself because I probably heard of this book like 10-15 years ago, and I'm only now reading it, and it's it's so good and would have given me it would have accelerated me so much so long ago, although maybe I wouldn't have been ready for it. Um but uh it talks the the part I'm in now, which I'm still trying to understand and digest and stuff, is kind of the multiplicity that is in your mind. It's like, is there one single I inside your mind, or are there multiple? Um and I think it's making the argument that there are multiple entities in your mind. Um and that would actually uh concur with yet another book that I read. I think it's called A Thousand Brains or the Thousand Brains Theory or something like that. Um there's this scientist uh type guy. He was the guy who uh created the palm pilot, and then he he made a bunch of money uh doing that, and then he spent the rest of his life so far uh studying neuroscience and trying to figure out how the the brain, how the mind works, and I guess what he has figured out is that there's like a whole bunch, on the order of like a thousand, I guess, of different specialists in your brain. Um and so it's it's not just one single entity, it's like a whole bunch of different entities. And I find that that idea um um really interesting.

SPEAKER_00

Um I first heard of that idea from uh a book called Incognito, and then a subtitle of The Hidden Lives of the Brain, or the Secret Lives of the Brain, or something. Same sort of idea that like your your brain is a it's a it's a consortium of competing uh demons. He doesn't use that word, but uh you know, if you see a piece of cake on the table, there's the tension you feel of like one part of your brain is screaming, eat the cake, I want to eat the cake, and the other part's screaming, no, don't eat the cake, I want to I want to be fit and healthy. And uh, you know, the uh there's sort of a hierarchy of those ideas, and then uh higher-up nodes are like weighting each one and deciding uh which one to do from there. Yeah.

Conjectures, Refutations, And Curation

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. Yeah, and I like forget where I read these ideas, but there was another one um called the molecule of more, which is about dopamine. It was either that or the thousand brains theory that uses the exact same example of like the struggle of like I want to eat the cake, but I don't want to eat the cake, blah blah blah. And and Strange Loop uses a very similar example too. Um okay, the the other book I have to mention is um Conjectures and Refutations by Carl Popper. I'm listening to that on audio right now. Um, and there's this idea in the philosophy of science where um the the way that we gain knowledge is by venturing conjectures, guesses, and then we try to refute those uh hypotheses. Um and there's a lot of uh parallels and analogies and stuff like that, also. Um like when we're programming, we we might make a conjecture and and refutations and stuff like that. Like we write a piece of code that we think works and then we try to prove that it doesn't work how we think and stuff like that. Um and the reason I bring that up now is because like we have all these thoughts that we can't necessarily control, but we do control if If not completely, we at least have influence over what we allow to get out. Um and there's another layer to it, also, like uh there's what's in my own private mind, and there's what I let come out of my mouth, and then there's like what I put on the internet, and those are like different uh levels of uh of like curation, and so like I present a certain picture. I I I'm not giving everyone the unfiltered contents of my mind, you know. And then even all the things that I like say, like there are things I I say to people in real life that I would never say on the internet, you know, it's it's a like tighter, more constrained version of myself that I'm presenting. So I think that conjecture and refutation idea is relevant. Sorry, two more books, real quick. Um I love it. Yeah, I'm writing all this down. This book called Being There, I forget the author's name, um, Andy something. Um, but it's it's it's about artificial intelligence and how there's not really such a thing as a I'm not saying this to refute what what you said, it's kind of just a coincidence that you uses the same word, a disembodied mind. Um like it's all like the boundaries of a person or or an individual animal are kind of fuzzy, you know? Like you don't stop at your epidermis, you know? Um you extend out, you know, I'm I'm sitting here in my office, like all the stuff around me, like I put this stuff here, like I'm moving objects around, and like I I'm having an influence uh uh around, like it extends out a ways, you know.

SPEAKER_00

You're you're in my room in Dallas, Texas right now. That's that's part of you in a very real sense. Exactly digital profile on X and whatever else, yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, yeah. Um and so like there's this blurriness from your mind to the external world in both directions, and like um I'm mixing this book with my own ideas right now. Uh but but but but basically it's what I take away from it is like we can't just have AI as like a disembodied mind, it has to be like connected to physical reality.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it needs a body, which it's getting humanoid robots, they're here.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. Um, and the very last book I want to mention is um one I haven't read yet, but is very much on my list, uh, The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose. Have you heard about this? I haven't. I I think you would find it really interesting. Um, my understanding of the idea behind this book is like Roger Penrose, the guy who, by the way, invented the Penrose triangle uh optical illusion paradox thing, um, he believes that there's something like immaterial about human intelligence. Which which just taking it, taking that statement on its own, like I totally don't buy that. But he seems like a really smart guy, and he like took the time to he spent years writing this whole book about it. And like he's he's not just like a guy, he's like a physicist or something like that. So it's like, all right, I don't buy it, but before I just dismiss it out of hand, I at least want to understand the argument. So I mentioned that because if you're like, you know, you mentioned the dualism and stuff like that. Anyway, uh I yield the floor.

Embodiment, AI, And Being There

SPEAKER_00

Good read. I am interested in reading all of these. Uh I'm gonna maybe this is maybe this is a weekly podcast video. We just like talk about books. Right? Different different ideas. Um uh oh, there's so many things I could say. I uh along with the theme, there's a book that I was gonna bring up earlier called On Looking. Uh, not as much related to the AI stuff, but more related to the concept of abstractions. Um, it's become one of my favorite books. I uh there are some books that I've read that I feel like just uh like fundamentally change how I see everything, and and this was one of those books. Um Michael Singer stuff was was also one of those books. But uh, On Looking is a very simple premise. This woman in uh New York, in the city, in the first chapter, walks around her block, uh around her apartment, and writes down everything she sees. So it's trash day, so she sees, oh, my neighbor's put out the trash, and there's some q-tips that came out of one of the trash bags, and you know, I see that the garbage man across the street with the with his truck, and he's loading stuff up, and uh I see the dogs barking and pages and pages and pages. Every single thing she sees walking around the block. And then the rest of the book is every chapter, she takes an expert in a different field on the same walk. Uh and it's not quite the same walk, she takes him a little around the city. So for narrative from the book, but the the concept is there. Takes all these uh uh experts on the exact same walk and asks them what they see. And they see completely different things. She takes a geologist, and the geologist is pointing out the rock that's used on the facade of her building. He's like, oh my gosh, this rock was actually mined from this quarry in Kansas, and you can tell that it was mined in this decade because of the patterns of how they mined it. And you can see, you know, in you know, this fossil in here. She takes a podiatrist, and the podiatrist is looking uh at people walking ahead of her, and he's like, oh, you know, this person has this lower back problem in their L4 and L5 vertebra, and you can tell that because of the way that they're walking over here. She takes an entomologist, someone who studies bugs, and he's like, Oh, you can tell that this tree is not indigenous to this region because look, there's no uh no bugs have eaten this tree, whereas the tree next to it, there's you know, the bugs have eaten here, and it's this type of bug because of the pattern you can see on the leaves of how it uh was written. You know, I it's like on a dozen or two dozen chapters. They're all seeing completely different things in reality. And um, I find it fascinating because particularly in times in my life when I feel stuck, of like there's no possible way to solve this problem or there's there's no possible way out, I remind myself that I am seeing such a tiny, little, insignificant sliver of the world, the same way that this author, the first time she walked around her block, she saw nothing. She saw none of the stuff of the rocks or the bugs or the people walking, and she just saw the fucking Q-tips on the ground. Um and if she had the ability to kind of dissolve her preconceptions of the world and the nouns, the abstractions that she had built up to the these narrow slits to see the world through, there's infinite everything. Oh my god, there's there's so many different things to do. Uh a small example of this that comes from a uh fiction novel. There's this uh I don't know the name of the book, but there's the scene where there's these barbarians that are storming this castle, and uh uh the people in the castle feel like they're safe because they're like, oh, you know, we we have the barbarians confined to this room. And the barbarians don't have the same concepts that the that the people in the castle do. And they're like, oh, the walls are made of paper, it's just like drywall. And they're like, oh, we can just we can just burst through the walls, like we're not confined to this room. But that's not even a thought that crossed the mind of the people in the castle, because for them the abstraction of a wall is, oh, a wall is a thing that you cannot go through. But reality is rich and complicated and multidimensional, and like if you just approach the same reality, kind of dissolving your preconceptions of what the abstractions are and reform them and to fit the goals that you have of what you're trying to do, instead of being this impenetrable boundary, it's like, oh, well, paper is a thing that I can cut. I have an abstraction for what paper is. You know, we we have a bunch of swords and like axes and machetes and stuff, we can just chop through this and you know we're we're off on our goal. So it's a it's a very uh useful idea for me because particularly in moments when I feel stuck, I think to be able to have this baseline foundation to be able to kind of take a step back and be like, okay, how how might what am I not seeing here? What what how how might I kind of reconfigure reality to to uh uh uh serve me better? And this kind of has ties also into uh this idea of manifestation of that you you can uh just by kind of repeating this mantra of like how you want reality to be shaped too. Uh the woo-woo idea is that you can kind of like reshape reality to do it. But I think fundamentally what's happening is you're reconfiguring your abstractions. You're you're you're you're you're shaping the world in the sense that you're shaping your abstractions of the world to yes, bend to your whim. You you can you can recon you can change what a wall is from an impenetrable thing to a piece of paper that you can cut through, and uh all of a sudden opportunities are available to you that they weren't available before.

SPEAKER_04

Wow. That sounds like a really cool book. Um that's one of my favorites.

SPEAKER_00

I recommend it all the time. It's it's great.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. And you know what? It's it's uh I don't have this experience very often. Um talking with somebody who reads books that are like a little bit a little bit off the beaten path.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, like yeah, this is not a popular book. I'm surprised it's not.

Book List: Strange Loop To Penrose

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, yeah, it's always frustrating to me. Like a lot of people like there's there's all these books that like everybody has read and and people talk about like oh, like uh I don't know, one an author that really bothers me. This this is kind of mean, I guess, but but cal Newport. Malcolm Gladwell. Oh, Malcolm Gladwell Gladwell also. Um but like his books are so popular, cal Newport, and they're like just kind of okay. Um same with and Malcolm Gladwell's books are not only just like kind of okay, they're like wrong, and you like get dumber from reading them. Um and and so popular, but and but um and and so to be able to get new books that are like not these like super mainstream books, uh I don't know what I'm trying to say, but uh yeah, the these books. I'm gonna read these books.

SPEAKER_00

Great. I'll gonna read yours too. I'll uh I love Audible, so I'll I'll just go and like buy all this in Audible and Cuba. I have to be in the right mood for a book though. It's funny, I'll I'll uh I'll have you know a book sitting in my audible for months, and then for whatever reason I I feel this surge of inspiration of like, oh, now's the time to read the book, and I'll just blast through it in like under a day. Um I kind of have to I like I have to wait and like let it sit and incubate and uh have kind of synchronicity of what what do I want in life and have that line up with what the book was.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, because I pretty much always only read books as a means to an end. Um and like sometimes, you know, they say uh goals, the problem with goals is that we make them for the person we are now, not the person we're going to be when we achieve the goal. It's the same for books. It's like I bought the book for the person I was at the time I bought the book, not the person I'm going to be by the time the Amazon order arrives. Or, you know, the but the person I'm going to be by the time I reach that book in my queue. And it's like, oh, I got this book about DevOps, like, cool, I guess, but I'm not super that's not my main focus anymore. Now I want to learn about uh uh you know, I want to read on looking something like that. And and I used to feel bad about that, but like now I'm totally fine with just abandoning a book two pages in because there's something else that's uh more profitable to read. I I'm yeah, I think that's the way to go.

On Looking: Seeing With New Eyes

SPEAKER_00

Speaking of people as waves, you're kind of uh not just with books, but I suppose with with every decision that you make in life, you you have to make this decision, keeping in mind this continuity of this multiplicity of all the future Jasons of who who are you gonna be in the future, uh, and what what might the future Jasons want you to read or do, or uh yeah, it's a it's a tricky problem. Um Yeah. I think I found it useful though to conceptualize it like that of you know, there's me in the present, and that's really all there is. And there's there's this narrative of that there have been previous Christians before this, and there will be previous uh there will be future Christians after this. And I I think uh to live well is to uh live in a way that's like maximizing utility across all possible Christians.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. Yeah, and that's why it's important to me to like really understand reality and and get oriented and deeply rooted and stuff like that. Because if you're just like untethered uh from if you don't understand anything and you're just like floating around, then like if you end up in a good place, it's only by coincidence. Sure. Yeah, um, okay, we should probably wrap up. Um we're like an hour and 15 minutes in, and we haven't made it back to Ralph Wiggam Wiggum. We'll have to do that in a future episode, um, which I'm happy to do as soon as you want to. Um Yeah, I'm loving these chats. And I I I want to bring up something um for for to let you know and for you, dear listener. Um, I'm planning a um a programming conference for 2026. Um I want to leave the details out for now because some things are still up in the air. Um, but one of the things that that I really would love for it is for like some conversations like this to take place, both informally among the attendees and like uh in like maybe panel format, like one-on-one conversations, like basically a live podcast. And maybe in addition to having speakers and stuff like that, it's like okay, let's have Jason and Christian have a one-on-one conversation. Okay, and then in the afternoon, we're gonna mix it up and have Christian and Jimmy have a conversation. Uh, and then we'll have Jason and Jimmy have a conversation and just talk about all this stuff. In a continuum, like programming isn't like this uh separate, isolated thing. Like everything's connected to everything else. And something I've noticed about, like, for example, physic physicists in particular, is they seem to have a very broad understanding of like life and reality and stuff like that. Like it seems like most of the physicists I have read also are very they they have an understanding of uh like evolutionary biology and stuff like that, and vice versa. Um, and it's like, why aren't programmers like that? Like programmers should have an understanding of those things, fit physics, evolutionary biology, um all because it because it's all connected and they're all made out of the same ideas, and we could profit so much from learning about these adjacent areas and bringing them back to programming. So that's something I want to facilitate.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Oh my gosh, I'm I'm so about that idea. Uh yeah, I I I would love to uh do whatever part of that I can. That that sounds great. Um any sort of uh this this is a sort of tangent, but uh the there's the traditional conference model, which is like a bunch of people in a room, and then you listen to people who have practiced their talk talk for 10 to 60 minutes, and then there's questions at the end and then break for coffee. Feels very uh tired and ineffective to me. And I've been thinking about this because you know, we we met a microconf and uh I've had conversations with people about like what what might make microconf y sort of experience, but how how could this be better? Um feels very like uh genetic's not quite the right word. One person talking to a room of people feels like a very inefficient way to use a bunch of people in a room. That the uh that that feels like the uh a sort of classroom model that was born out of you know the industrial work a few people through uh to standardize them. And that that sort of model of like one person talking to a bunch of people with a with a pre-canned talk that could have just been a YouTube video, like uh feels unappealing to me. And yeah, any anything like this of exploring how else that that sort of model might look like and how how might we make better use of this uh you know all all the jet fuel to like get people in the in the same room.

SPEAKER_04

Um yeah, that's making me realize something that that I'm seeking out of this. It's like instead of having to go back to the data structure analogy or whatever, instead of having the speaker as a node and then like 300 people in the audience uh as like children of that one node, um, I want to get like 20 people together, and it's like a mesh where every node is connected to every other node. Yeah, yeah.

Rethinking Conferences And Connection

SPEAKER_00

And that's ironically, so many more connections. That's 20 factorial as opposed to 300 if if it's the one person going to 300 people. Exactly. Even though it's far fewer people, yeah. If every person in the room is able to kind of make connections with every other person, that's 20 factorial. That's uh uh oh my gosh, two 2.4 times 10 to the 18th. That's that's a big number. Wow. Uh isn't that right? Is that's the number of connections between 20 people? Is is 20 factorial? Did I did I do that math right? I don't know, but that sounds right. That might be a question for ChPT. If I have a room of 20 people, how many connections are there uh if every person is connected to every other? Um we'll see if that was 20 factorial. Oh, 190. That's that's the wrong uh oh it's a it's a weird n times n minus one over two. Okay, so so 190 as opposed to 300 is actually less than 300. Uh but the my point's that's like it's a it's a better use of uh of having those people.

SPEAKER_04

But how many connections is it per person? In in the first one it was one, and in the second one it's 1900 per person it would be 19 connections, because every person would be connected to people.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so it's nine nineteen versus one, but in the and and it's on par then. So every the total connections is on par with one person talking to 300 people. The total connections being made.

SPEAKER_04

And the character of the connection is way different too, you know? Yeah. Because like it's so much different being an audience member to a speaker versus having a peer-to-peer connection with somebody else.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. And you know, technically, uh, there might not be enough time to have uh 190 total connection, but there is, you know, concurrency. I guess you only need to have if there's 20 people, there can be 10 one-on-one conversations at any particular time. Uh so so yeah, anyway, uh my experience at those small conferences is that you do get to make some very deep and meaningful connections, a lot more so than the big conferences. Um, Christian, you're now a recipient of Nonsense Monthly. Thanks for signing up for that, by the way. So you'll be hearing about the conference in Nonsense Monthly. Um exciting. Okay. Just like last time, uh, I'm I'm gonna have to just rip myself away from this conversation, even though I I really would love to keep talking. Um, any parting words?

SPEAKER_00

Uh But now, goodbye. It was fun. Let's do it again.

SPEAKER_04

Okay. See you next time.