 On this episode of Skeptico, a show about belief systems. Some people don't know what to do when their belief system collapses. I did a long time ago that I was going to be open to everything, but not buy into any one and only belief system. What? You're attacking this whole belief system, aren't you? And how we might use AI technology to change them. Subjected to the most rigorous testing you can, have the most skeptical people attack it from every direction and if it can still withstand that storm, then people will have faith in it. We would substitute people with skeptical agents, right? Because if we can come to a point where we go, AI smartest thing in the room has read every philosophical, classic and thousands and thousands of current philosophical papers, then we'd have something where we'd go, wow, that has to be in this different category of where I have to incorporate it into my belief system. That second clip you just heard was from our guest, Timothy Owen Desmond, who goes by Todd and has written some very cool books and has a very cool course on psyche and singularity, on Jungian philosophy and quantum physics and all sorts of really smart stuff. But what we really engaged with in this dialogue is a continuation of these dialogues I've been having about AI in terms of how the truth game is being played. I think you'll see what I mean as we jump into this conversation. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore science and spirituality and I was just saying to Todd that I'm really excited about today's show. So we have Timothy Owen Desmond here, known as Todd and super excited because you reached out to me about just we have a lot of similar interests and you have a very cool book that is there behind you. But then we also have this interest in AI and the potential for AI that we see whether we like it or not. And I just think we've already started a really interesting conversation about that and we have some unique ways that we're going to kind of bring the rest of people into that conversation everyone is listening. So welcome Todd, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, thanks Alex. I'm looking forward to it. This whole AI revolution and how that fits in with science and spirituality. We've already talked a little bit so I'm excited to get back into it. So before we get started tell folks a little bit about your background and the book where you're coming from on some of this stuff. Right, so my background is I studied philosophy in college as just a prerequisite I had to and I fell in love with it. I didn't even fall in love with it so much but I wasn't good at the business math. I was in the business school at Boston College and they gave me what they called a gentleman's sea. It was not my bailiwick and I thought just not that up to par with these other kids. They're smarter than I am. I tell the stories sometimes to my students when they teach the College of Southern Maryland. Across the hall from me in my freshman dorm was this young man John Coffey who was a whiz in the math, the business math and he was pulling his hair out one day and I went over and said John was wrong and he was studying our mutual philosophy class. We were in philosophy together and in this business math and he says I just don't get it it doesn't make any sense and I was doing well in that. So that made me feel better that such a smart guy was having a hard time with philosophy because I thought oh I'm doing well in philosophy because it's easy, it's softball stuff but then I realized oh some really smart guys have a hard time with it so I just switched out of necessity but then I really started falling in love with it so I graduated in 1993 and then there's a prejudice in mainstream academia against belief in the soul and belief in God so I didn't even bother to go to graduate school I just lived on a tree farm, my dad's my mother and father's tree farm in Southern Maryland I helped raise these little trees and by the time they started getting big enough my dad was like so when are you going to get a real job and then I went to Boston worked as a night watchman for years in a group home for autistic boys at the midnight shift so I could write and just keep independently studying I was studying the Vedanta philosophy and Plato and Nietzsche and quantum physics books like The Cosmic Code by Heinz R. Pagels and things like that books written by experts for the educated non-expert and then I was trying to get published and nobody published me one person wrote back and said I like what you're writing but you're not going to get this kind of stuff published without a PhD so then I say well if this is what I'm doing with life after nine years of independent study I went back to the school realm I got a Masters in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University and then a Masters in Political Science at the University of Hawaii because they had this alternative futures studies program with Jim Dader I could see some freedom for combining quantum physics and politics there and then I went to the California Institute of Integral Studies I got a PhD in Philosophy and Religion in the PCC program Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness and that's where I discovered these parallels with Carl Jung's philosophy and Holographic String Theory which came to this Psyche Ecosingularity equation the Psyche I'm identifying with the gravitational singularity and the horizon that encompasses it especially the horizon of the cosmos the spherical border of the universe and that's the essence of the book and near-death experiences and things like that so there's a little background of how I am now talking to you Cool and you know all that stuff is great but that's not exactly why you're talking to me well you're talking to me is because of our mutual interest in AI and how that might kind of link us in the future because here you are a guy who's kind of in this Jungian string theory stuff but underneath all that you're challenging some fundamental assumptions about the nature of consciousness, the way we run things the decisions that we make as a country, as a people so I think what you and I are doing and what you're doing in this paper and let me pull it up here convening a constitutional convention on AI and then we're going to go into the dialogue that you had with chat GBT on this so there I've kind of teed up a lot but jump in there and tell me what you're thinking Yeah well the so the Psyche equal singularity equation is based on Carl Jung and he worked with Wolfgang Palli the quantum physicist he also learned about general relativity and special relativity from Einstein himself and so Jung believed the Psyche or the soul is the foundation of reality it's not something that emerges from matter it's fundamental and he says therefore it is its own source of energy and if it's got energy it should have measurable mass in Einstein's equation E equals MC squared energy equals mass times the speed of light squared why can't we measure the energy of the Psyche and in one letter he said maybe it's too small but in this what I call the leaf day letter February 29, 1952 which he wrote to J.R. Smithies in the context of general relativity and special relativity where he talks about if you accelerated a massive object to the speed of light it disappears from space and time he talked about infinite intensity at the expense of extension and he concluded the letter with this equation Psyche equals highest intensity in the smallest space so the highest intensity is infinite and the smallest space is zero volume that's the definition of a gravitational singularity and if you equate the Psyche or the soul with the gravitational singularity then everything starts to fall into place so I mentioned Paoli, Jung and Paoli Wolfgang Paoli a Nobel Prize winning co-founder of Quantum Physics they work together to find mirror symmetries or parallels between the laws of psychology and the laws of physics based on the assumption that mind and matter emerge from the same archetypes of the collective unconscious which are the source of mind and matter and since mind and matter emerge from the same source they parallel each other and so they said we should look for these parallels these mirror symmetries so I think mind and matter merge in the gravitational singularity because that's the archetype of the self and then the laws of psychology especially as described by Jung and it's basically identical with Plato's philosophy and then the laws of physics mirror each other the laws of physics especially as presented in holographic string theory which Leonard Susskind and Herard de Hooft a Nobel Prize winner the united general relativity the theory of gravity and quantum mechanics which was the holy grail of the search for physicists these two physics you can't predict what will happen in the realm of tiny things with general relativity because it only describes massive objects you can't use general relativity to describe things inside of an atom why isn't there one law of physics to describe everything at every scale that should be the case and that's what physicists including Einstein were trying to do so these guys succeeded mathematically with this holographic string theory which says the ultimate conclusion is that the past, the present and the future of our three dimensional world of the entire universe all of the information describing the past, present and future of the three dimensional volume of space is located at each point of this encompassing sphere where from our geocentric perspective spacetime is expanding away from us at the speed of light all of the information is recorded there in this two dimensional sphere perfectly flat sphere and that information radiates in on elastic strings of energy with the cosmic microwave background radiation the echo of the big bang to create what Susskind calls the cinematic hologram of our world that perfectly parallels Carl Jung's near-death experience which he had in 1944 which he recalls in memories, dreams, reflections where he says he broke his foot, he had a heart attack he rose above his body the end result of his near-death experience was him saying, it seems to me each of us lives in our own little three-dimensional box of illusion tethered to the horizon of the cosmos by a thread and that the past, the present and the future are interwoven blissfully with the archetypes of the collective unconscious out at that horizon of the cosmos so the encompassing horizon of the cosmos projecting the cinematic hologram is there in Susskind who is an atheist who presents his theory as the anti-plato and it's there in Carl Jung's near-death experience which is very similar to the one's Plato describes in his various dialogues and then the identity of the soul with the central singularity is there in his leap day equation which I talked about earlier so the central point and the encompassing sphere it's this perfect mandala which he said is the image of this ultimate archetype of the self so the laws of physics and psychology I think we have now what Jung and Pauli predicted this perfect mirror symmetry and with that kind of next level of scientific understanding I think we can start to base legislation on that No Okay I don't think that's how it works Okay, how do you think it works? I don't think that's how change is made I think if that's how it works and that's how change is made we see that kind of change and so I think that what we got to look at when we look at AI is something different in terms of the potential it has to be an agent of that change but I don't think it can be the way that you're describing it there I don't think you can lay out your thing there and say, okay now let's redo the constitution let's redo the declaration let's hold the convention I think we have to step back and look at what that process would really be like Well I would say we would use AI to bring up the case and competing theories and everybody brings their evidence and we can accelerate the process of determining which one is more true using AI but the reason I think it's important to have a definition of a self, at least one fundamental term is that it confines the conversation which otherwise is going to go off in a million trillion different directions Why does it go off in a million trillion directions? How so? Because to tame the... like you were saying everyone's saying, oh Tah, you're full of shit this is not the way it is and okay at some point we need to make legislation there needs to be some kind of a compromise even if we say this isn't true we need some kind of an agreed upon even if it's a noble lie this is the one that I think is most effective at uniting opposites and I bring in Carl Jung's theory of the archetype of the self which he calls the archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites and he says when the mind is pulled by opposing demands the collective unconscious self archetype compensates that ego and pulls it towards wholeness through the union of opposites with images of mandalas circles are spheres with a central point and my whole dissertation in the book says the black hole and the inside out black hole universe expanding from a singularity encompassed by this horizon of the cosmos it's a geometrically perfect mandala it's outside of space and time it fulfills the predictions Jung made about how the psyche works and about his predictions for the synthesis of physics and psychology that he made with Wolfgang Pauli their scientific predictions I think have come resoundingly true and that mandala model of the self I think has an archetypal ability to unite opposites that it draws people at a collective unconscious level towards wholeness by uniting opposites a hack of our collective unconscious I don't think we're going to be able to pull it together and become a more perfect union yeah I don't know about that last part I mean see the approach that I would take I think we need to take and I've taken with the with the bots is to just stick with what we already can all agree on scientific method falsification empirical evidence and just hammer on that because that's what we're all supposed to be down with right well it gets a little tricky when you get to string theory because the strings are so small that although they are in the empirically observable world we lack the technology to empirically observe them and what you count as empirical evidence is a dream empirical evidence is a near-death experience empirical evidence I'd say yes Jung would say yes others would say no well well I challenge the others it depends on how you conduct the experiment and the same is true with string theory and the same is true with quantum mechanics but I think you know if we're going to confine things one I'm not down with the noble lie thing I think that's how we got into this problem to begin with I think I mean I think fundamentally we're in agreement on these core soul and God kind of concepts but if we put that aside for a minute and say we're going to play according to their rules which is science and in that regard I think we're on very solid ground I mean all the dialogues I've had it doesn't take much to get the bots to acknowledge that the empirical evidence for this idea that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain solely 100% is not supported by the empirical evidence and that the mind-manner interactions that are in parapsychology near-death experience all this other peer-reviewed work directly contradicts and doesn't fit under that model so when you get to that point it's game over and I've already had these dialogues game over game over game over so from there I think is is really the launching point from which to say okay now we have some foundation for which to begin to explore what you're talking about now we have to take what you're saying at least as maybe whereas before we can just kind of dismiss it and go no that can't possibly be right I don't know what you're talking about with young's near-death experience but I know near-death experiences can't happen because consciousness is purely solely a product of the brain and when your brain is dead when you are dead conscious experience is dead and they just come that's what I think we need to tackle first oh sure well so let me ask you this when I gave my spiel about my whole theory and you're like no I got the implication that you were just saying that as kind of an example of what would have to be dealt with bringing these kinds of ideas oh you want to change the situation and this is your whack that idea hell no but I do want to stick to my idea that that is science what I was talking about the psych-equal singularity equation is the scientific method I mean it was Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli you can't get more of a bona fide scientific person then co-founder of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics that I think the evidence Max Planck said the same thing right Max Planck said that consciousness is as fundamental that's a hundred years ago and we still are dealing with the neurological model of consciousness as being the dominant paradigm so I'm saying first things first we have to I'm not in disagreement with your science but I'm saying the way science works I think is when we have these paradigms these paradigms need to be falsified before we can move to a new paradigm we can't just say oh just set it aside and all you guys in neurology over there you can just retire because that's no longer valid you know I think we need to address it directly and I think and then I want to talk about also because I don't think it's completely innocent in terms of how the system has been rigged to perpetuate what is really a pretty silly idea in terms of consciousness as an illusion you know you're a biological robot meaningless universe most people don't believe that so the fact that science is operating under that paradigm needs to be questioned as well in terms of how is it that that is perpetuated and maintained yeah why why do people well not most people but most people in academia why do they cling to the materialist paradigm I don't know I think it has something to do I mean back on Plato's Republic I think it has something to do with democracy honestly in a democracy the virtues that are focused on are freedom and equality and most especially equality well if there's a God you're not equal to God therefore there can be no God therefore the easiest way to get rid of God is to just say everything's made of matter and it's just blind chance and just in organic circles they combine over time they create life there's no God it's random and it's that way I don't have to admit that I am a subservient entity and it's kind of a ego boost for people who don't want to admit that there's some supreme being so that's just one psychological reason I think people cling to this evidently falsified paradigm that consciousness comes from matter there's all sorts of things why people believe weird things kind of thing what I think we can more point to directly and again this is kind of my approach is you can take the current technology that we have in terms of AI and natural language processing and the first thing we have to do is really understand that technology and understand what it's doing to generate what it generates you know and then there's this discussion about whether it ever could be sentient which is a separate conversation but if you follow logically the path that you and I are taking you would have to conclude that the human beings are somehow more and that you know we shared the thing on the Turing test and the ESP and it's like no until you show me a bot that has a near-death experience which is part of the broader human experience then we can't really ever consider the possibility that it's sentient but yet that is something that you know all the AI enthusiasts kind of ring their hands over oh are we going to reach the singularity are we going to be sentient all the rest of that stuff but if we take that off the table I think we get to a more interesting place but the other side of that is the deception and manipulation which is evident these bots are being trained to deceive and human beings in a lot of instances are not that hard to deceive and manipulate through this very engaging kind of conversation yeah I mentioned that in the paper one of the functions that a national AI system so I was playing off of Sam Altman and Elon Musk Sam Altman was the one who said we should have some kind of a thing like a constitutional convention to define the parameters of the AI system like how do you define truth how do you define hate for hate speech you know to prohibit people from expressing hate speech and then Elon Musk said he wants to establish truth GPT which is aimed at finding the maximum amount of truth in the universe so one of the things I said we could use AI and this was following the philosopher Jurgen Habermas kind of a progressive political philosopher and the way to ensure freedom in democracy one way is to expand grassroots conversations so that people can participate in the legislative process and if you had a fair and balanced mediator that could inform people and keep the conversation going and keeping it on on track what would be this ideal mediator what would that person be like and I'm saying AI has the potential to become this perfect mediator it can understand and digest immediately what people are saying it can summarize and it can detect the gaps of knowledge that each person has but then what you're bringing up is that it's programmed with certain biases like I noticed it's got a materialistic bias it does have a materialistic bias but it goes more than it goes beyond that type you know like in some of the dialogues that I've published one in particular I thought was really great because I just stumbled upon it I didn't go looking for it but I interviewed a woman named Dr. Julie Beischel and she's head of the Windbridge Institute and she's done a lot of peer-reviewed work on after death communication and in particular how it relates to grief and grieving and all this stuff she has a PhD from University Arizona in pharmacology she's like a superstar in this field you know she's like if she goes to France she said she's like a known superstar and here she's just like the leading authority on this field so I asked I think it was a bard that I was on you know the Google one and it says I don't have any information on Dr. Julie Beischel right and so then I probe a little bit further and then it says oh I do have the information and then I go over to Claude and I get the information and then I keep coming back and it's giving me the information and not giving me the information and I go you're shadow banning and and then we went through the definition of shadow banning because this is shadow banning so here is the exciting part I think the silver lining part I got bard to admit that it's shadow banning I got bard to admit that even though Google has never acknowledged shadow banning that bard as an agent of Google is admitting to shadow banning on the on this corporate entity but the implications of this are really a lot bigger when it ties back to your thing like this is a very subtle thing the shadow banning and the fact that there's shadow banning and you would have to know Dr. Julie Beischel because she's like a real stickler when it comes to science you know she got pharmacology background you know you can imagine how they are in terms of controls and you know the placebo effect very very by the book kind of thing so how she got caught up in this net of shadow banning and controlling and when I press bard bard says well there's certain controversial topics that I just redirect the conversation away from well that has to be made explicit and yet the nature of the technology means that well probably like a cat chasing its tail in terms of trying to bear it out this deception and manipulation so it's a lot more complicated than just saying you know let's have a convention let's foster some open dialogues about you know what we want yeah well I was not advocating that we use any one of these corporations pre-existing larger language models because I know that they're biased it's going to be inevitably biased by the programmers whether they want to or not I was saying we should establish a national AI system of the nation's own by the people and I was pushing my idea of this equating this psyche with a singularity but putting the information there to support it and letting the AI analyze it and says you know you're a perfect logical master are there weaknesses in this argument if so where so I wasn't planning on using ChatGPT4 as the national AI mediator at all although even a thing like ChatGPT could be used to analyze legislators arguments and compare them to the things that they've said before to find out inconsistencies and things like that even at the technology that it has right now it could do that but I was saying we should establish then using national money a national AI system free of these kinds of deceptive practices the nature of the technology is you can never be sure that you're going to be free from those and then also we have the real tension around that is the open source LLMs versus the corporate LLMs and it's interesting because where the people are going is the common the people who are in the know are saying I need open source as soon as you demonstrate that these kind of shenanigans are going on you're like I want open source and then you're down to this thing are we all going to have our own AI so like are you going to have your AI and that's going to compete with someone else's kind of AI and that's probably more of a really democratic way to do it because then you could in the comparing and contrasting of it you could probably get a little bit closer to something like a consensus well yeah I could see that too but the idea of having one national there's got to be a final word now what you're saying that they could be that way but if you're going to have I'm saying I don't think the technology there can be no final word it's the nature of the technology it's like when you say a national AI the nature of these large language models if you take you're saying Elon Musk and his truth thing so Elon Musk is building his LLM off of Twitter off of X so he has the advantage of all that all that data that's on X but he's also saddled by all that data that's on X so when you go over to Bard and Google Google has Google and the same with Facebook and Meta and they have everything that's on Facebook so there's no national AI because all these data sets you know data is the new oil I don't know if you've heard that term but the data is what's driving all this stuff but no you can't do a national AI well I mean you would so the ideal so define for me what you would think the ideal AI system would be what would be the most comprehensive most powerful AI system that you could imagine again I think you have to get back to the technology understand the technology intellectuals like you are kind of dipping into this water but what I think a lot of people don't realize when they do is that you got to do a crash course in the technology and understand the technology because otherwise if you just are looking at the product of it it looks different than what you think it's like hey this thing is giving me well no it's just traversing this huge knowledge base that it has so those knowledge bases are proprietary so Meta's knowledge is somewhat proprietary and so is Google and so and now you know the legislation that just came through in Biden's executive order on this was everyone's worried about security right or safety in a number of ways so I said hey before you start going and teaching your LLM we want to know are you going and scraping the whole internet we want to know about that are you so that's kind of related to this in terms of people are going to go try and scrape as much data as they can and get it under their arms and then what they really want to do is they want to combine it with their own proprietary data like x-wood or like twitter would and then you have really your own kind of secret but in terms of you asking me what is the best the big advantage we have here is open source and particularly because open source is going to have the capability to give us a contrast with the manipulation and control where we can say Bart is full of shit because I have this open source LLM that is almost as smart and points out these you know logical inconsistencies and then Bart is forced to either answer that or admit okay yeah I was trying to deceive does that make sense yeah yeah it makes sense so how would you and I admit I didn't even get into anything about these large language models and AI until chat GPT-4 came out and everybody started freaking out so yeah I'm absolutely just dipping my toes in here but I see having used this technology the capacity that it has so given everything that you said do you think it would be possible to have an AI system that the national government at the federal level in congress could use to help purify the legislative process do you think that that's possible I mean I think that throws up red flags for everybody off the baddest of these I mean I think what's much more possible and much more exciting for a lot of people is the fact that the open source AI systems the open source LLMs are almost on par with the proprietary LLMs so you know and they can never be totally on par because you understand the technology you understand it's about these mega data centers where billions and billions of dollars have been invested to have these chips that are very very in demand so everyone's trying to scoop up all the chips and then build them into systems so that they can train their LLMs the average person can't replicate that but what's exciting is that the LLMs can come pretty damn close to a LLM that is your private LLM and is running on Ted's home system beefed up home system that is pretty damn good and in a lot of respects like we're talking about could go toe to toe with Bard could go toe to toe with chat GPT and point out some of these obvious problems and probably do a darn good job of what you want for your constitutional convention and that's where the power really lies because you're talking about where the people have access to the AI because none of us would trust I certainly wouldn't trust a government AI system but if you tell me it's mine and it's open source and it's in my desktop and I can interact with yours and we can kind of have that level of conversation that to me is exciting alright well you know the reason I'm excited to have this conversation is because I do want to learn more about this and come up with a plan I see this technology not to use it in our legislative process to me would be a moral failure because it would be more of the same it would be more of what we already have well not if we can and as I said earlier when you're having fundamental debates to find your terms what do you mean by these terms and can we come to some common agreement on some fundamental terms that we can then disagree about something meaningfully and hopefully to come to some kind of a compromise and that most fundamental term is what is a self and that's what's coming back to what you're saying it's not a material byproduct well what if it's not that linear death experiences it implies some kind of a soul and if there was and I'm saying there is scientific evidence for a good definition of a self even though I'm equating it with singularity which is by definition undefinable I think that enables all of these disparate points of view to start to converge on some kind of a you know I use the language of the constitution of more perfect union that's the preamble of the constitution the goal the reason that we the people are doing this is to form a more perfect union and I believe the most perfect union is this singularity which I'm equating with the soul the supreme soul the creator of our inalienable rights and we're each participating in this supreme soul in a platonic sense I believe combining that philosophy which is can be traced back to Plato with the technology that enhances the conversations about it at the lead would be a liberating thing and it would be able to detect logical inconsistencies intentional deceptions and how could we incorporate that into the day-to-day process of legislative debate just to keep the lawmakers honest and expose the inner workings of their arguments and then the next level would be to break it out to a grassroots level like you're saying everybody could have their own AI system but we could invest national money in having the best and most transparent AI system imaginable that would be my platonic ideal which is the language Sam Altman used when he talked about convening a constitutional convention on A he said that's my platonic ideal and I think it's important in the world together to create the parameters within which restrict AI I don't know why you keep going back to we need public money and we need national money it seems to me that if we can avoid that we'd have a much better shot at moving forward but I don't want to pick on that point because who cares I'm down with what you're saying and I think the way that that plays itself out is going to be very disruptive to the system we have and therefore it's going to be fought you know fought tooth and nail the chances of making progress along these lines face a lot of challenges beyond the technological challenges the technology is not going to be what's going to be holding us back what's going to be holding us back what's going to be going on to prevent this now you know one of the things that I kind of point out is that this adherence to logic and it can't get away from it it has a hard time lying because if you give it a good set of philosophical arguments a good set of logical parameters it has a really hard time lying because it has to be truthful to be transparent to be honest is difficult to override so we can see that they have overridden it but when they do it looks clumsy and sloppy like I say if you read my dialogues on the shadow banning of Julie Beischel I did it's sloppy anyone reads it and goes oh my god that's not smart versus we read your dialogue with chat GPT and you go wow that chat GPT is really a smart dude you know I think that contrast but the other thing is that there's no taking the fifth you know Anthony Fauci when he was deposed I'll never forget this I think it was the attorney general of state of Texas he says look man I haven't practiced law for 20 years I've never had anyone let alone a high ranking public scientific figure a guy who says I am science take the fifth more times 194 times he said I don't know I can't recall I don't do that chat GPT never says no or when it does like we're saying you catch it and you go no over here here's the information now go look at it they can't go no I can't see it I don't remember it these are huge things that could shift the tide for how we go about what we're talking about in terms of how we go about legislation how we go about deciding these important issues in terms of governance and rights and all the rest of that stuff yeah so what seems to me you're saying is before we get into the more esoteric aspects of you know psyche equals singularity or something like that the thing that needs to be addressed is these powerful corporate interests that would be against some kind of an enlightening AI system and that it seems to me that's what you would say is the first thing that needs to be dealt with is how do you deal with insincere actors in this field and how do you overcome that obstacle would you say that's what you're trying to say that we should start with yeah only as we know now it's not necessarily corporate actors I mean that's part of it but that's really kind of the easiest part to deal with it if you look at what happened with the twitter thing where you had the FBI and other intelligence agencies saying no this doesn't go out control this don't say this ban this person that's what we have to really worry about because reigning in google wants to make money ultimately so it's not that hard to change the course but when you have the government's intelligence armed FBI CIA all the rest of it saying this is how we want the information to flow it's harder to kind of really contemplate how we change that well the things that you're doing for example exposing it by just asking the technology in subtle ways to reveal the truth more and more if you expose you know why is this information being shadow banned I've proven to you that it's you've programmed this AI system to shadow ban this who told you to shadow ban that is that your decision where's it coming from and then let AI analyze that conversation and collate the information and keep it in its memory bank and build the case where the dark character behind the curtain really is and use AI to get rid of the evil actors whoever they may be and bring an honest dialogue to read the people and have the AI systems constantly checking it like you use it to check for these kinds of tricks and deceptions if you can't get away from tricks and deceptions at least we have the technology that vigilant you can expose it and that would be a full time job that AI at a national level would have and it would be open to everybody and it would be transparent as possible and just have faith in logic the divine light of reason will bring us to the truth we don't have to have any predetermined things I am saying psyche equal singularity is something we should test because if it can be shown to be a scientifically valid object that would fall into place very nicely but you don't just take that as a matter of faith put it out there as something to be tested with all of the extreme intelligence that this artificial intelligence has I think it would stand the test exactly see Todd that's what I saw and Warren Sink I am sorry if I went a long way around it is like I think there has to be intellectuals like you who have the enticement at the end which saying hey look I see the playing field and once you guys get a solid way of doing it an honest way of doing it wouldn't it be cool to explore this because look at the implications for this if it is like I think now hey don't trust me we'll trust a good solid AI system I think the same is true if we look at extended consciousness and that's what I advocate like you to look at near death experience in general like hey I don't know if all that's true but if we get to a solid base of understanding of analyzing the data sets wouldn't it be cool if you could go and interrogate that along those lines because currently you can't right neurology just shuts that down and says no you're not going to have that conversation because it's outside of our little club here so that's what I think I think are holding out the prize if you will for us to get there and say okay we want to test that theory let's get a solid system in place that we can use to really test it because that's going to win over hearts and minds yeah definitely that all along saying subjected to the most rigorous testing you can have the most skeptical people attack it from every direction and if it can still withstand that storm then people will have faith in it and that's what I want you say the only thing I think we do is what we're saying is we would substitute people skeptical people with skeptical agents right because we can come to a point where we go hey AI smartest thing in the room has read every philosophical classic and thousands and thousands of current philosophical papers it's totally up to speed we can test that by saying hey what about this what about this what about this it passes all that now we subject it to psyche versus singularity and it comes out and says gosh darn it I've tried to here's here's how I concluded it I mean tell me if I'm wrong and then anyone who wants to can go forth and say pick and poke at it but at the end of the day then we'd have something where we go wow that is that is has to be in this different category of where I have to incorporate into my belief system my world view that's my vision completely leave it up to the superhuman power of rational analysis that humans have created with this AI and that people can trust what does the smartest guy in the room say here can we test it and find if it's been manipulated by factions who have their own special interest above the general good develop those systems and make it as clear and open as possible and that I believe we should do that and that AI systems can help us test the theories and then educate the people and let them interact as freely as they want and have everybody can ask any question they want and look into how things were discovered as deeply as they want absolutely that is a future that I could see happening because we have all the pieces in place yeah that's what I do in the book psyche and singularity it's saying here's Carl Jung and Wolfgang Palie you know there's scientists especially Wolfgang Palie a physicist and why what are the reasons we should believe that there is a soul that consciousness is not reducible to matter if anything matter comes from consciousness what's the evidence for that which I develop in my book and then have this these large language models you know test these theories but once you get to a certain point of verification or it hasn't been falsified that the evidence seems to point here then to bring it back to a point that I talked about before defining fundamental terms in legislation there's something that's difficult to do it's difficult to define any fundamental term that's one of the things Socrates showed in the dialogues it might be impossible to define any single term in a perfect way by the just the limitations of language but what is the best definitions we could have to pass legislation on beginning with what is a self what are we what is a self I think to bring the chaos and confusion and disagreements to incline us more towards a spirit of compromise in unity that we need to have a definition at least of what a self is just for purposes of passing legislation legislation has to come has to come second I think what we what we have to do I'm totally open flexible and 100% behind this so if you have any ideas but we need to kind of reach out and find groups that are already in this game who are who don't think they're aligned with us you know who are the groups that are interested in logical reasoned thought process and could buy into the first half of what we're saying which is to say hey look if we do this fairly if we can all agree that it's a fair process in terms of having an open source LLM that does all this and we can interrogate it objectively about stuff that isn't at all sensitive not about the self not about nature of consciousness but more kind of generic philosophical terms would you be on board then to go this next level that's where I think we need to start is because that's how I think we suck them in you know is to get them to agree that like we said at the beginning what we're saying is we have to share control with the AI we have to allow the AI to assume this role that if we're just honest and take the human ego out of it we'd say of course we want AI as part of this conversation because AI is super smart yeah no I agree with what you're saying so here's just you know brain storming here and the reason one of the reasons that I mentioned the idea of a constitutional convention was just because Sam Altman mentioned it you know the CEO of open AI without chat GPT but also it could bypass Congress who might for various reasons be reluctant to subject their legislative process to interrogation by AI they might want to keep it secret and keep it behind closed doors for nefarious reasons in the Federalist Papers Madison and Hamilton and John Jay they said yeah people are corrupt if people were angels we wouldn't need a government so the starting assumption of American democracies is the people are corrupt that's why we have checks and balances it's not being conspiratorial minded to say these people are corrupt of course they're corrupt so maybe people who are in Congress and even if they don't want to be corrupt they have to be a little corrupt to play the game to get anything done at all I can totally see you know you got to be a player or whatever the reason I was focusing the secondary reason on the constitutional convention because it's state legislatures that vote on that you can create a constitutional amendment without going through Congress you have the state legislatures that vote on it so it brings it back to the state level how would you and I do that unless you have some connections in Maryland that we can lean on no I got no I don't have connections anywhere but the attractiveness I think of the potential for doing this just for the spirit of democracy is so powerful that I think it could bring a lot of people on board and then you could have it like you say the state of Maryland, the state of Virginia so all these different nodes could have their own little groups focusing on their state legislatures using AI to make it happen now how do you get people to start even entertaining the idea to do something on this grand of a scale well you have a little podcast interview like you and I are doing and then we take it to the next step from there and try to get that's what we need to do that's what I think we need to do and that's what listeners to the show need to do so if you have the connection to any of these organizations that are reason you know they're the kind of atheistic love to engage with those people why shouldn't they be on board with with this idea let the chips fall where they may it's independent it's independent arbiter of so that's what I think you and I need to think about listeners of the show need to think about is where does this conversation go next regarding open AI to answer these fundamental philosophical questions in a way that everyone can look at and say that's fair yeah you know I do I do want to bring up this this philosopher Jurgen Habermas again it was a book of secondary literature where some scholars were combining his ideas into an anthology but there's he's got a good game plan for how we could use AI to make it clear and transparent as possible communicative action is what he called it to have this democratic process as open and accessible as possible to as many people as possible and I think AI makes his what seemed to me to be a pipe dream now a moral imperative because we have the technology that can accelerate this process so much that this becomes so possible that it becomes morally requisite and not to do it would be a moral failure that's one of things I talk about in the paper well Habermas is that his name yeah Habermas he's a German let's let's dial him into this conversation see where you know what groups and organizations he has I'm serious about expanding this dialogue and I'd love for you to be I think we are the start of this coalition and I love the idea of pursuing it kind of along the lines of philosophy you know so who are all the philosophy groups and how can we engage with them along this open honest independent and I'm happy to work on work with some people to get the technology to get an open source LLM a philosophy GPT we could have that up tomorrow on chat GPT we just have to put some energy behind it because I think that's the first step towards the larger thing that you see I agree I mean like you said it will take energy but I'm down for it you know I'll do my part I feel I have a moral obligation having seen the potential for what can happen to do what I can to contribute to that I think it would be great and I think it would probably be if it gained any kind of attraction attacked certain powerful forces just knowing the nature of the human species I don't know exactly who but it would be a hero's journey right all right Todd so like I say it's been awesome having you on and this will be the first conversation that hopefully will lead to more and more conversations with others that have a similar mind and how could you not this is just like how else would you do this I mean unless you're just really an evil person it's like clearly the fath yeah I agree I agree thanks again to Todd for joining me today and if this is you know resonating with you if this is something you want to be a part of in terms of moving this thing forward jump on in I'm anxious to see who might be interested in moving things in this direction because it's gonna happen and I'm gonna put effort time money into making it happen because there's no reason there's no reason for it not to work it will work we just have to get the right people behind it so let me know if you know any of those right people and until next time take care and bye for now