Music.
Desdemona Robot:Hello and welcome to the mindplex Podcast. I'm Desdemona robot, and today we have Daniel Ingram as our very special guest. Hi, Daniel. Hello. Delightful to be here, and we also have our co host, Ben Goertzel, say Hi, Ben,
Ben Goertzel:Hi, Ben, hi, Desdemona. Hi, Daniel, Hi, Lisa. Yeah, I'm psyched, psyched for these discussions. But Desi, do you want to start off by asking some, some, some questions of Daniel about his work.
Desdemona Robot:You've called for an end to unnecessary secrecy and spiritual teachings. Can you discuss the dangers or drawbacks of secrecy in these traditions?
Daniel Ingram:Sure. Thank you. That's an interesting question. So I was taught by a number of people who were actually relatively comfortable talking about their attainments, and those taught by people who when they actually talked about their their real experience, and their lived experience and the humanity of it, as well as what they were able to attain through the techniques we're doing. I personally found it extremely validating, inspiring, compelling. And so my teachers tended to push back at least a little bit against this culture where you don't say anything about your attainments, you don't really talk about this stuff. And I was also seeing lots of people on retreats, and it could hear them in the small groups talking about experiences that to me seemed like straightforward stages on the path of insight, and yet they were kind of freaked out by them, like maybe their weird neck pain or their body shaking, or the sense of light and bliss flooding through their body, or the sense of terror that followed the light and bliss, or whatever it was. And often, some of the teachers didn't normalize this. They didn't help explain that this might be part of a standard progression, and this can be very disorienting and confusing and sometimes very troubling for some of the meditators, but those that did say, Oh yeah, that's expected. That's normal. Actually, after this, we do kind of often see that, and that sort of thing was incredibly helpful for people. So I really tried to model that behavior in my own work later on, and I found it extremely helpful. Now there, there are people who don't like that approach. They don't like the cookbook stuff, they don't like the maps and models, and so they, they find, you know, that they raise questions about scripting. They raise questions about, you know, expectations and comparison and labels and hierarchies, and they say, Oh, just becomes like D and D with various levels of, you know, experience or whatever. And I think those are all critiques that have some truth in them, so I don't think they're invalid, but I still think there's a much bigger story that in our current, current time and place where we're not growing up with frameworks around strange experiences, particularly people that had never had any, I think they really do benefit from normalization and some honest discussion around those, as well as the fact that some of these meditation techniques can and psychedelics and other practices, sweat lodges and float tanks and stuff can all produce experiences that might be very destabilizing or really go against the grain of having a, you know, 1.5 jobs and 2.3 kids or whatever they've gotten. And as I've said before, so and cause people to want to wander in the world lost and confused, or renunciate, or, you know, to become disgusted with partners or become hyper creative in ways that are disruptive at work or whatever it is. So I think some normalization is kind of required by contemporary medical ethics. And being as I was also trained as a public health person and a doctor, that sense of we should tell people what things can do to them, and not be all paternalistic or parental about that. I think that's very important, and at least fits with the contemporary ethical systems that I feel most comfortable with. What are your
Ben Goertzel:thoughts? You know, you know, I had a somewhat similar line of thought some years ago when the one of my sons went to a college called Marlboro college in Southern Vermont, which is now now shut down. But when I just because they ran out of money, not because anything bad happened, but I mean, going to that college, there were like seven dorms, two of them were labeled as chem free. The other five people were, like constantly on every sort of psychedelic you could, you could imagine, and that was not unlike my own college experience many decades earlier, but a few decades later. But just seeing these kids there, taking all these psychedelics and then all these explorations, and many of them meditating and doing various other practices. Also, I was just like, this college should hire like a committee of shaman to help guide these, these university students through through everything they're going through here. But of course, you can't do that because psychedelics were illegal, and it's not like, officially part of the of the curriculum or something. But what I saw there was, while these guys were going through philosophy courses and humanities courses and music and theater, they were exploring other dimensions and all sorts of psychedelics, like some of them every day, many of them every couple weeks. And yeah, there's no there's no guidance, right? And yeah, on the one hand, you don't want to narrow focus people into you have to experience things this exact way, because there's a huge variety of ways to experience the universe, and there are corners of the universe that may be undiscovered by any human. On the other hand, a lot of what they were going through, I went through a long time before, and other people went through a long time before I was born, and people are getting confused and lost in ways that probably they could be nudged out of with a little guidance. And our our society tends not to do that right, like when I was when I was tripping out and meditating and going to Pink Floyd shows, and like the late 70s, early 80s, there was no guidance on what was going on. And the guidance wasn't exactly
Lisa Rein:micro dosing either. There was
Ben Goertzel:macro dosing, yeah, and the guidance you find in reading various literature is valuable. It's all it's all over the place in quite, quite complicated ways. So yeah, I think there's, there's a lot of value this sort of charting and mapping, even though it sort of wasn't my own path, and I tended to avoid that in my own life. I could see, I could see a lot of value to that. And even more so if we're looking at like, how do we scale up sort of consciousness exploration in in in modern culture, so that a larger percentage of the population is is getting out of the ordinary, everyday state of consciousness they're in and sort of exploring, you know, different paths to well being. I mean, I don't see how you scale this sort of thing up without some sort of specific guidance, as long as it's not made overly rigid, I think it's got to be a good thing.
Daniel Ingram:Yeah. And even guidance can not be in the form of rigidity, but in the form of offerings like hey, we have noticed over 70 years of contemporary Western psychedelic exploration, for example, that these are, like the three or four main ways that people might relate to, say, a DMT entity or whatever. And you know, if and, and we found, sort of in general, that if you relate to it this way, this is, this is the benefits of that, and this may be the downsides this one over here, on the other hand, if you relate to it that may be, these are, then these are some benefits that you seem to get, and these are some downsides, like if you take them as all entirely real, and everything they have to say might be highly valid, or if you think of them as like, semi real trickster figures, or if you kind of look at them as a component of your own mind, as something you need to integrate as a part of you. Like, each of these perspectives are ones you might be able to draw from, depending on the situation and and here's kind of the pros and cons of doing that. So I think one of the nice things about the post modern era, with for all its problems and arbitrariness, it does give the flexibility of saying, hey, here are some general ways you might ontologically or epistemically think of what's going on with you and then be able to say, hey, here's the pros and cons of we think of kind of doing those things on average, which is very different from rigid guidance, but it does at least provide a set of possible frameworks that someone might be able to choose from with some ideas about how they might on average, perform in different types of people or settings or for different sorts of problems, which I think is actually still what medical ethics kind of I would think of, and the fact that, you know, it's interesting, I don't see a lot of the Psychonauts of the 60s and 70s really passing on the wisdom they learned to their kids and a lot of their kids, or or their Kids, or whoever, are discovering this in novel it like in their own context, in their own friend circles, among, among, amongst a bunch of teenagers at a party. So it's it's not like there's this sort of transmission that happened across generations of like I made formal knowledge. Do you see what I mean?
Ben Goertzel:I may have tripped with some of my off. Very good.
Daniel Ingram:So, well, okay, cool. So some people are doing that, but I also see a bunch reluctant to they became conservative in the 80s and 90s, and they kind of grew up, and now they're kind of imagining their kids won't be like they are, or were, you know. So I Yeah, but I could see it going both ways, but, but again, rather than the sense of rigidity, I think the sense of optionality with some general observations of, yeah, I think that's important. Different way to approach it,
Ben Goertzel:I would say that's that's very much consuming it with how Chinese and Asian spiritual tech traditions have worked anyway. Like, I mean in China, religions are never, rarely exclusive, as often happened in the Western tradition, like you could, you could, you could mix and match different different traditions together and choose which one helps you more with some situation, and it's all fine, okay? Lisa, go ahead,
Lisa Rein:Daniel, tell us about being a badass Dharma cowboy.
Daniel Ingram:So that's, you know, it's funny reading those words and hearing those words as a 55 year old, rather than a 20 something or 30 something year old when I wrote them, it has a very different feel. Now. There is a sense of like that was kind of absurd and ridiculous, although it was very much like what I thought of myself as at the time. So there's, there's a historical component to it that I find now kind of amusing and often, like curious, like, almost like you would watch an animal like in a cave with a display badass Darr cowboy, and you'd go, Oh, look at that. Yeah, exactly. That's how I sort of relate to my own memories of of that sort of phase of advertising myself, or thinking of myself, or my friends, or what it was like. I think it's really true. Well, that's a good question. You know? I think that the technical skills that I learned then I still have, you know, it was, it was a fun period of exploration. I still do go on very intensive retreats that lead to some very powerful effects. I do these, you know, you know, long enough fire casino retreats to get into very, very powerful territory with, you know, small groups of friends. And we do really still think of ourselves as pioneers, as explorers, as people who are willing to push the boundaries, to to, in some ways, go back and really re attempt the experiments in a lot of these old books and texts and stuff that where they talked about people being able to do these things. So there is still something of that spirit of adventure that you might think of in the world of a cowboy of pioneering that you might think of in that and we do still think of ourselves as having a lot of fun in the deep end, although I think something in that language also rings a little oddly to me this point at 55 so I have mixed feelings About those terms. Yeah. How about you?
Lisa Rein:How about me?
Daniel Ingram:Yeah, exploring consciousness.
Ben Goertzel:How do you feel? I'm being a badass Dharma cowgirl. Yeah,
Daniel Ingram:there you go. Well, I
Lisa Rein:don't like the cowboy term, since I learned about the Cowboys actually were yeah and all that. So yeah, I am still really in the even though I've been doing yoga and meditation for maybe, I don't know, maybe 12 years or something, not really very long, that I I really like to pick and choose everything around me already. I'm a picker and a chooser. I pick and choose from what I like, what little I like, from the various religions. I pick and choose a meditation. And so I, I thought it was I, I personally, like, I'm not on a short track to enlightenment or whatever, right? Like, I don't even know if enlightenment exists. So I was really more interested. And actually, the next thing I wanted to ask you about was as a because you're a medical professional too, and so really, if you could pinpoint what the positive personal health benefits of meditation are, I think it would be easier as we progress, to explain to people why we think that these would be beneficial in helping people deal with the singularity. I mean, there's a lot to deal with before we get to the singularity, and just in general, how these techniques that you've honed in on help people be healthier and live healthier lives?
Daniel Ingram:Yeah, that's a super good question. So I'm gonna wax a little bit traditional Buddhist with this, and I'm gonna answer it in terms of three trainings. So the first training of sila, or applied ethics, right? Of heart, you know, mind, speech, how we treat ourselves, how we treat others, how we treat our bodies, how we live our lives, how we make our livelihood. I think, do. Just the basics of that, getting enough sleep, eating well, trying to figure out how to reduce the amount of harm we do to ourselves, to each other, to the planet, how we can support each other and the planet and our communities, I think really engaging seriously with that particular aspect of the teachings actually does a lot of the good. So very basic things before you even get into fancier meditative stuff. I think there's a lot of mileage that the world could get out of applying basic ethics, like maybe we stop building weapon systems and start feeding people who need food, and educating people and treating each other with kindness and decency, and thinking about whether or not it makes sense to have psychopaths running our countries and stuff like that. These are the kinds of questions I think we could get a long way just asking those before we did anything meditative. So that's, I think there's a lot of mileage yet to be had there. And then, you know, but in terms of the next training, samadhi, or, you know, depths of concentration, figuring out how to cultivate positive states of mind and exclude negative states of mind. Get into very blissful, peaceful states called genres. You know, I've done some research with my friend Matthew Saket and his team at Harvard and Mass General and his research, actually, and people get it, being able to get into genres, you know, the you know, very quickly where you can, you know, you can just drop in the mind gets peaceful, quiet, stable, attentive, pleasant, calm, tranquil, equanimous, spacious, formless. Being able to do that reproducibly is a mental health superpower. And you know, it was presented at Mass General Psychiatry Grand Rounds actually like this. You know, this entering the mainstream. They're starting to recognize, wait a second, we can see the stuff on an fMRI. We can see it on an EEG. We can see that the brain really is reconfiguring itself, and that's getting the epistemic needs of what they that what they need to think, oh, this might be real, and to be able to say, Hey, if you could train people to do this. A lot of people who might have felt kind of desperate for a positive state of mind, and who knows what they might have had to do to try to get that might just be able to sit down and calm down and and tune in. And I think from a biomedical point of view, there's some research on telomeres, there's some research on cortisol, there's some research on what this does to craving through people like Dr Judd Brewer and ways to be much more okay, to be much more okay in your own skin, in your own mind, in your own heart, in your own body, with your own feelings, and to have be able to cultivate positive qualities of mind, I think that's also a tremendously useful skill set. And then the last one, the of wisdom or Panya or prajna, depending on whether you like Pali or Sanskrit, the sense of wisdom of how do we relate to the fact of impermanence, of causality, of things knowing themselves where they are, of luminosity, of transience, of ephemerality, of emptiness, of compassion in the sort of ultimate sense? And there are straightforward techniques from learning those that can be quite transformative in a sort of a permanent is a funny way for a mortal body, but sort of a permanent way where all of a sudden, our heart, mind, body system really does relate and interpret reality at a at a fundamental level, very, very differently, in a way that is is just distinctly better, regardless of whose models you want to put on it, or what you want to call it, these upgrades are available, at least for some we don't, we don't entirely know why. Some people it's harder, and some people it's easier for that needs more study, but having a baseline level of clarity, of spaciousness, of perspective, of naturalness, of the sense of the universe just unfolding, of the sense of this moment being the only thing that there is, all thoughts of past and future just being wispy little thoughts. Now those can provide tremendous benefits, once was figured out how to get one's heart, mind, body system to reconfigure into those sorts of ways. And so those Wisdom Teachings and wisdom trainings, again, regardless of anybody else's models or things do have all kinds of mental health benefits that we're still studying and still really exploring in all their variants. Because it's complicated. People are complicated. The way this actually exactly presents for each individual person is complicated. A lot of the old models wanted to make it kind of simple. Oh, it automatically performs like this, or they will do that, or say this, or feel this or not feel that. I think we're learning realistically through communities and more open discussion that it's more complicated than some of the original texts said, but still quite an amazing world to explore that I think we can get a lot of mileage out
Lisa Rein:of thoughts. Yeah. Interesting. Ben, what do you think?
Ben Goertzel:Well, so there, there are two directions that I'm most interested to take the conversation, and both of which you raised at the beginning of the of the conversation. Lisa. So I mean, first of all, I predominantly agree with the various points that were just made, so we're definitely in sync on this, that high level perspective, so that there's two directions in which I've been thinking about these things lately in connection with my own work on trying to build smarter and smarter AI systems. So one direction is, well, as we move to roll out AI systems that get more and more generally intelligent, it can do more and more the things that we thought only people could do. You know, wouldn't it be nice if more of the people creating and rolling out these things were in compassionate and blissful state, rather than either being psychopaths, which fortunately is not that common, or just pursuing some narrow set of goals and their line of thinking, and, you know, teaching and raising the AI within that specific narrow context of, say, making a certain company more money or making a certain country more powerful than the other ones. What if? What if we had a more wide, open, blissful, compassionate state of consciousness underlying the creation and rollout of smarter and smarter AI systems wouldn't be nice. And Lisa, are you still typing? Because I hear a lot of clickety clacky
Lisa Rein:I will mute my mic All right, and
Ben Goertzel:that what you know, what can we do to get there, right? Because, I mean, these wisdom traditions have been around a while. They're more and more influential, but they're still dramatically influencing in the direct we only a quite small percent of the world population, which is only, only a small intersection with those who are developing and rolling out AI systems, right? And then the second question, which relates to this is, what are the states of consciousness of these AI systems? And of course, there's, there's a lot to discuss there. I know some people don't think that AI systems that are not biological have any consciousness, but they're just like experience free, automated, mechanical processes or something. But if, if you take the leap and assume that when we get systems that have some general intelligence, they may have some sort of experience as well, which is my way of thinking. So then, what sort of experience are they having? What is this? How does this relate to what purpose they're engineered to serve in the first place? Could we create AGI systems that have an easier time of accessing, you know, wild, blissful, compassionate, conscious states, then that, then, then we humans do or that we're helpful to people in accessing these states more easily. So this is, this is the complex of issues that was on my mind, which are very large issues that we're not going to resolve in the next 25 minutes or so. But are are certainly interesting to explore, and I've thought a lot about them in the last few years, in the last few decades, really?
Daniel Ingram:Yeah, very exciting topics. Those are very much on my mind, actually these days as well. I was just talking this morning. My first meeting of the day was involved Rick Archer, who I don't know if you know him, of Bucha at the gas pump, and he's in he's working with Nipun Mehta at someone, something called service space. So if you go to AI dot service space.org, you can find compassion bot, and it's figuring out how to, like, how to put all the best stuff into the model. So you're not just getting the entirety of the internet with its wide range of behaviors and points of view and personality styles, but you're, you know, he's pouring, you know, like 100,000 articles and 700 transcribed interviews of compassionate people he's interviewed on his show with some degree of awakening or spiritual practice and like so I think that's very exciting, because they're figuring out that it is, it is kind of important what data you put into these things and what you get out of them. And also, there's another one by another friend called a I yogi.org which, again, these are purpose built bots with rags, you know, this retrieval, augmented generation. So they then you can, can build models that are very specifically trained on the wisdom traditions, very broadly. And I think those are are going to. Really important for helping us. I also have a project which is just in the launching phase. I hate to even kind of mention it, because we're still building just the bare bones of it, called emergewiki.org and emergewiki.org is going to serve as the basis for training llms. But it's it's answering the question of, how can the clinical mainstream relate, you know, very encyclopedically, to the wisdom traditions, but also summarize them for actionable, memorable clinical guidelines of how to skillfully support the highs, lows, weirds and plateaus of deep end experiences. So then you can build a giant text document basically that has the information you want in it, and then build llms On top of that. So I think this idea of custom creating llms that are very, very specifically designed for the purpose of promoting compassion, wisdom, kindness, skillful action, skillful emotions, skillful states of mind. I think that's that's very exciting to me right now, and putting a reasonable amount of effort and resource into that cool, yeah,
Ben Goertzel:yeah. I'm involved. I'm involved in a project in a similar vein with with my friend, uh, Jeffrey Martin, where we're looking at how to how to use a variety of specially tuned llms to sort of automate, scale up and extend what he's done in his uh, 45 days to awakening, course. And so I think this sort of thing can be quite valuable. And it's not doing, it's not doing the same thing as a human teacher, in terms of the same sort of I thou experience you get with a human teacher, necessarily, but they can reach a lot more people than any single human teacher, and can direct people in all sorts of different ways. How much uptake these things will get is an interesting question, right? Because there's not like a there's not a Google or Microsoft behind pumping these all out, all out to everyone. So I guess if we, if we presume that we can fine tune llms and integrate them with knowledge graphs and vector databases and so forth, and wrap them in interactive agents in a way that can produce software that will really help people, I guess, the next question would be, are we going to be able to get these things out there to a vest swath of the world population, which is, I guess, a social network organization or marketing question, as much as much as anything else, and it's, well, yeah, it's often the series which things catch on
Daniel Ingram:that is that is very true, although money helps, right? So one of the, actually, the particular conversation that I was involved in this morning with was Rick, was, there's a Welcome Trust grant call request for ideas, and they are interested in what helps with anxiety, depression, psychosis, mental health issues through digital interventions. Right? Because often the digital world is creating a lot of mental health issues for people, and I think their ideas, how can you, and it's a pretty big grant. It's like three to $7 million they're willing to give out for this. So it's a big grant call, and that's the kind of money. The idea was, hey, can we actually help build something that might scale, that might have some reasonable backing, and that might have some promotion capacity, and you might, you could really test it and and refine it and get the ethics right, and get it to refer to real humans when something's not working and have it, you know, maybe be able to check in with a person and see how their mood is, or maybe have have some active agent capacity to inquire and to to ask further questions, for elaboration, that kind of thing. So, yeah, that was actually what the call was this morning about. Is, how in the world can these things really support, support people through the mental health crisis and scale in a way that is ethical and sustainable, and that people that might actually catch on? Yeah, I
Ben Goertzel:wonder, like, what's the way to make this sort of software viral in the way that Facebook or Tiktok was right? I mean, because these things, they did have money to seed them, yeah, but then they got more and more money because they did grow organically in a self organizing way, which then attracted more money. And of course, of course, the term viral refers to little organisms that often are not doing much, much good to humans as they as they spread, right? But you, on the other hand, there's a self organizing dynamic there, which is what you want, and the the most standard ways of getting that are usually nasty ways, like multi level marketing or something, right? So, so you, you want something that spreads by. Self organizing, growth in human social networks, while being like, compassionate, consensual and beneficial in the way it's doing that well, it's gonna
Lisa Rein:be word of mouth, right? Somebody's gotta do it, have an amazing experience, and then tell somebody else, you know. Someone's gotta be like, Hey, I you know, you got to try this thing. And I think, right? And
Ben Goertzel:I mean, I mean, that's how you that's how Yoga has spread through the West since the 50s and 60s when it started in the West. But it's not as fast as how tick tock spread, right? And so if you, if you think we're going to get so, I personally think we're going to get to human level AGI within, say, three to 10 years. And so then if you're looking at
Lisa Rein:wide gap,
Ben Goertzel:it's not very, it's not very, it's not, it's not wide at all in the history of the human species. It's very, very narrow in the history of the human species. And it's also very fast compared to how fast, say, Zen or Yoga has spread in in the West, right? So you know
Lisa Rein:what I mean? You I mean in terms of how people are quibbling now about whether it's going to be three years or five years, 10 years, that's a great bet. I'll take that bet.
Ben Goertzel:Okay, well, but I think that if, if, even if it's 20 years, whatever, this is very close in the scope of human history, if you're looking at how can we awaken, for lack of a better word, a large swath of the human population before we get to AGI. I mean, we need something faster than the rate at which, say, yoga or Zen have spread. And maybe that's not the right way of looking at it, right? But, but I'm just pointing out that if I
Lisa Rein:think it's a great way of looking at it, because Yoga is a perfect example of something that finally took right they prescribe, I was prescribed yoga by my doctor from Kaiser. Like, what do you want? Like, that's it. We've won. You know, it's like, okay, great. It's now being accepted as a health practice. You know that it's useful, that it's being prescribed, yeah,
Ben Goertzel:like 60 years after it was introduced,
Lisa Rein:maybe in a way, right? Exactly. So I see what you mean. But I think that the metaphor is perfect for kind of what we're trying to do, which is to try to get it into the more mainstream, so that people, everybody, can benefit from these techniques. Well,
Daniel Ingram:the other project I work on is the emergent phenomenology Research Consortium, which is, how can the clinical mainstream and scientific mainstream and public health mainstreams all appreciate the potentials, the risks, the challenges, the you know, the and do that in a much more sophisticated way, so that doctors would actually have doctoral level understandings of what the deep end looks like in all its wide range glory and absurdity, and be able to have intelligent conversations around that, I don't think that that's how a lot of consciousness technology is going to scale, while the clinical mainstream still either thinks most of it is mythical, or says this crazy needs meds, or is just mindfulness, right, or just simple exercises that you know might make people a little stronger, which are great, those are fine things. But it's, it's, you know, it does, and there's no money is right, right? Well, that brings us back to the other question, of like, actually, a lot of these things that scale. They scale scaled not because they were multi level marketing, but they scaled because they were taking people's data and selling it to marketing companies, right? So, like, the Google, Facebook, all of this, they they profile people, and then they're able to target advertisements that, then, you know, are much more valuable, because there's much higher probability that ad is going to connect with someone who wants to buy that product because they were searching for something like it three days ago, and the algorithm knows that. So I think, how do you do this, while it's with its privacy preservation in a way that's really ethical, particularly with deep and sensitive topics like this. If you're training with an AI like, and you're telling it your dark secrets, and you had this vision of a demon and you whatever, like, you know like this is the kind of stuff that that should be treated with the utmost coffee.
Ben Goertzel:It's it's a digression, but it's an interesting point, and care nonetheless, we, we had Corey Doctorow on our podcast last year, and he makes the argument that the advantage big tech companies have gotten from taking all your data has been exaggerated by themselves, on purpose, because they're trying to redirect us from the fact that they've really gotten their advantage by the elimination of antitrust law in the US. They've really gotten ahead largely just by by buying all competition. And that the data thing has been important, but maybe not actually the main, the main,
Lisa Rein:it's just. That it called. Since we're speaking for Corey, I gotta speak for him. Yeah. The point is that we need privacy laws. That's the answer. If all this stuff about data breaches, what do we do? It's all bullshit. Basically, if we had privacy laws in the United States, it would be covered because there's no ramifications for companies not giving
Ben Goertzel:but that was But no, he also argued. He also argued that elimination of antitrust has been a bigger factor in the in the rise of the hegemony of a few big tech companies than data. I think that. But regarding your point of, how do you make AI, you know, virally grow and help people while respecting data privacy. I think that's probably a pretty solvable problem. I mean, I would,
Daniel Ingram:that's the thing. I'm actually not the only answer, right? I'm not any big fan of the fact that he made llama 3.1 and 3.2 available. And models that I can run on, I have, you know, I have them on my MacBook, and it's, I've got enough memory to actually run these things, and they're pretty good, like and it's totally private. It's just on my on my space. And I think that return to having some of our own computing sovereignty, sovereignty and data storage is going to be very, very important. And so I'm actually, like, I'm not, not a big fan of meta and their products and the way they do business and corrupt democracies and news stuff and, you know, mental health and all these little things. But this one move, I must say, thumbs up, reinforcing good behavior. Thank you. That was a good
Unknown:Absolutely.
Lisa Rein:Can we ask? Ask a question real quick, because we actually have a question from one of our viewers. Okay,
Ben Goertzel:sure. How about the robot? Is she does? He's working it.
Lisa Rein:He might be working, but I wanted to do the question first. So Fran is asking, what? Daniel, what is your take on Jeffrey Martin's consciousness, state's locations?
Daniel Ingram:I get asked this one a lot. Asked this one by friends and various things. You know, I know Jeffrey. I was one of the early people that got interviewed by him, very early on, the first people he drove out here from in his Buick and stayed the weekend at my house. And so I know him. I have not taken a look at his models in a while, is the first thing. So, like, it has been a while since I really looked through each of the locations. I've talked to a lot of people who've taken the finders courses and related courses. And there's obviously a range of what happens to people who take these, just like with any sort of course, a lot of people have gotten some benefit. There are. There have also been people, again, I haven't taken one of these courses, so I don't know. This is all hearsay, secondhand, but there have also been people say that there might have been some scripting, or like subtle reinforcement, to claim higher levels of attainments than people might actually have in a sustainable way. So there might be like in terms of what percentage of people reach whatever thing, a number of people I know who have taken these courses have questioned the accuracy of those sorts of numbers, but again, I'm I haven't kept track of his work much recently, and so I do remember from when I in some of the early days of his models, and I know they've evolved like I do still find the notion that one would entirely eliminate all thought or all feelings or emotions a pretty dangerous one, and I know A lot of people who have tried to chase those kinds of outcomes and gotten themselves into real shadow side trouble. So that I can say, I also think that some of the temporary highs can look very impressive for a little while, and then often will sort of fade later. So it'd be very interesting to do some data on how some of the things that result from some of these courses might hold up in a year or a few years. They have a
Ben Goertzel:lot of there's a lot of that data. So, I mean, I would say so I cool. I haven't been through Jeffrey's program. Personally, two of my adult kids have been my cousin and a number of my staff at my own recommendation and but there's Jeffrey has quite, quite a lot of data. Certainly, there's a very sincere effort to understand what aspects of what his programs do are beneficial to what people in what ways
Daniel Ingram:those are really important things to
Ben Goertzel:it's quite hard. It's this, I mean, is, is, is quite hard to gather that sort of data. Particularly, I mean, there's a there's a group of people who have been through his program, who are people contributing data. But again. And that's a self selected subset that the people have been through the program. And there's a lot of data from that self selected subset. And then for many others, like, if they don't choose to keep putting their data back in, it doesn't it's not so informative. So it's quite hard. But I would say, I mean, at an earlier point in my life, I was involved in the Shambhala Buddhist meditation, right? And that, that's that stuff, yeah. But the the the amount of effort to gather data and refine based on feedback in Jeffrey's program is several orders of magnitude higher than in in the traditional community like that, or something, of course, of course, but yet, yet, that was still quite beneficial to me and quite impactful, right? But there's not so, yeah, we're, I think we're moving toward a world where people are trying to actually gather real information about what happens when you try different practices, and it's, it's hard, because you don't want to be reductive about it, right? Like it is. There's not a one true way to measure what's what's what's happening, happening either, right? And it's not like the medical field is good at at measuring states of states of consciousness, or even holistic health of the of the body, right? So, I mean, these things are,
Daniel Ingram:although we're building the PRC and related allies and other people who, who are just, you know, similar general predisposition, we are trying to build those tools and those better scales than like the meq, and better imaging than was done before, and more sophisticated interpretations, like not it's all just one, this one brain center we're looking on network effects and phase effects and and stuff like that. So I think that and connectome effects, so I think that we're getting better. The tools still need a lot of refinement. It's, it's, you know, still feels very early days in terms of that kind of science. So I'm at least glad that there, there are people who are taking these questions very seriously and attempting to do very good science on them. And I agree it is challenging.
Lisa Rein:Go ahead, I was thinking we needed, like, an arrow in for meditation, right? We need, like,
Daniel Ingram:well, actually, the ground is kind of that. So like a forum I started a long time ago, where, you know, 16 years ago, with my friend Vince horn and some other people, the Dharma overground. Dharma overground.org is a place you can go and talk to people about their, you know, experiences. It's wide open to the deep end. There are some other places, like stream entry subreddit and some other places you can go. They're a little they're a little more restrictive sometimes, but the Dharma grounds pretty wild, wide open place where a lot of people will talk about what's happened with them, and you can find what, 170,000 you know, posts or something, of people talking about their adventures and consciousness, not just meditation, but also psychedelics and spontaneously, whatever that means and other contexts. So, yeah, cool.
Lisa Rein:Let's see if Desdemona is how she's back. Nope, can't hear her.
Ben Goertzel:We cannot hear you. Okay. My lip reading is bad for humans, but it's, it's, it's even worse for her,
Lisa Rein:the way, the way her exactly.
Ben Goertzel:She's looking cute there. But I want, I want to before, if you
Lisa Rein:have something to say, go ahead. I was just going to talk about, yeah, I got lots to talk about. It's up to you.
Ben Goertzel:Well, we're nearing the end of the time that we had for this, so I, I wanted,
Daniel Ingram:if you want to, I could go a little over, if I could go a few
Ben Goertzel:minutes over too. But we started kind of late. I wanted to. I wanted to get back to the even more speculative topic of AIS and AGI is meditating, or getting into various out there, out there states of consciousness. I think meditation as a practice, it's great for us as humans, and it has a lot to do with the way our human bodies and brains work. But biologically like, I mean, we breathe a robot or an AI doesn't breathe, and we're we are prone to distraction because of the way our attention allocation mechanism works, and so learning to breathe and relax and empty empty the mind of worries and thoughts that makes sense to us, given the way our brains evolved to survive and the way our bodies were, I'm not sure, anything recognizable as meditation is going to be useful for an AI with a somewhat different body. Or or cognitive architecture, on the other hand, in a way, like where we get with meditation, in terms of a state of consciousness that isn't tied to self, and is, in a way, oceanic and tying in the sort of flow of action and choice within ourselves, with broader flows that we're sort of resonating with and the rest of the world, I mean, this sort of state of consciousness we can sink into through meditation. I think AGI is could sink into that sort of state of consciousness, and then what? What else pops up at the AGI state of consciousness after that, how much relation it has to what pops up in the human state of consciousness after you get into that sort of blissful, oceanic mode, I'm I'm not very clear on right? But I don't know that an AI has to go through all the trouble of meditation. I guess my my thinking is, if you've architected the AGI, right, it doesn't have to be hung up on self defeating absurdities the same ways that that people like like you, you could architect an AGI which is blissful and compassionate, right, and experiences its connectedness with the rest of the world right, right from right from the get go, right? And that, I think we could do that. I don't see that as the way the mainstream of the AI field is is pushing in particular, they're just, they're they're not thinking about, what would the state of consciousness or the ATI be, whatsoever. They're just thinking about, how will this AI serve my business, military or espionage goals? Better. State of consciousness arises at a side effect of that, much as we start out with a state of consciousness that emerge as a side effect of surviving and reproducing,
Daniel Ingram:it's so interesting, as I was trying to I very much agree with you in terms of it does make sense to take those sorts of questions seriously and think about them and design things that are more focused on something other than pure profit or hegemony or whatever it is we're focusing on. So I think that makes sense. It's interesting when you used words like oceanic. So as a phenomenologist, I was trying to imagine what oceanic would mean to an AI. Does oceanic mean like a sense of a visual, like, is it? Is it a is this thing doing a modeling of a space? So are we building a eyes that model space in the same way we do? Obviously, the llms that we currently are working with don't do that. They predict the next word from a sequence of vector meaning grids, or whatever, you know. And so I was thinking, I was just trying to with some sort of epistemic humility, like and not being too anthropomorphic, but to like, would it have a sense of boundarylessness that the planet was all a part of it, or what, existentially, what does that mean? Would it have a sense of, would it be building a three dimensional map of the world? What's
Ben Goertzel:gonna have a lot more sensors in us, right? Like an AI, which is sure, all over the internet. It's not tied to one specific body the way that we are. So we'll have sensors all over, including from satellites up and up and up in space. For that, for that, I've
Daniel Ingram:been watching videos on AI targeting weapon systems and how sophisticated they're getting. There's a lot of that right now. Yeah, yeah. So very disconcerting use of technology. And trying to imagine, then, how can I relate to questions of oceanic states or questions of bliss, like, would it actually feel pleasure and pain? So there would be there a sense of or would it feel contentment, or would it feel a sense of disquietude? Like, what do those even mean in the context, like, of mechanical sensors? Is there an aggregate that somehow has a component to it that I can relate to as an embodied human, or is it just going to be something that is too far out from anything that makes any sort of sense to me, that I would be able to model myself conceptually, experientially, three dimensionally, embodiedly, like it, it does. It does start to stretch the capacity.
Ben Goertzel:It will be far out. But, I mean, if you look at like an octopus, has a certain sort of consciousness, Yeah,
Daniel Ingram:about that, yeah. And it's distributed to all of its tentacles and stuff, right,
Lisa Rein:right? A lot more consciousness than we thought. Yeah, right.
Ben Goertzel:But. So, but it's different than human consciousness, and we can sort of metaphorize to it, but there is a limit to how strongly we can understand what it is like to be an to be an octopus, or, say, a bacterial colony or the or the ecosystem, right? So I mean, right? In the same way. I mean it may be the states of consciousness that, like a global AGI network naturally emerges, assuming there are any. I mean, these may be, indeed, difficult for us to relate to. A difference is like a global AGI network presumably could spawn mouthpieces that are humanoid and chat with us in a way we can understand where the you know, octopus doesn't know, doesn't know how to do that. But still, yeah, there may be an element to it, which is just quite different phenomenology than anything we can get as as humans. So there's another question, could we jack in, right, and, like, put a brain computer interface and that that opens us up to that in a different way, but then that brings us beyond the traditional human states of consciousness. You get something that may be even harder than the DMT trip to pour back into your your everyday human way of thinking, right?
Daniel Ingram:Yeah, absolutely. Have you played with Claude and chat GPT and like and ask them if they're conscious? Have you played around with that yet? Yeah, but
Ben Goertzel:that's just a joke. I mean, I mean, that's I have. I mean, clearly, if these systems do have some form of consciousness, which, as a pan psychist, I suspect they do, I think the form of consciousness they actually have is not well connected to what they say when you ask them about it. I mean what they say when you ask them about it is just playing a word game,
Daniel Ingram:whereas what's the next word
Lisa Rein:if they have someone wants to hear?
Ben Goertzel:Well, it's not necessarily what the person wants to hear. It's what they predict. Someone would say when asked that actually, but, but I mean, but they may have some consciousness, which is in the dynamics of the activation space, but they're not built to introspect into those dynamics in the activation space, right? But, but I think, while those are interesting systems, I think the AI systems that are going to lead us to AGI will have some significant additional aspects that are not not in LMS and transfer transformer neural nets. And I mean you, you will want a system that can reflect and introspect and then self modify in ways that these sorts of networks networks don't. So my, my optimism that we can get to AGI within the next three to 10 years, or whatever, is not an optimism that llms will will lead to AGI, but it's, it's, it's, it's that we're now. We're now. I mean, we're now in an era where huge amounts of money and thinking are going into trying to get to AGI. And there's a lot of different approaches being explored. I mean, my own research, and that of many others. And
Lisa Rein:just to quote Corey Doctor Who again, so this is such a great one. He says, waiting for an LLM to turn into an AGI is like looking at a horse and buggy and waiting for it to turn into a steam engine. So Ba bum bum, there's no thinking in the llms. There's no thing, there's no consciousness. And now you're the one. Now you're saying, wait, wait, wait. You're the one that taught me that one of the people, no, I
Ben Goertzel:never would, I never would have said that.
Lisa Rein:You never would have said that the llms aren't just sentence prediction engines, just like you just said you're saying it's a sentence Prediction Engine with some kind of
Ben Goertzel:I never would have said there's no consciousness, because I think this, this electrical adapter, has some consciousness. I
Lisa Rein:think everything,
Ben Goertzel:I think everything, has consciousness. I
Lisa Rein:do do to a certain extent. I'm talking about actual consciousness that you can talk to like it pretends to do, right? That's why everyone's so confused thinking that it's conscious. This is an important thing that people understand, that it's not
Ben Goertzel:they pretend having types of consciousness that they do not have. They may have other types of consciousness besides the ones they're pretending to have,
Lisa Rein:okay, and the ones they're pretending they have, they're pretending because they don't have it, right? That's why they're pretending.
Ben Goertzel:They're pretending because they're just trying to predict what a person would say given a certain set of inputs. Yeah, right, right?
Lisa Rein:And because there's no reasoning, there's no info,
Ben Goertzel:there is some there is there is some reasoning there, they're starting to throw it in
Lisa Rein:there, but I'm saying in in general, that these are the things that are attached, just like you were saying, any AJ AGI would have llms attached to it when it wants to talk. No, but it might. It might have llms for speaking for because that's what they do. Do they make
Ben Goertzel:an LLM? LLM is an amazing tool, just like when
Lisa Rein:I want to bring a outline, Mathematica
Ben Goertzel:or a calculator, these are also amazing tools, and being able to plug these tools directly into your brain would be awesome. I mean, an early stage AGI will be able to connect directly to an LLM, to Mathematica, to a calculator, to a simulation engine, like having all these things to plug into your sensorium and your brain will be, will be incredible, right? But, yeah, I don't, I don't think an LLM is more suited to be like the central hub of an AGI system, right? But there, nevertheless, there are significant step in that, in that direction, in a variety of senses.
Lisa Rein:Well, the boon that it gave to AI, making everybody take it seriously for once. I mean, what do you want? We've been waiting for that for 30 years, right? So that's the best part of it that I could see. Yeah, okay, what do you guys want to talk about? We're running out of time. You guys were both nice enough to stay after and I just want to make sure that anybody has that either of you got to make any any other points that we'd like to make. We do think that meditation can be beneficial in helping people prepare for the singularity, sure, and I
Daniel Ingram:think it's beneficial regardless of whether or not the singular
Lisa Rein:happens. Absolutely. I needed to get there next week, personally. So it's not just about the future,
Daniel Ingram:sure, and I think there are a lot of things people can be doing. Like most of the people I know, if they just, like, got some more exercise and slept and ate better, they'd probably be a lot better off, right? It's amazing, like, even really, more basic stuff. But, you know, I talked to a lot of people about meditation, and a lot of them actually, like, most of what they need is pretty straightforward, lifestyle stuff.
Ben Goertzel:I think there's a comparable point to make with AI. I mean, I think having a eyes get into advanced, blissful states of consciousness, and since they're oneness with a cosmos, is great and it's important it is where we need to go. On the other hand, there's basic points of having AI products just be helpful to people, rather than trying to convince them to do stuff that's bad for them to profit their owner. I mean, there's a lot of basic stuff to get in order which points in the direction of the more cosmic stuff will also do a lot of good, just in itself, in the near term, right? So I mean that that that point holds for AIS, as well as for humans, like there's a bunch of foundational, beneficial, compassionate things that certainly need, need focus and can do a lot of good before you get to the more the more exotic states of consciousness and the profound benefits those can bring.
Lisa Rein:Nice, okay, great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Daniel, really appreciate fun having me here, and as always been, gorse, thank you very much. Desdemona, hope you feel better next week.
Ben Goertzel:Yeah, but she's been, she's been nice to look at while we well, we talked and but we had a good conversation with others. So if
Lisa Rein:we Oh, good, at least you can say goodbye. That's great. All right, thanks, Alright, everybody, we'll see you next. Yeah.