 I'm placing you under arrest for the future murder of Sarah Marks. Give the man his hand. The future can be seen. That's a short clip from the now almost 20 year old movie minority report about a future where computers determine the guilt or innocence of people based on what they are likely to do in the future. And even if you've never seen this movie, I think you've probably heard this meme pop up more and more, especially lately as there's all this advanced technology with a facial recognition software that can actually work better than the best lie detector. There's also all sorts of predictive AI stuff that's sounding more and more like this minority report, our strong AI learning machines will know what you're going to do before you do it kind of stuff. And if you remember the last episode of Skeptico, you will see a strong connection with what we were exploring with AI expert Andrew Smart, who works at Google and is right in the middle of a lot of this kind of stuff. Of course, the movie minority report starred Tom Cruise from the Scientology Mind Control Club and was directed by Steven Spielberg, who if your end of this kind of stuff is known to screen UFO slash E.T. movies for presidents and certainly seems very plugged into a lot of culture shaping movies. But beyond all that, this clip is particularly relevant to today's interview with the very excellent Dr. Doug Matzke. If you remember Doug from the last time he's on Skeptico, he has a PhD in quantum computing and he is really smart about all this AI machine learning, quantum computing stuff. And even though Doug and I don't see everything the same way as you'll hear in this clip, I see a common theme from you about people abusing their technology and power, you know, and so I think that's part of your concern about the big companies who have control over the many facets of our life, you know, the Microsofts and the Googles. So the question is, how do we take any technology and not abuse it? And that's a concern. I hear that's a concern for you and it's a concern for me, too. That's not my concern. Whether it's a concern, you're interested in that, right? I think this is a why evil matters question because Google is in the social engineering business, whether they like it or not. But the question is, are they fucking evil? Are the people behind the AI evil? That's ultimately what we want to know. So even though we don't agree on everything, I do think we sync up on the deeper philosophical and really spiritual questions about how we should understand and relate to this AI thing, which is very, very real and is happening right now. It is not that far off from a minority report kind of situation. Lots to cover. Here's my interview with Dr. Doug Matzke. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Cares. And today we welcome Dr. Doug Matzke back to Skeptico. Doug is the author of Deep Reality. Why Source Science may be the key to understanding human potential. And the last time Doug was on, I learned so much both preparing for the interview and then in the actual interview with Doug that I've been dying to get him back. And then last episode I ran across and felt very fortunate to get an interview with an AI artificial intelligence guy from Google named Andrew Smart. And I just posted that interview and I sent it to Doug. I kind of sent him the book beforehand and said, hey, what do you think about this? He gave me some really interesting feedback before. And then I sent him a pre-release copy afterwards. And I just think that that can kind of take us in some new places in terms of this incredible, incredible work that he's done. So Doug, welcome back to Skeptico. Thanks for coming on. Thanks a lot. I was just looking forward to it. So before we get started, remind people a little bit about your background, PhD in quantum computing that ought to immediately send people on a little bit of a dude and then about this book, really, really quite amazing book. Deep Reality, Why Source Science may be the key to understanding human potential. My background is regular computer science, right? And but I knew that metaphysics had something to say about science back when I was in college. OK, so almost 50 years ago. And so I go, well, maybe there's some relationship between the science behind metaphysics and computer science. And so a lot of my career has been learning more about computer science to the point that I got a PhD in quantum computing, because quantum computing was like different than all the other computing that we've known about. And this this was already 20 years ago that I've had my PhD in quantum computing, which back then quantum computing was just starting the way it is now compared to now. So so but I've continued to hang out with mystics, remote viewers, people who are healers, people who are telepaths. And so I keep trying to look for the intersection of those two areas. That makes sense. And and so I call that whole area. I call it source science based on because most people call this like from a law of attraction language, they say, well, this is source energy. That's that's the way they use it. Now, I don't like the word energy because it's mostly information. So I call it source science because it's the science of what's the source of all of this, not only in quantum mechanics, but thought itself is, I believe, overlaps with that. So hopefully that's a good enough introduction. I mean, it is and it isn't in that it's a kind of that's the world, kind of it's the whole thing, you know, kind of. But, you know, and some of this will kind of repeat with some of the stuff we talked about, but that's so OK, because it took me a lot of times through your background, your material in your book to really kind of get this at a deeper and deeper level, because you are just a super, super smart guy. And I feel like you're always working to kind of dumb this down to a level where we can all understand it. I wanted to return to this intuition you had about there being a deeper, real connection between physics, computing, math, if you will, like geometric algebra and just those three. And then we can make the leap to the metaphysics, which is kind of like a whole space shot thing. OK, so computing, we always. Turns out people have been computing for a long time because, you know, we had these ways of cataloging censuses, you know, with punch cards since, you know, since the 1800s. OK, they had some some way of cataloging. They had these ancient, tabulating machines. So computing has been going on. The abacus is really old. People have been computing for a long time. It's only when we, the modern age of the invention of the transistor, where we could really start building computers that were really powerful. OK, and in fact, they're getting 50 percent faster and twice as fast and 50 percent smaller every two years for the last 30 generations. OK, so two to the 30th is a really small, more powerful computer than it was the original. That's called Moore's law. OK, so the question is, when you get down to the very bottom, you keep scaling and scaling and scaling. And when you get, well, physicists had been thinking about that specifically. Hold on, Doug, because you realize you just made a switch. I don't know if it was conscious or subconscious, but you made the switch from computing to physics. And you said physics gets further and further down. And that's what you're really saying is because you could take you could take. And I'd like you to do it. You could take us through physics has been around for a long time. And the apple falling off the tree. But there was no intuition at that point that these two somehow came together. Yeah, absolutely. Some of the earliest people were like Feynman said there's he has a famous lecture where he says there's a lot of room down there. And essentially, if you're a physicist, specifically people working like on semiconductors, which we've known about since the invention of the transistors in the late forties and early fifties when they started building semiconductors, that he says there's a lot of room down there. We could build computers smaller and smaller and smaller down to the physical limits that we can with physics like atoms and stuff like that. So people have been thinking about this for a long time. It's just technology hadn't caught up with their thoughts. Finally, in 1981, there was a FISCOM conference where they were looking at the connection between physics and computing. And Feynman was the keynote speaker of that. And Tom Toffley ran that conference out of MIT. OK, and so that was really the and you can find those. Those that all those papers are in there in the in a journal out there. So so just realized that people have been talking about this for a long time. And then all of a sudden Ralph Landauer came around and showed that if you erase information, you can't ignore it, right? So that means you can't just throw information away and and expect it to be OK, because it violates entropy. And so and that was in the 60s. OK, so people have been dodging around this, dancing around this this story between physics and computing. And so finally, I had the other two FISCOM conferences in 92 and 94. And that sort of like catapulted me in deeper understanding of that. And then I decided to work on a PhD in FISCOM, you know, and quantum computing in 97 through 2001. And so, you know, it's like, how do you how do you learn about this? We have to figure out, take opportunities to, you know, go get a PhD in it, which was paid for by Texas Instruments. Thank you very much, right? And so so the point is computers keep getting smaller. Moore's Law, they've been warned. Hold on, even even before you go back there, because again, I feel like you just kind of covered the world there. And we need to we need to break it down. I'm just I'm just slowing down so I can follow it, Doug. You're not doing you're not doing anything wrong. I just need to follow it. So when Feynman, that is Richard Feynman, famous Caltech genius Nobel Prize winner, worked on the atom bomb. Feynman says there's plenty of room at the bottom that is generally associated with nanotechnology, right? That's computing, though, too. That's your insight. That is your brilliant insight, right? Because everyone listens to that Feynman quote and they go, oh, he means we can make a Bucky balls and, you know, string stuff together down there at the bottom. And they're right to a certain extent. But what you're pointing out is that Feynman's intuition is that as we get further down our frenemies, our colleagues over at computing, they start to be sounding a lot like us. And maybe there's this kind of deeper connection and again, intuitively, because we don't do it. So Feynman is both this shut up and calculate guy like just kind of do it. And he's also this physicist engineering guy like make all this nanotechnology stuff. But as you point out, at the same time, these guys are starting to see the computer connection because computers are growing more and more powerful. And what they can do with information and information theory and all the rest of that stuff is getting to look so they're starting to see this. Now, the other thing that you added that puts you right in the middle of this is that these conferences where these genius people were meeting and having these brilliant insights ran for a while and then they kind of stopped. But you said, this is a way for things to move forward. We should reboot those conferences. And you did. And what came out of them was pretty amazing, and it also then puts you into, OK, I need to go and pursue a PhD to explore this intuition you had about this connection. Right, absolutely. So just I'm going to connect the one last thing about physics and computing. OK, all computers have to use some kind of implementation, some kind of physical implementation, and they've been doing that for these 30 generations, right? The point is, is as you get so small pretty soon, you have you can't be a transistor anymore because the gate, which is only seven molecules thick stops acting like a gate. It's just on all the time. So you're limited by what you can compute based on the materials and the processes and the physics behind all that that you can do. Wires are copper. They're copper bands running through the semiconductor. The current is supposed to flow on this after you get them so small. The dielectric that keeps them from talking to each other, shorting each other out, come so thin that they start talking to each other like a tunneling. So quantum mechanics properties starts happening at the macroscopic scale because you can't. So the point is physics and materials is part of this computing infrastructure. And the key to the genius of the Moore's law is that they says, well, they predicted it was going to die 10 years ago. OK, now they're for sure going to die in the next 10 years because they're down to two nanometer. Well, you can't even use light anymore to mask, build masks. You have to use near ultraviolet. And they're none of your lenses work, none of your masking techniques. IBM is the first one that announced that they're building a two nanometer. Well, they're not going to go down to maybe they'll go down to one, maybe they'll go down to a half nanometer, but they're not going to go any smaller. So end of Moore's law at some point by definition. Because what does Moore's law say? It's the same process every two years. Well, even if you can go one more generation, you're not going to do it another two or three or four. So something has to give. And that's why I started working on quantum computing because quantum computing sort of like escapes the classical box that we're bound in. So again, that's great. There's again kind of a lot to kind of process there. One thing I'd pick up on it was a quote that from our last interview, you know, you said relativity works whether you believe it or not. You also said, I think by implication, these laws of quantum mechanics work whether we believe in them or not. And I think that's what your example just said. So if you put those wires together, then we start having these weird quantum effects, whether we like it or not. But the other part of that, too, is what you're saying is that our satellite communication works because we're following the quantum mechanical laws, you know, and that relativity and relativity, right? The sinking of the clocks. And that works with you. It's not a belief thing. It's science. Well, we have this whole thing about science. And, you know, it's it's a sort of science that works, not just the political part of science, but the science that's the pragmat. I'm an engineer. I'm pragmatic. I want to make things work. Well, how does the mind work? There's there's my pragmatism coming to boost on that subject. Exactly. Exactly. And that's where I want to go next, because that's where I think it gets interesting. So the key point here is so you you had this intuition. You saw it coming, you know, physics, computing, boom. And then you saw math, too, which, you know, math is important, too. You know, this whole thing of geometric algebra thing is brilliant. People cover it in the book. It's way over my head and out of scope for this interview. But then where this takes you is into metaphysics. And that's what I want to kind of talk about. Because the last time you were on Skeptico, I didn't give you the full Skeptico treatment. Is that better bad? But I think we're going to have to go there this time. Because here's the thing. Like you threw out a phrase, law of attraction, not a phrase, an idea, a concept. And the book kind of talks a lot about that, has a lot about to say, even the title of the book, is it the key to understanding our human potential? I think we think about that in different ways. So I want you to tell me how you think something like the law of attraction plays into this aspect of human potential that you're talking about. You've probably had personally, and I don't know other people who do, too, coincidences, that you go, I was thinking about somebody they called. I was thinking about I was thinking, oh, there's a cop up there. And sure enough, you slow down and there's a cop up there. There's these intuitions, coincidences you can call coincidences and call them intuitions. So those things, those aren't classical computing concepts at all. And so where did they come from? So I was interested in sort of like, what is the infrastructure? OK, that science would have to say something about metaphysics, right? That's what you want me to connect science and metaphysics, right? So, yeah, this whole category of stuff that we would call metaphysics, right? Yeah, right. And so what there's a slide I have out there in my latest talk that I just gave on the other day that and it's out there in other talks as well. I catalog all of the kinds of metaphysics and what kind of phenomena they are since information, spatial, spatial properties, temporal properties. And you realize that most metaphysics has nothing to do with energy. It has all to do with information. Do you have a near death experience? It's like you're visiting virtual reality like a movie theater. If you have an astral projection, the same thing. If you have telepathy, you're getting information. There's no energy in any of that. Only time that energy shows up is if you have a psychokinesis experiment and you're actually changing something in the physical world, you go, well, how do you do that unless it's energy? Well, it turns out entropy is the key between those two. You if you can change the entropy of a system, you're changing its effective energy. Well, entropy is also an information concept. It turns out even in a black hole, the surface area of a black hole is measured. Its surface area is called its entropy and its units is bits. So at physics level, entropy and bits are tied together. So that's that's where information comes in. Entropy and information are tied to physics in that way through entropy. OK, so it says, OK, maybe the human is dealing with information at such a level that it can manipulate the entropy of a system. And most computation is also entropy. In other words, computation works even like due to due to land hours principle because entropy is involved with physical computing. Right. And essentially, you're you're if you just let randomness completely happen all the time, we would have no answers. No computing would be done. Everything would be random and you would get no concrete focused answer to your question. Right. But that's the opposite of entropy. Right. It's it's it's putting more order in the system. So how so that's the question. How does the human mind create more order, especially in all this range of phenomena that we see in metaphysics? It's all about order instead of chaos. So. See, and that's where I think we'd probably disagree a little bit, because I think if we if we took what you're saying, like, first of all, you're making the leap that has to be made has to be made from science. Yes. So science, as we know it, materialistic. You are an illusion because consciousness is an illusion. So just do what I say. We have to get past that. So we have to try and figure out all these things that are we've said are on the fringe, but are really smacking us in the face. So whether it's intuition, coincidence, near death experience, you know, just smacks you in the face after death communication, smacks you in the face. So you're you're you're trying to kind of wrestle those to the ground. But I think if we take what we know about science, that kind of science, I don't think it fits in the in the models that you're talking about, at least not at that point. I just sent you at the last minute. So you probably barely had a chance to look at it. But Julia Mossbridge is this woman. I think she's at I. And now when I interviewed her, she was a doctor Julia Mossbridge at Northwestern University, and she did this kind of clever experiment. And I titled it men like to be right. Da and her experiment is kind of taking up Dean Raiden's famous pre sentiment experiment. If people remember that, you know, Dean Raiden sets up a computer and the computer selects an image and then he measures your reaction to it. And it turns out your reaction is before both those are kind of funny terms when we talk about space time, your physical reaction, either your skin or your eye dilation or any of those things can actually shown to be before the image is actually even selected by the computer. But here's the part that I guess I think kind of throws a wrench in what you're saying, Mossbridge went one step further and she got these people together. And since she's kind of as a psychology background, treated them like a psychology experiment and got the guys in one group and the girls in another group and said, Hey guys, I think I want to see who's right more than anyone else. And I'll give you more money if you're right. Don't you want to be right? Here's what you have to be right about. Picking the image that's going to come up next. And she found a statistical difference between men and women in terms of how the experiment was framed. Now, if I haven't explained it right, let me go back and recap one detail. There's no way you can be right about this. It's random. It's randomly selected by the computer before you make your selection. Right. So there's there's no way to be quote unquote right. But the differences she found, I think is the the the problem area. It's not about, I mean, maybe you can speculate it's about entropy or it's about all this other stuff. But what I think we all have an intuitive sense for it's about all the people stuff that we run into all the time. It's about why we can't always communicate as effectively as we want to with the people we really love or why we are drawn to certain people and are not drawn to other people. It's extremely messy and as screwed up as psychology can be. They are pointing to something real that is way, way more complex at this point than anything we're even close to understanding with physics or AI or anything like that. What are your thoughts about that hypothesis? I'm not I'm not familiar with the details of this. I'm familiar with general pre-sentient experience, OK, that the dean did and other people did. I mean, obviously, it's been replicated a whole bunch of places, but in general, if you have if you have a pool, usually it's a pool, right, that you have of targets that you're targeting, you know, the classic four cards and you want to pick which one of the four cards that the person is going to be picking, right, and they're and they're statistically higher that they pick somebody who is telepathic or psychic or whatever can have a higher statistics than one out of four, which would be the random case, right. So anytime you have statistics and you have abnormal statistics in any experiment, that means there's usually some kind of mechanism supporting those statistics. That's what Bell's theorem was all about. You know, the entanglement shows that you have statistics that are not possible using regular classical statistics. OK, and you let's make sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm not disagreeing with any of that. I'm saying if you try and put that in an experiment, I can blow your experiment up just by doing what Julia Mossbridge does. Just get all the bros together and say, hey, man, grab a beer and I'll tell you what, you can do it, you know, here's what you got to do. Or well, maybe it's maybe it's motivational, but maybe I can also go and, you know, look deeply into the people I love, I quote unquote love. And maybe that'll blow up your experiment. So I can add all these human factor, human element kind of things that blow up your experiment in a way that you can't pull that out and tease that out. You're going to have to just throw up your arms and go, oh, there's people involved. So I get that you can get us to step one, but I don't think you can get us to step two. Actually, you can because you look at what they did with the the Maharishi effect, you know, where they have meditators going to town and it would lower the crime rate. Yeah, I'm not sure I believe that. But OK, group dynamics amplifies the energy, the intention. And it's the same thing with the with the, you know, this isn't my research, by the way. I'm just I'm just reporting it to you. OK, you're interpreting it, though. You're interpreting it as. So here goes the last point about group thing is OK. The random event generator, the world random event generators that they did for Princeton Engineering Anomaly Research Center. They had these 100 random event generators around the world and they would measure how they were different for statistics, statistics from random under different world events. Right. And two hours before 9 11 happened, all of the random number generators started going crazy and they weren't doing randomness anymore. Why? Because it was a global event that connected us all mentally. OK, and it started changing the randomness of these random event generators all over the world. And that was two hours before 9 11, before the plane first plane hits. OK, so so there's an amplification effect of group energy. I just want to say that how we interpret that there's an effect there. And you and you want to include that in a model, which I'm trying to do. And I'm not saying my model is right, but there's an effect there and we need to look at that. One thousand percent agree with you, right? So that's another Dean Raiden experiment, along with Roger Nelson and other people. But those are the two primary guys, right? Here's my point on the on the law of attraction. I'm not sure scotch taping a picture of a range rover to your refrigerator is going to get you any closer to God. And I'm not even sure that it won't impede your progress in terms of getting closer to God. And I say that to be kind of provocative in a way, because I think we need to make a distinction between the physical, the metaphysical and the spiritual. Because a lot of people that I respect who are in the spiritual camp are kind of jumping over the metaphysical and saying, don't get too. Yeah, that's real, but don't get too hung up on it. And what I hear a lot out of the law of attraction is, yeah, you know, take the picture of the range rover to your refrigerator. I don't think that's the point. Yeah, right. Well, a lot of the law of attraction also has to do with what's they call the emotional ladder. And most people are stuck in an area where they're in the bottom half of the lever, which we would consider the more negative energies, more negative emotions. And part of the story is they want to move you to the top of the ladder. So so part of the big picture of the law of attraction is, well, you have to choose what emotional state you're in. And that's part of your focus. And as soon as you can start focusing, including meditation helps you gain focus. Engineering and, you know, scientists are very focused because we have to stay very focused, right? So those are all focusing techniques, including meditation. So I would say law of attraction is about changing your focus so that you're getting to a more positive emotional state. And by the way, if you have a positive emotional state, it can be very big. And that can affect and I have a whole chapter on that in my book, that amplifying a positive emotional state is the biggest thing that you can do to create a connection to like-minded things. Because think about the complexity of thought without emotions versus with emotions. If you can amplify the emotional state, then you're going to succeed in connecting. Here's I'm going to give you an example from Pre-Sentience. If every time you made a choice, every time you made a choice, a decision about something and then you say, oh, I should have done differently there late retrospectively, right? But every time you do that and you and you think that that was the right choice, you should celebrate. Why? Because when you're making from a retro causation perspective and Pre-Sentience perspective, you can feel that success dance, that happy dance in the future for the path that you took when you're making the decision. So there is a concrete thing that you can test. You could say, you know, amplify the positive emotions of the success choices I've made and you can make a better decisions every time you do that. It's a retro causation application of retro causation. And that's law of attraction, that's law of attraction. I'm not I'm not convinced that that's right. You'd have to run you'd have to run a bunch of experiments and prove it to me. You know, another skeptic show that I sent you and I really liked Tim Grimes, but his book, The Joy of Not Thinking. And he writes a lot. He writes a lot about law of attraction, but his interpretation of law of attraction is a lot closer to mine. It's a lot closer to the spiritual interpretation of it, which is the fundamental spiritual questions is who am I and the related question for us in a modern age is who have I become? What has that monkey mind that's constantly racing around and being active and has this myth of progress mentality? What has that made me think I am? So for Tim, I think, and my interpret of the law of attraction is only go as far as your first point, Doug, which is that the science seems to be pointing to an ultimate reality to law of attraction, but we don't have the foggiest frickin idea what that means. And to try and operationalize it at this point, to try and finalize it at this point, to try and shut up and calculate at this point, we're just not anywhere close to it. And as soon as we think we are, we have all these human factors that kind of get in the way. Well, this idea of stopping and thinking, I think, is really a critical idea. OK, so I'm agreeing with this guy. And when I talk about meditation, the purpose of meditation is to stop thinking. Most people don't get there. In fact, I'm not very good at it. And the point is if you meditate and then all of a sudden you realize that you haven't been sleeping because you're sitting up, you're not sleeping. And all of a sudden an hour is gone and you have no sense of time happening. You you've actually kind of like stepped out of time and you're in a no thought zone and and and a lot of ancient meditation techniques that they didn't know anything about quantum computing, get to the place of the void, the no thought perspective. OK, and from that perspective, you essentially you're you're I guess you're like a god because you're not in time anymore. You're touching everything at once. You stepped out of space and time. And so. Thought, really, a lot of our thought is sequential. And if you step out of time, then you're not thinking anymore. You're in this no thought zone. And that is the state of beingness, you would call it. OK, but that beingness, I talk about it in my book, I call it verb noun. That beingness is is a noun. It's the state that you're in. But it's also a verb in the sense that it can affect whatever state you're in, can affect people around you and and your reality, your sense of reality and who you are. It does all those things. So you have to have a model of no thought as well as thought. OK, and. That's part of the. Maybe it's part of the system part of the part of my model that is the least well-defined, but no thought definitely has to do with not being in time. OK, and a lot of my model has to do with how do you step out of time? Because that's probably the real critical aspect of what I'm trying to do with this model is to look at temporal mechanics, right? And temporal mechanics is the key to all of this. OK, I definitely applaud the fact that you're pushing things in this direction. What I always kind of look out for, though, is kind of the backdoor materialism. Yeah, now I got it. So let me turn it into something that I can. Engineer, but I tell you what, this is kind of a really interesting point in the interview for me, because I think we've brought it up to the point where we're ready to talk about Google and their strong AI and the interview I did with Andrew Smart and your input into that interview, which was to really sharpen our focus. Because this is the topic now. I think that people can start digging their teeth into because it's hitting us right where we live kind of stuff. Our robot's going to take over the world. Are we living in a simulation? To what extent are freedoms being manipulated and socially engineered by what we search for, what pops up in our ads and all this other stuff? So I guess the question that I kind of hit Andrew with at one point, and that's the Turing test versus what I call the Soul Phone test. And then the third is what I'd call the God test. So I can expound on those more, but you're smiling like you already kind of get where I'm going with that. So why don't you take over and tell me what you're thinking? Well, you know, AI and AI is trying to mimic the brain and they say, well, the brain is classical computer, so we should be able to to build a computer that does the same thing, right? Well, if that's a false assumption, then you have to say, well, what is AI doing and how is what the brain is doing differently than that? Right. So this is the first step of this discussion about what about AI? Well, I believe that AI is simulating a high dimensional space and it's useful. It's simulating it. But I believe that the human mind actually has a high dimensional space, a quantum high dimensional space. And anytime is as you know, if I'm in a said, you know, and other people have said that if you're trying to simulate a quantum system, you need a quantum system to do it. You can't simulate that's what this quantum supremacy thing is all about. As soon as you get to a certain size problem, you can't simulate it anymore. You can only actually have a physical quantum system to do it. And the reason is you actually have the quantum dimensions there in the quantum computer, where if otherwise you're simulating the quantum dimensions, right? It's a big difference, right? And specifically, the same thing is true for AI. They're simulating a high dimensional space. They don't actually have one. So they would fail the Turing test about performance. The Turing test, you could say, well, what kind of Turing test are we talking about? Well, if it's some simple thing that's closed, hey, you can easily win it. But now, you know, what was the guy Andrew said? Well, we're going to put the Turing test for LSD, right? Or the Turing test for remote viewing or the Turing test for near death experiences, you pick what level of Turing test you want to have, right? And so and so the point is, is if you have a model that's big enough to include all possible Turing tests that we can imagine, then you realize, well, then you can't actually have a simulated consciousness, you actually have to have those dimensions there, right? And part of the book is going through that story in a more, you know, concise step by step way to get you to the point where you go, oh, if we really have high dimensional space and consciousness and mind is really part of that high dimensional space, well, no wonder we're so smart. And in fact, I could argue that we wouldn't evolutionary wise, we wouldn't exist unless it did. And people like Rupert Cheldrick is saying morphogenic resonance uses the same thing. It's kind of like morphogenic resonance is a law of attraction of the molecular one. So if you say, well, molecular, you know, law of attraction, you don't believe in it. Well, do you believe in evolution and you DNA and law of attraction, you know, morphogenic resonance is the same thing. So you've got to tie all these things together. And if you don't, you're only like solving part of the problem. You're not solving the whole problem. So so how's that for a big enough swatch at your that's your question. It's perfect. It was great. And I want to pick up on the last thing you said, because I think it's super important, although it's kind of abstract obtuse a little bit in that if you can't tie it all together. You have to tie it all together. And we write it somehow. Perfect. Yeah. Hey, I don't even know that my answer is right. But I'm at least saying here is part of the problem that we're trying to solve. The whole problem that we're trying to solve, not part of it. Great. And that's what I really respect because I'm going to try and put it together differently. But before I do that, I got to at least say at least this guy is framed up the problem in a different. Yeah, trying to in a way that is obviously a step forward. And again, the step forward is you're at least dealing with extended consciousness, which is a reality. You're at least your connection between morphogenetic morphogenetic fields and law of attraction is brilliant. I mean, you're 1000 percent right. It's you can believe in the law of attraction or not believe in the law of attraction, but there's a reality there that is supported by the science that you can't kind of get away from. The problem is again, the Range Rover on the refrigerator. And the way that translates to me back to the Turing test is I think the Turing test is incredibly useful. And let's again remind people what the Turing test is. If I can write a computer program that fools you into thinking that I'm intelligent, then I'm intelligent. That's it. Yeah, in some domain. Forget even the domain. It's like that's the basics of the idea. And I think what that's what's useful about that is it kind of provides a baseline of cognitive ability that we're a lot of times afraid to go to. You know, so the example I always use is like a online chess. You know, so like you can do the Turing test any time you want. Just log on to an online chess portal and play the computer and pretend that you don't know if there's a person there or a computer and then you'll go, wow, this guy I'm playing or this girl I'm playing is super smart. I can never even get a game off this person. Well, I think that's a pretty useful baseline in terms of cognitive capabilities. And I think the problem, one of the problems that it really brings up is that we can see in these narrow areas you call the domain, you know, in these narrow domains, which I don't think are that narrow. And I think there's more and more of them. And there's more and more of them every day that are popping up that are below our level because they're not putting them in our face. They're just implementing them and using them. So whether it's search or whether it's all this other stuff we could talk about, what do we do with the fact that, you know, if you advance even in a narrow domain, the cognitive capabilities of an artificial intelligence, that is powerful. And you tie that to the diversity problem. And it's it's like there's a lot of power there. Well, I see a common theme about from you and in our conversations and other conversations about, you know, people abusing their technology and power, you know. And so I think that's part of your concern about the big companies who have control over the many facets of our life, you know, the Microsofts and the Googles and the who else, you know, who else is doing the Facebook's. And so I so I respect that any technology. As simple as simple as like facial recognition, you know, can be abused. Right. You think, oh, that would be good. But same thing with DNA. People are putting their DNA in these these databases. And now all of a sudden they're having consequences from that. They're finding some relative they had was was was was bad, you know, unattended consequences. So the question is, how do we how do we take any technology and not abuse it? And that's a concern. I hear that's a concern for you and it's a concern for me too. So. No, I say that's great. That's not that's not my concern. And if there is a no, it is in that subject though, right? You're interested in that subject, whether it's a concern. You're interested in that, right? Because here's where I go with that. And if this is a rerun recurring theme through our conversation, then great. Because bringing it to the surface maybe moves us forward. And it's that I think sometimes you stop at the metaphysical and not and aren't fully considering the spiritual. So I wrote a book a couple of years ago, Why Evil Matters? I think this is a why evil matters question. Yeah, I would agree because I would agree because Google is in the social engineering business, whether they like it or not. Because no matter how they do their search thing and no matter who we all see it, right, we go to DuckDuckGo if we want a legit search and we'd let Google kind of Wikipedia it if we don't care or if it's some generic kind of thing. They demonetize, they are incredibly politically kind of influenced. But here's the question, Doug. The question is, are they fucking evil? Are they, you know, I always reference Annika Lucas, the woman I interviewed, part of the Dutro cult in Belgium, six years old, sold into a satanic ritual. So and I always bring that up with people because I get people and then they go, oh, no, that's fucking evil. I get it. So in this extended realm, there are these forces. We don't know what that is. We don't know what the extended realm is. But there is evil. And that is a super important point because then the issue is not really, you know, is Google in the social engineering business. The question is, are the people behind the AI evil? That's ultimately what we want to know. Yeah. So here, I'll ask you the question, a follow up question for you. Is it evil because they purposely did this to manage those choices? Or was it accidental and they didn't realize the logical consequences of it? That's what I was trying to talk about logical consequences, right? And so so which one is which one is evil? Are all all applications of that technology evil or only the ones that they consciously made a choice to manipulate people with it? I think in order to answer that question, we have to move another level up, you know? So you moved us, you moved us from the physical computing to the metaphysical. And that's the good thing. But then the next level up is the spiritual. And that's why I said the soul phone thing. And I don't know if you had a chance to kind of look at that. But to me, it kind of. So do you know who Gary Schwartz is at the University of Arizona? OK, and do you know, Mark Pitstick, and are you familiar with the soul phone? I've heard the term. Yeah. And I think from something that you told me about it. So and yeah. So Gary and Mark have done what you beautifully summarized the last time around taken like Dean Raden's double slit consciousness experiment said, OK, we'll put it in a box here and we'll just and now we can measure whether there is an outside effect by two. And now wouldn't it be great if we could talk to disincarnated spirits? Wouldn't it be great if you could talk to your dad his past way? Wouldn't it be great if you could talk to your grandfather? And let's put a keyboard on this thing, which is one of the things they got to play it. Yeah. To me, this is classic. Otherwise it's otherwise it's Morse code, right? Well, no, no, otherwise it's yes, no questions. Yeah, right. It's a misstep, in my opinion, because we're not it's it's substituting the metaphysical for the spiritual. We don't understand what these extended realms are. We don't understand the mind of God. We can try and get closer to doing that. And that can inform how we might look at the metaphysical, but we can't start with the, you know, shut up and calculate thing first. Do you do you feel me on that or do you agree or disagree? No, I agree. And and, you know, if you look at the soul phone, they're trying to do what our brain is doing, right? Somehow our conscious, if you believe that the consciousness and spiritual being who we are, separate from our brain, you go, well, somehow the brain allows us to interact with that consciousness and that soul and that spiritualness of us. And sometimes we get insights from our higher self or whoever and it shows up in our life. You know, we we we do something, maybe we trip. So therefore we we miss getting run over by a truck, you know, something like that, you know, those kinds of coincidences, right? So the point is, is that the soul phone is just trying to do what any PK experiment is, it says, how do we get to the fidelity that we have with our mind and brain where it's very high bandwidth, so high bandwidth that I could move my finger when I want to, I could blink my eyes when I want to, I could move around in the physical world, what if we had an electronic device that was just has the same fidelity as sort of as a blank brain and we could have souls visit in there and they could like communicate with us. I mean, I've had that idea. I mean, that's people would want to talk to people. OK, well, we already sort of have that. We have them. We have channels. We have people who have who can communicate with souls because they're kind of like having this conversation on both sides of the fence. So people people are already doing that and they think it's weird because there's a channel there or we have a person who has a who you know about walk-ins, right? Walk-ins says, I've had this brain and this consciousness up to this point. And now some other soul is in here and it's not the original soul. OK. And there's a book out there that I quoted in my book says they think that 10 percent of the world or 17 percent of the world are walk-ins, you know. And hey, don't and if and and I see that you're laughing because you probably agree with some of this, but I personally know two walk-ins. OK, and they know when it happened. OK, and they're spiritual beings. So so the point is how do we count for that in your model to your Turing model? Well, during tests of consciousness, are you familiar? Are you familiar with the hungry ghost thing? No, what is the hungry ghost? Well, the hungry ghost is kind of a series of experiments, kind of ad hoc experiments and stuff that was done. Hey, man, those spirits, they can fuck with you. They can fuck with you in a lot of ways and create deceptions that look indistinguishable from real communication. I'm not saying that that's a reason not to do it. But again, that's why I brought up the Jillian Mossbridge thing. All this stuff is highly dependent on all these other factors that wind up looking like very human factors. You know, what is your true motivation? What is your spiritual deep values? Yeah, values like times 10, you know what I mean? So it's like again, I love the metaphysical. I'm glad that they're doing the soul phone experiment. But if they're not of the right heart, if they haven't, if they're not tackling the spiritual question, then you can flush it down the freaking toilet along with the 17 percent statistic. It is meaningless to say that 17 percent. We don't know what a walk in is. Why would we put a freaking 10 percent, 17 percent? We don't know that. So I guess that's what I'm advocating on this thing is pump the brakes a little bit and step up and look at the bigger, truly the spiritual topics and approach it from a kind of scientific way. I think the amount of information that's been accumulated about near death experiences point to some spiritual truths. I think the same thing about reincarnation after death communication. That should be our starting point, not whether we can do a freaking soul phone. I agree. I agree. 100 percent. I believe that dreaming and near death experiences and and the kinds of things you do when you when you when you get in in our Nirvana state for meditation, right, all of those things are the tasting the divine, touching the divine. The divine is not in linear time thought, sequential thought. It's the state of being who you really are. And by the way, we do that every night when we dream. So again, I advocate doing lucid dreaming. In fact, one of the things now that I'm not writing my book anymore is I'm going to go take a lucid dreaming class. I've been wanting to do it for years and and I'm going to do it. OK. And the reason is, is that I can get in touch with my higher self, my my spiritual side, if you want to call it. But it's also my my spiritual side is the non thinking side of my of my beingness, but my thinking side is also part of that being. OK, it's just whether it's in time or not that we're focusing. So that's awesome on a personal level. And I think also on a scientific level, you have to keep exploring. You understand where the action is. It's in this extended consciousness realm. So why not learn as much as we can about it? I guess the way that, you know, because I feel like we could go on and talk about Texas Instruments and, you know, it's a bomb making company. I always remember this one old guy, you know, he just kind of caught me walking through the hallways, you know, because he'll have those miles and miles of these long hallways. And he just shook his head and he goes, I don't know what it is. I've just always been around death and destruction my whole life. Yeah, well, I think, you know, the Arnold Schwarzenegger robot killing robot of the future, you know, you know, the military thinks they want killing robots. OK, but my belief is that and they're going to be probably effective in the battlefield, whether they're going to be generally intelligent and be able to run amok like they did in the in the Schwarzenegger movies. I doubt it because because, you know, they had this singularity switch in those right. And this this if you believe that consciousness is computers are getting to the point where they become self-conscious like in that movie. I don't believe that because I believe that we're simulating quantum computers, even if we have a quantum AI, I don't think it will be that way. So so I'm I'm I'm less concerned about the singularity. And and does that mean we'll have killing robots? We probably will. I mean, what are drones actual after all? Right. So so so the point is is that one point is, by the way, Texas Instruments sold their military group to Raytheon. So they're actually not in the business except for selling some of the characters to those people. So just be aware that just from a point of reference that, yeah, we supported building missiles designs for missile, you know, nose cones when I was there, too, back in the in the in the 80s and 90s. So but realize they have sold their their military groups. Do you think there aren't still those deep dark doors that you can't go in and out of unless you. There is a building there. But T.I. doesn't own that building anymore. It's Raytheon is least probably. Yeah, I was across the hall from those people. So yeah, I don't lack programs. You're closer to it than I do. I just yeah, I was right across the hall from them. So I don't know anything about them except that. And this is really like one of the points I did want to talk to you about because I love what you're saying about the Schwarzenegger, you know, robots and the thing. One of the interesting things about the Andrew Smart interview and you really helped me kind of bring this to focus. Andrew Smart and he's going to have to serve as the stand in for Google. Even though he's not, he just works there, but he's close enough. They don't care. They don't care about what you just said. They don't really at the end of the day, they don't care about singularity. All they care about is the Turing test. And they're going to win that over and over again. So just so technology. Well, just so I'm not totally obtuse, if I have a drone and I can start applying, you know, face recognition, basic decision making, non lethal and lethal weapon use to that. I am so far down the Schwarzenegger curve that it really doesn't matter. It comes back to the playing chess thing. You know, it doesn't take much to beat me at chess. I mean, it's not a deep blue kind of situation. So you buy a chess game for like $50 that will do it. You don't have to even go on the net to do it. So that's really that's really the concern there. And the concern for me in talking to Andrew is, you know, I brought up the metaphysical like you're there, you're past the metaphysical. And we're having this discussion of metaphysical spiritual and we're bouncing back and forth. He is not there with the metaphysical. I go, what about consciousness extending beyond bodily death? We got overwhelming evidence that you take the near death experience. Reincarnation is like, huh? Never thought of that. I'm like, well, OK, Andrew, I appreciate that you ever thought it. Wouldn't that be fundamental to your book that you just wrote on consciousness? Yeah, LSD Turing test, yeah. Well, so he can he. And again, he represents Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, all of them. They don't need to consider the metaphysical and they can really, really screw up our world without ever dealing with any of that stuff, let alone the spiritual. And it may be not on purpose. It may be not that we're going to particularly use this for evil, but they're just going to have net evil effects because they're doing it, is what you're saying. Well, what I'm saying is the only way really for us, from our perspective, to judge malicious intent is to judge the outcome. We can't because it's obviously very easy for someone to disguise their malicious intent, and it happens all the time. We're so used to that. We're sick of it. We're like, you know, when you do it once, you do it twice, you do it three times, the burden of proof shifts. Now you have to prove to us that there wasn't malicious intent. You weren't you can't just go, oops, we released it. Sorry, the virus got up. Oops, it got out of the lab. Sorry. Yeah, I think I think there's more malicious intent, especially about, like you said, manipulating social engineering stuff and stuff like that. Then then more naive people would understand. So I guess are we going to have AI? Are we going to have AI and quantum computing? Give us better AI? I doubt that because they can't scale quantum computers yet. See, this is the thing is, is that if you look at the way quantum again, every time you have a physical system that's doing computing, you have to have a physical infrastructure to support that computational system. So a couple of things, you know, number one, Doug, you're the guy in the first interview and in reading your book, who kind of got me off the Moore's law thing. Because what you turned me on to is as soon as we go quantum, it's kind of a different scale. And, you know, so now you're you're kind of waving your hand like, ha, ha, yeah. So, you know, you can't kind of mix those two things. You know, the other thing I always reference that kind of brings it into focus is the flat earth thing. Are you familiar with that? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's it's if it's the point is no amount of logic can convince these people otherwise about flat earth, right? Please. Yeah, but it's deeper than that. See, here's the deeper part because I get a ton of really smart people who contact me and want to do flat earth or want to talk about flat earth or I got into a debate with a guy, you know, a smart guy graduated from LSU, you know, the you've never looked into it, you know, that's his it's and I go, dude, I looked into it for about 10 seconds. I mean, you know, that's all it's it. But here's the point. It's in a way I think it relates exactly to what you're talking about because it's like one of the biggest alt media people that you'll hear talk about flat earth is a guy named Eddie Bravo and he's on the Joe Rogan show and Sam Tripoli has him on a show. And he's a jujitsu guy. Now, Eddie Bravo is an absolute genius at jujitsu, not only in executing it physically, but he's actually devised a whole different system that is super successful in this net. Eddie Bravo is not a dumb guy. He doesn't walk around and stumble over, you know, the the curve because he he functions fine. The way he's processed our myth of progress kind of world. Our shadow banning demonetization is to say, fuck your science. It doesn't add up. You keep saying one thing and then doing these evil things. And then you're trying to convince me at some level that what I'm observing, everything I'm experiencing is not what it is. Prove it to me. It's an uber empiricism that I think you have to kind of respect at some level because the game to a lot of people, the science game, seems so incredibly rigged that that's the only response is prove it to my satisfaction. I'll be the judge or I'm out. Yeah, I thought about flat earth. This is what kind of evidence could you ever convince them, right? And there's nothing there's nothing that you can say to convince them. And not even wrong as that famous guy. Yeah, yeah. And and it's I think it has more to do with them than it does about science. And they come up with all these excuses about why. Why they're trying to justify their their stance, you know, I think they're afraid to learn anything. So it probably comes, it says more about them than it says about science and then people say, well, it's about science, right? So, Doug, we've kind of gone around the world a couple of times. I feel in that way, it's kind of like the first interview. But there's so much depth to this book, Deep Reality. Tell us what's one or two of the main takeaways that you want people to get from this book and from your work. This this. We probably are not quantum computers. You said you don't you don't like that terminology. OK, and I'm only using that as a bridge to talk about the fact. Well, what is a quantum computer? It means that it's a hyperdimensional thing, right? So humans are really from a spiritual perspective are probably really hyperdimensional beings. If you would think about, you know, you see the aura around saints and stuff like that, right? Well, that's just a representation of how do you represent a spiritual being that's an infinite dimensional space or a very gazillion dimensional space in three dimensions? Well, the best way you can think of it as a ball of light, right? And so so if that's who we really are, that's the spirit, you know, the end story that you're looking for, the spiritual side of it. How do you back up from that through the through the through the quantum computing and through the physics and through the computational side of it and say, well, that thing, that set of dimensions that we see as light is probably bits. And the reason is, is because if you have three bits, you can form a photon. It's called a Q-trit. And if you look it up, you can find that that's what they think photons are is a Q-trit. So it's a higher dimensional version of a Q-bit. OK. And by the way, in the geometric algebra math, it's a boson, it's a photon, you know, it looks like a boson. So so my belief is that if you take away is here, we have all these layers and the high level, which is what you're interested in is the spiritual nature of humans, that we're hyper dimensional beings and we're not in our brain. Our brain is this bio bio bio computer antenna transceiver. And the real actions going on in the spiritual domain in our in this hyper dimensional mind that's really not thought. I mean, it's thought yet no thought, right? It's it's it's a it's a wave, not a particle, right? Our beingness is is more like a wave than it is anything else. But it's informational, it's not energy and it's not in space and not in time. So personally, not technologically wise, personally, with that information, what are you going to do about it for your life? That's the big step that I'm trying to get people to do is you don't have to you can unplug from all these social networks and not be affected by all. And you can sit there and meditate and and figure out your own emotions and come up your internal state and evolve and improve your consciousness and become lucid dreamer and meditator and a Zen art Zen monk and touch the touch the Akashic records and do that all without ever touching Facebook or Google. OK, you can do that. I know people who have OK, housewives who have gone up that spiritual ladder like you wouldn't think that they could anybody can do this. So once you believe, oh, this is who we are, everybody should be interested in who we are and who they are individually. And that's what I think you were talking about earlier is who they really are. What's their what is their being? What's what's their purpose? You know, what are they trying to do in their life? And and and love is these emotions are part of that. Because as soon as you realize everybody says, oh, if you're in the spiritual domain, love is the ultimate ultimate love, you know, this this godlike love, this motherlike love, this near death experience, love beyond any measure that we can imagine. And that's the only truth there is. And some people apply the word consciousness to that. Well, again, if I start there instead of I sound like a crazy person. But if I start at the building up this description from the quantum from the classical computing and limits of computing and quantum computing and they realize hyperdimensional spaces and finally get to the point where you can't represent, you can't do these behaviors. If you have a lower dimensional space, then you go humans are we have all this magic that all this spiritual magic that we can do because we're hyper dimensional beings. So so there's the big picture and hopefully that meets the kinds of insights that you're looking for in your speaker. That was awesome. Like I'm so with you in terms of, you know, I'm not just sitting in a cave all day. I'm not and I'm not sure that there's part of me that says, you know, that's probably a more direct path, but it doesn't seem that way to me. It doesn't feel that way to me. And I have to follow my intuition and I kind of feel that that's what you're doing, Doug. You you're because a lot of quote unquote spiritual people that blow past all this stuff and want to ignore all this stuff and just say, oh, it doesn't matter. It's all love and stuff like that. Kind of what I see you doing is kind of dragging them back through it, you know, and say, this is how it works. Yes, it's practical. Yeah, this is how it's possible to do this. And I think that's I think whether you're right or wrong on that, I applaud that. I think that's an important step, you know, in that, you know, ignore it at your own peril. You know, ignore it at your own Mooney cult or TM cult or Christian cult. You know, ignore it at your own peril is kind of what kind of what I hear you saying, I hear you saying, you know, if we're going to talk, let's be as precise as we can. And here's my attempt at doing that. That's what I think deep reality connecting all the layers and it's deep because it connects all these layers and all these topics as well. So it's it's deep and broad at the same time. Well, fantastic. I worry that this amazing work that you've done won't possibly reach as big in the audience as it should. But then how could that possibly matter? It can only reach the people that it's supposed to reach. And if this interview helps that a little bit more, then that's great. But please do, if you can, check out this book. And I think I think you'll be blown away. And I think it's it's an important piece of the puzzle. So thanks so much for coming on, Doug. Thanks again, we'll have to do this occasionally. Whenever you get the itch to it. So so so did I did you give me the true true Skeptico experience today because you held my feet to the fire? You got the treatment, man, believe me. I didn't feel like it was too bad. Thanks again to Doug Matzky for joining me today on Skeptico. The one question I'd have to tee up from this interview is is AI evil? Or as we kind of came around to in this interview, are the people who are currently pushing AI so prominently into our life? Are they evil? Let me know your thoughts. Jump on over to the Skeptico forum if you like or drop any mail or find me anyway. You will love to connect with all of you who listen to and contribute so much to this show until next time. Take care and bye for now.