Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is the conversation with
yoshi bach his second time on the
podcast yoshi is one of the most
fascinating minds in the world exploring
the nature of intelligence cognition
computation and consciousness
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this is the lex friedman podcast and
here is my conversation with yosha bach
thank you for once again coming on to
this particular russian program and
sticking to the theme of a russian
program let's start with the darkest of
topics
so this is inspired by one of your
tweets
you wrote that
quote when life feels unbearable
i remind myself that i'm not a person
i am a piece of software running on the
brain of a random ape for a few decades
it's not the worst brain to run on
have you
experienced low points in your life have
you experienced depression
of course we all experience low points
in our life and
we get appalled by the things by the
ugliness of stuff around us we might get
desperate about our lack of
self-regulation and
sometimes
life is hard and i suspect you don't get
to your life nobody does to get through
their life without low points and
without moments where they're despairing
and i thought that
let's capture this state and
how to deal with that state and i found
that very often you realize that when
you stop taking things personally when
you realize that this notion of a person
is a fiction
similar as it is in westworld where the
robots realize that their memories and
desires are just stuff that keeps them
in the loop and they don't have to act
on those memories and desires that our
memories and expectations is what make
us unhappy and the present rarely does
the day in which we are for the most
part it's okay right when we are right
sitting here right here right now we can
choose how we feel
and the thing that affects us is the
expectation that something is going to
be different from what we wanted to be
or the memory that something was
different from what you wanted it to be
and
once we basically zoom out from all this
what's left is not a person what's left
is
this state of being conscious which is a
software state and software doesn't have
an identity it's a physical law
and it's a law that acts in all of us
and it's embedded in a suitable
substrate and we didn't pick that
substrate right we are mostly randomly
instantiated on it and there all these
individuals and
everybody has to be one of them
and uh eventually you're stuck on one of
them and um have to deal with that so
you're like a leaf floating down the
river
you just have to accept that there's a
river and you just
that you are an agent is a construct
right what part of that is actually
under your control
and i think that our consciousness is
largely a control model for our own
attention so we
notice where we are looking and we can
influence what we are looking how we are
disambiguating things how we put things
together in our mind
and the whole system that runs us is
this big cybernetic motivational system
so we're basically like a little monkey
sitting on top of an elephant and we can
put this elephant here and there to go
this way or that way and we might have
the illusion that we are the elephant or
that we are telling it what to do and
sometimes we notice that it walks into a
completely different direction and we
didn't set this thing up it just is the
situation that we find ourselves in
how much prodding can we actually do of
the elephant
a lot but
i think that our uh consciousness cannot
create the motive force
is the elephant consciousness in this
metaphor no the monkey
is the consciousness the monkey is the
attentional system that is observing
things there is a large perceptual
system combined with the motivational
system that is actually providing the
interface to everything and our own
consciousness i think is a tool that
directs the attention of that system
which means it singles out features
and performs conditional operations for
which it needs an index memory but this
index memory is what we perceive as our
stream of consciousness but the
consciousness is not in charge that's an
illusion so everything
outside of that consciousness
is the elephant so it's the physics of
the universe but it's also society
that's outside of europe i would say the
elephant is the agent so there is an
environment which the agent is stomping
and uh you are influencing a little part
of that agent
so uh can you is the agent a single
human being
what's what which object has agency
that's an interesting question i think a
way to think about an agent is that it's
a controller with a set point generator
the notion of a controller comes from
cybernetics and control theory control
system consists out of a system that is
regulating some value and the deviation
of that value from a set point and it
has a sensor that measures the system's
deviation from that set point
and an effector that can be parametrized
by the controller so the controller
tells the effector to do a certain thing
and the goal is to reduce the distance
between the set point and the current
value of the system and there's
environment which disturbs the regulated
system which brings it away from that
set point so simplest case is the
thermostat the thermostat is really
simple because it doesn't have a model
the thermostat is only trying to
minimize the set point deviation in the
next moment
and if you want to minimize the set
point deviation over a longer time span
you need to integrate it you need to
model what is going to happen so for
instance when you think about that your
set point is to be comfortable in life
maybe you need to make yourself
uncomfortable first
right so you need to make a model of
what's going to happen when and this is
task of the controller is to use its
sensors to measure the state of the
environment
and the system that is being regulated
and figure out what to do
and if the task is complex enough the
set points are complicated enough and if
the controller has enough capacity and
enough
sensor feedback then the task of the
controller is to make a model of the
entire universe that it's in the
conditions under which it exists and of
itself
and this is a very complex agent and we
are in that category
and
an agent is not necessarily a thing in
the universe it's a class of models that
we use to interpret aspects of the
universe
and
be when we notice the
around us a lot of things only make
sense at the level that you are
entangled with them is we interpret them
as control systems that make models of
the world and try to minimize their own
set points so but the models
are the agents
the agent is a class of model
and we notice that we are an agent
ourself we are the agent that is using
our own control model to perform actions
we notice we
uh produce a change in the model and
things in the world change and this is
how we discover
the idea that we have a body that we are
situated environment and that we have a
first person perspective
still don't understand
what's the best way to think of which
object has agency with with respect to
human beings
is is it the body
is it the brain
is it the contents of the brain that has
agency like what's the actuators that
you're referring to
what is the controller and where does it
reside or is it these impossible things
like because i keep trying to ground it
to space-time
the three-dimensional space
and the one dimension of time
what's the agent in that for humans
there is not just one it depends on the
way in which you're looking at the thing
in which you're framing it imagine that
you are
say angela merkel and you are acting on
behalf of germany
then you could say that germany is the
agent and in the mind of angela merkel
she is germany to some extent because in
the way in which she acts the destiny of
germany changes
there are things that she can change
that basically
affect the behavior of that nation state
okay so it's hierarchies of to go to
another one of your tweets
with uh i think your uh playfully
mocking jeff hawkins
with saying his brains all the way down
so it's like it's agents all the way
down
it's agents made up of agents made up of
agents like if phanja marco's germany
and germany's made up a bunch of people
and the people are themselves agents
in in some kind of context
and then people are made up of cells
each individual
so is it agents all the way down
i suspect that has to be like this in
a world where things are self-organizing
most of the complexity that we are
looking at
everything in life is about
self-organization yeah so i think up
from the level of
life you have
agents
and
below life you rarely have agents
because
sometimes you have control systems that
emerge randomly in nature and try to
achieve a set point but
they're not that interesting agents that
make models and because to make an
interesting model of the world you
typically need a system that is true and
complete can i ask you a personal
question
uh
what's the line between life and
non-life it's personal because you're
a life form
so what do you think in this
emerging complexity at which point does
the thing start being living and have
agency
personally i think that the simplest
answer is that life is sales because
life is what cells cells biological
cells so it's a particular kind of
principle that we have discovered to
exist in nature it's modular stuff that
consists out of
basically this dna tape is a read write
head on top of it
that is able to perform arbitrary
computations and state transitions
within the cell and it's combined with a
membrane that insulates the cell from
its environment
and there are
chemical reactions inside of the cell
that are in this equilibrium and the
cell is running in such a way that this
this equilibrium doesn't disappear and
the cell
goes if the cell goes into an
equilibrium state it dies
and it requires something like an neck
entropy extractor to maintain this this
equilibrium so it's able to harvest like
entropy from its environment and keep
itself running
yeah so there's information and there's
a wall to protect to to to maintain this
disequilibrium but isn't this very
earth-centric
like what you're referring to as
i'm not making a normative notion uh you
could say that there are probably other
things in the universe that are
cell-like and life-like and you could
also call them life but eventually it's
just a
willingness of to find an agreement of
how to use the terms
i like cells because it's completely
co-extensional with the way that we used
the word even before we knew about cells
so people were pointing at some stuff
and saying this is somehow animate and
this is very different from the
non-animated stuff and what's the
difference between the living and the
dead stuff and it's mostly whether the
cells are working or not
and uh also this boundary of life where
we say that for instance a virus is
basically an information packet that is
subverting the cell and not life by
itself
that makes sense to me and
it's somewhat arbitrary you could of
course say that systems that permanently
maintain a disequilibrium and can
self-replicate are always life
and
maybe that's a useful definition too but
this is eventually just how you want to
use the word is it uh so useful for
conversation but
is it uh
somehow fundamental to the universe do
you think there's a actual line to
eventually be drawn between life and
non-life or is it all a kind of
continuum i don't think it's a continuum
but there's nothing magical that is
happening um living systems are a
certain type of machine
what about non-living systems is it also
a machine there are non-living machines
but the question is at which point is
the system able to un uh perform
arbitrary state transitions in uh to
make representations
and living things can do this and of
course we can also build non-living
things that can do this but we don't
know anything in nature that is not a
cell
and is not created by the lola life that
is able to do that
not
not only do we not know
i don't think we have the tools to see
otherwise
i always worry that we we
look at the world too narrowly
like we have there could be life
of a very different kind right under our
noses
that we're just not
seeing because we're not
either limitations of our cognitive
capacity or
we're just not open-minded enough
either with the tools of science or just
the tools of our own mind
yeah that's possible i find the thought
very fascinating and i suspect that many
of us ask ourselves since childhood what
are the things that we are missing what
kind of systems and interconnections
exist
that are outside of our
gaze but the um
we are looking for it and physics
doesn't have much room at the moment
for uh
opening up something that would not
violate the conservation of information
as we know it
yeah but i i wonder about time time
scale and scale spatial scale whether we
just need to um
open up our idea of what
like how life presents itself it could
be operating in a much slower time scale
yeah a much faster time scale
and
it's almost sad to think that there's
all this life around us that we're not
seeing because we're just not
like
thinking in terms of the right of the
right scale
both time and space
what is your definition of life what do
you understand this life
[Music]
entities of sufficiently high complexity
that are full of surprises
i don't know i don't have a free will so
that just came out of my mouth i'm not
sure that even makes sense there are
certain characteristics so complexity
seems to be an unnecessary property of
life
and
i almost
want to say it has
ability to do something unexpected
it seems to me that life is the main
source of complexity on earth
yes and complexity is basically a
bridgehead that order builds into chaos
by modeling
by processing information in such a way
that you can perform reactions that
would not be possible for dump systems
and this means that you can harvest neck
entropy that dump systems cannot harvest
and this is what complexity is mostly
about
yeah in some sense the purpose of life
is to create complexity
yeah
increasing i mean there there's um
there seems to be some kind of universal
drive towards increasing pockets of
complexity
i don't know what that is that seems to
be like a fundamental
i don't know if it's a property of the
universe or it's just the consequence of
the way the universe works but there
seems to be this small pockets of
emerging complexity that builds on top
of each other and starts
having like greater and greater
complexity by having like a hierarchy of
complexity little organisms building up
a little society that then operates
almost as an individual organism itself
and all of a sudden you have uh germany
and merkel but that's not obvious to me
everything that goes up has to come down
at some point
right so every if you see this
big exponential curve somewhere it's
usually the beginning of an s-curve
where something eventually reaches
saturation and the s-curve is the
beginning of some kind of bump that goes
down again
and
there is
just the thing that when you are in
sight of an evolution of life you are on
top of a puddle of negentropy that is
being sucked dry
by life and during uh that happening you
see an increase in complexity
because life forms are competing with
each other to get more and more and a
finer and finer corner of that like
entropy extraction but that i feel like
that's a gradual beautiful process like
that's almost
you know follows a process akin to
evolution and the way it comes down
is not the same way it came up
the way it comes down is usually harshly
and quickly
so usually there's some kind of
catastrophic event well the roman empire
took a long time
uh
but that's would that be would you
classify this as a decrease in
complexity though yes i think that this
uh size of the cities that could be fed
has decreased dramatically and you could
see that the quality of the art
decreased and it did so gradually
and
maybe
future generations when they look at the
history of the united states in the 21st
century will also talk about the gradual
decline not something that suddenly
happens
do you have a sense of where we are
are we on the exponential rise are we at
the peak
or are we the downslope
of the the united states empire it's
very hard to say from a single human
perspective but
i it seems to me that we are probably
at the peak
i think that's probably the definition
of like optimism and cynicism
so my nature of optimism is i think
we're on the rise
but
uh i think it's just all a matter of
perspective nobody knows but i do think
that erroring on the side of optimism
like you need a sufficient number
you need a minimum number of optimists
in order to make that up thing actually
work
and so i tend to be on the side of the
optimists i think that we are basically
a species of grasshoppers that have
turned into locusts
and when you are in that locust mode you
see an amazing rise of population
numbers and of the
complexity of the interactions between
the individuals
but
it's ultimately the question is is it
sustainable see i think we're a bunch of
lions and tigers that have become
domesticated cats
to use a different metaphor as i'm not
exactly sure
we're so destructive or just softer
and nicer and lazier
but i think we have monkeys and not the
cats and if you look at the monkeys they
are very busy
are the ones that have a lot of sex
those monkeys not just the bonobos i
think that all the monkeys are basically
a discontent species that always needs
to meddle
well the gorillas seem to have a little
bit more of a structure but it's a
different different part of the tree
[Laughter]
okay uh you mentioned the elephant and
the the monkey riding the elephant
and uh consciousness is the monkey
and there's some prodding that the
monkey gets to do and sometimes the
elephant listens
i heard you got
into some content maybe you can correct
me but i heard you got into some
contentious free will discussions
uh is this with sam harris or something
like that not that i know of
some people on clubhouse told me you
made a a bunch of uh um
big debate points about free will well
let me just then ask you where where
in terms of the monkey and the elephant
uh do you think we land in terms of the
illusion of free will how much control
does the monkey have
we have to think about what the
free will is in the first place
we are not the machine we are not the
thing that is making the decisions we
are a model of that decision making
process yeah and there is a difference
between
making your own decisions and predicting
your own decisions yes and that
difference is the first person
perspective
and
what
basically makes decision-making um and
the conditions of free will distinct
from just automatically doing the best
thing is
that uh we often don't know what the
best thing is we make decisions under
uncertainty we make informed bets using
a betting algorithm that we don't yet
understand because we haven't reverse
engineered our own mind sufficiently we
don't know the expected rewards we don't
know the mechanism by which we estimate
the rewards and so on but there is
we observe ourselves performing where we
see that uh we evade facts and factors
and the future and then
some kind of possibility some motive
gets raised to an intention
and that's informed bad that the system
is making
and that making of the open bet the
representation of that is what we call
free will
and it seems to be paradoxical because
we think that's the crucial thing is
about it that it's somehow
indeterministic
and yet if it wasn't deterministic it
would be random
and of course it cannot be random
because it was if it was random if just
dice were being thrown in the universe
randomly forces you to do things it
would be meaningless so the important
part of the decisions is always the
deterministic stuff
but it appears to be indeterministic to
you because it's unpredictable because
if it was predictable you wouldn't
experience it as a free will decision
you would experience it as just doing
the necessary right thing
and you see this continuum between the
free will and the execution of automatic
behavior
when you're observing other people so
for instance when you are observing your
own children
if you don't understand them you will
use this agent model where you have a
agent with a set point generator and uh
the agent is doing the best it can to
minimize the difference to the set point
and it might be confused and uh
sometimes impulsive or whatever but it's
acting on its own free will
and when you understand what happens in
the mind of the child you see that is
automatic and you can outmodel the child
you can build things around the child
that will lead the child to making
exactly the decision that you are
predicting
and in under these circumstances like
when you were a stage magician or
somebody who is dealing uh with people
that this you sell a car to and you
completely understand the psychology and
the impulses and the space of thoughts
that this individual can have at that
moment under these circumstances it
makes no sense to attribute free will
because it's no longer decision making
under uncertainty you are already
certain for them there is uncertainty
but you already know what they are doing
but what about for you so
is this akin to like
systems like cellular automata
where it's
deterministic
but when you
squint your eyes a little bit
it starts look like there's agents
making decisions at the higher so
when you zoom out and look at the
entities that
are composed by the individual cells
even though the there's
underlying simple rules that
make the system evolve in deterministic
ways it looks like there's organisms
making decisions is that
where the illusion of free will emerges
that jump and scale
it's a particular type of model but this
jump in scale is crucial the jump in
scale happens whenever you have too many
parts to count and you cannot make a
model at that level and you try to find
some higher level regularity
and the higher level regularity is a
pattern that you project into the world
to make sense of it and agency is one of
these patterns right you have all these
cells that interact with each other and
the cells in our body are set up in such
a way that they benefit if their
behavior is coherent which means that
they act as if they were serving a
common goal
and which that means that they will
evolve regulation mechanisms that
act as if they were serving a common
goal and now you can make sense of these
all these cells by projecting the common
goal into them
right so for you then free will is an
illusion
no it's a model and it's a construct
it's basically a model that the system
is making of its own behavior and it's
the best model that it can come up with
under the circumstances and it can get
replaced by a different model which is
automatic behavior when you fully
understand the mechanism under which you
are acting yeah but the another word for
model is what story
so it's the story you're telling i mean
you actually have control is there such
a thing as a you
and is there such a thing as you having
control
it's like are you
manifesting
your
evolution as an entity in some sense the
u is the model of the system that is in
control it's a story that the system
tells itself about somebody who is in
control
yeah and the contents of that model are
being used to inform the behavior of the
system
okay so the system is completely
mechanical and the system creates that
story like a loom
and then it uses the contents of that
story to inform its actions and writes
the results of that actions into the
story so how's that not an illusion
the story is written then
or
or rather we're not the writers of the
story
yes but we always knew
that no we we don't know that when did
we know that i think that's mostly a
confusion about concepts the
conceptual illusion in our culture comes
from the idea that we live in physical
reality
and that we experience physical reality
and that you have ideas about it
and then you have this dual list
interpretation where you have
two substances res extensor the world
that you can touch and that is made of
extended things and res cognitions which
is the world of ideas
and in fact both of them are mental
representations
one is the representations of the world
as a game engine that your mind
generates to make sense of the
perceptual data and the other one
yes that's what we perceive as the
physical world but we already know that
the physical world is nothing like that
right quantum mechanics is very
different from what you and me perceive
as the world the world that you and me
perceive is a game engine yeah and there
are no colors and sounds in the physical
world they only exist in the game engine
generated by your brain and then you
have ideas that are not cannot be mapped
onto extended regions right so the
objects that have a spatial extension in
the game engine are res extensor and the
objects that don't have a physical
extension in the game
engine our ideas
and they both interact in our mind to
produce models of the world yep but
you know when you play video games
i understand that what's actually
happening is zeros and ones inside of uh
inside of a computer instead of a cpu
and a gpu
but you're still seeing
like uh the rendering of that
and you're still making decisions
whether to shoot to turn left or to turn
right if you're playing a shooter or
every time you start thinking about
skyrim and elder scrolls and walking
around in beautiful nature and swinging
a sword but
it feels like you're making decisions
inside that video game
so even though you don't have direct
access
uh in terms of perception to the
bits to the zeros and ones it still
feels like you're making decisions and
your decisions are actually feels like
they're being applied
all the way down to the zeros and ones
yes it feels like you have control even
though you don't direct
access to reality so there is basically
a special character in the video game
that is being created by the video game
engine yeah and this character is
serving the aesthetics of the video game
and that is you
yes but i feel like you have control
inside the video game
like the all those like 12 year olds
that kick my ass on the internet
so uh for when you play the video game
it doesn't really matter that they're
zeros and once right you don't care
about the vids of the bus you don't care
about the nature of the cpu that it runs
on what you care about are the
properties of the game that you're
playing and you hope that the cpu is
good enough
yes and a similar thing happens when we
interact with physics the world that you
and me are in is not the physical world
the world that you and me are in is a
dream world
how close is it to the real world though
we know that it's not very close but we
know that the dynamics of the dream
world match the dynamics of the physical
world to a certain degree of resolution
right the causal structure of the
dreamworld is different
so you see waves crashing on your feet
right but there are no waves in the
ocean there's only water molecules that
have tangents uh between the molecules
that are uh
ex
the result of electrons in the molecules
interacting with each other aren't they
like very consistent we're just seeing a
very uh crude approximation isn't
our dream world very consistent like to
the point of being mapped directly
one-to-one to the actual physical world
as opposed to
us being completely tricked is this is
like where you have like that it's not a
trick that's that's my point it's not an
illusion it's a form of data compression
yeah it's an attempt to deal with the
dynamics of too many parts to count at
the level at which we're entangled with
the best model that you can find yeah so
we can act in that dream world and our
actions have impact in the in the real
world in the physical world yes to which
we don't have access yes but it's
basically like
accepting the fact that the software
that we live in the dream that we live
in is generated by something outside of
this world that you and me are in so is
the software deterministic and do we not
have any control
do we have
so free will
is uh
having a conscious being
the free will is the monkey being able
to steer the elephant
no
it's slightly different
basically in the same way as you are
modeling the water molecules in the
ocean that engulf your feet when you are
walking on the beach as waves and there
are no waves uh but only the atoms on
more complicated stuff underneath the
atoms and so on and you know that right
you would accept yes there is a certain
abstraction that happens here it's a
simplification of what happens in
simplification that is designed in such
a way that your brain can deal with it
temporarily and spatially in terms of
resources and tuned for the predictive
value so you can predict with some
accuracy whether your feet are going to
get wet or not but it's a really good
approach it's a really good interface
and approximation yes it's like equals
mg squared is a good
equations are good approximations for
what they're much better approximation
so
to me waves is a really nice
approximation what's all the complexity
that's happening underneath basically
it's a machine learning model that is
constantly tuned to minimize surprises
so it basically tries to predict as well
as it can what you're going to perceive
next are we talking about
which is the machine learning our
perception system or the dream world
the machine world is a dream world is
the result of the machine learning
process of the perception system that's
doing the compression yes
and uh the model of you as an agent is
not a different type of model or it's a
different type but not uh not different
as in its model like nature from the
model of the ocean right some things are
oceans some things are agents and one of
these agents is using your own control
model the output of your model the
things that you perceive yourself as
doing
and that is you
what about
the fact that like when you're standing
um and with the water on your feet and
you're looking out
into the vest
like open water of the ocean and then
there's a beautiful sunset
and it well the fact that it's beautiful
and then maybe you have like friends or
a loved one with you and like you feel
love what is that as the dream world
what is that yes it's all uh happening
inside of the dream okay
but see the word dream makes it seem
like it's not real
yeah of course it's not real
the physical universe is real but the
physical universe is incomprehensible
and it doesn't have any feeling of
realness the feeling of realness that
you experience gets attached to certain
representations where your brain
assesses this is the best model of
reality that i have so the only thing
that's real to you is the thing that's
happening at the very
base of reality like
for something to be real it needs to be
implemented
so uh the model that you have of reality
is a real in as far as it is a model
right it's an appropriate description of
the world to say that there are models
that are being experienced
but
the world that you experience is not
necessarily implemented
there is a difference between a reality
a simulation and a simulacrum
the
reality that we are talking about is
something that fully emerges over a
causally closed lowest layer the idea of
physicalism is that we are in that layer
that basically our world emerges over
that every alternative to physicalism is
a simulation theory which basically says
that we are in some kind of simulation
universe and the real world needs to be
an apparent universe of that where the
actual causal structure is right
and when you look at the ocean and your
own mind you are looking at a simulation
that explains what you're going to see
next
and we are living in a simulation yes
but the simulation generated by our own
brains
yeah and this simulation is different
from the physical reality because the
causal structure that is being produced
what you are seeing is different from
the causal structure of physics but
consistent
hopefully if not then you are going to
end up in some kind of institution where
people will take care of you because
your behavior will be inconsistent right
your uh behavior needs to work in such a
way that it's interacting with an
accurately predictive model of reality
and if your brain is unable to make your
model of reality predictive
um you will need help so what uh what do
you think about donald hoffman's
argument
that it doesn't have to be consistent
the dream world
to the the what he calls like the
interface
uh to the actual physical reality where
there could be evolution i think he
makes an evolutionary argument
which is like it could be an
evolutionary advantage to have the dream
world drift away from physical reality i
think that only works if you have tenure
as long as you are still interacting
with the ground tools your model needs
to be somewhat predictive
well
in some sense humans have achieved a
kind of tenure in the animal kingdom
at some point we became too big to fail
so we became postmodernist
it all makes sense the version of
reality that we like
oh man
okay
yeah but
basically you can do magic you can
change your assessment of reality but
eventually uh reality is going to come
bite you in the s if it's not predictive
do you have a sense
of what is that base layer physical
reality
you have
like uh so you have these attempts at
the theories of everything
the very very small of like strength
theory
or what um stephen wolfram talks about
with a hyper grass these are these tiny
tiny tiny tiny objects
and then there is more like
quantum mechanics
that's talking about objects that are
much larger but still very very very
tiny do you have a sense of where the
tiniest thing is that is like
at the lowest level the turtle at the
very bottom do you have a sense
i don't think that you can talk about
where it is because space is emergent
over the activity of these things so
space
uh the coordinates only exist in
relation to the
things other things and so you could in
some sense abstract it into locations
that can hold information and
trajectories that the information can
take between the different locations and
this is how we construct our notion of
space
yeah and uh physicists uh usually have a
notion of space that is continuous
and this is a point where i
tend to agree with people like stephen
warfram who are very skeptical of the
geometric notions
i think that geometry is the dynamics of
too many parts to count and
when there are no infinities if there
were two infinities you would be running
into contradictions which is in some
sense what uh google and turing
discovered
in response to hilbert's call
so there are no infinities there are no
infinities fake there is unboundedness
but if you have a language that talks
about infinity at some point the
language is going to contradict itself
which means it's no longer valid
in order to deal with infinities and
mathematics you have to postulate the
existence in uh initially you cannot
construct the infinities and that's an
issue right you cannot build up an
infinity from zero but in practice you
never do this right when you perform
calculations you only look at the
dynamics of too many parts to count
and
usually these
numbers are not that large they're not
googles or something the big
the infinities that we are dealing with
in our universe are mathematically
speaking
relatively small integers
and um still
what we're looking at is dynamics where
um
a trillion things behave similar to 100
trillion things or
something that is very very large
because they're converging and these
convergent dynamics these operators this
is what we
deal with when we are doing the geometry
right geometry is stuff where we can
pretend that it's continuous because uh
as if we subdivide the space
sufficiently
fine grained
these things approach a certain dynamic
and this approached dynamic that is what
we mean by it but i don't think that
infinity would work so to speak that you
would know the last digit of pi and that
you have a physical process that rests
on knowing the last digit of pi
yeah that that could be just a peculiar
quark of human cognition that we like
discrete discrete makes sense to us
infinity doesn't
so in terms of our intuitions no the
issue is that uh everything that we
think about uh needs to be expressed in
some kind of mental language not not
necessarily a natural language but some
kind of mathematical language that your
neurons can speak that refers to
something in the world and what we have
discovered is that
uh we cannot construct a notion of
infinity without running into
contradictions which means that such a
language is no longer valid
and i suspect this is what made
photographers so unhappy when somebody
came up with the notion of irrational
numbers before it was time right there's
this miss that he had this person killed
when he blapped out the secret that not
everything can be expressed as a ratio
between two numbers but there are there
are numbers between the ratios the world
was not ready for this and i think he
was right that has confused
mathematicians uh
very seriously because these numbers are
not values they're functions
right so you can calculate these
functions to a certain degree of
approximation but you cannot pretend
that pi has actually a value
pi is a function that would generally
approach this value to some degree
but nothing in the world rests on
knowing pie
uh how much does how important is this
distinction between discreet and
continuous uh
for you to get to the because there's a
i mean
in discussion of your favorite flavor of
the theory of everything there's a few
on the table
so there's string theory there's a
particular
there's a
loop quantum gravity which focus on one
particular unification
uh there's
there's just a bunch of favorite flavors
of different people trying to
uh
propose a theory of everything uh eric
weinstein
and a bunch of people throughout history
and then of course stephen wolfram who i
think is one of the only people doing a
discrete
no no there's a bunch of physicists who
do this right now and okay like um
topholy and tomasello and um
the
digital physics is something that is i
think growing in popularity
but uh
the
main reason why this is interesting is
because it uh it's important sometimes
to settle disagreements i don't think
that you need infinities as or at all
and you never needed them
you can always deal with very large
numbers and you can do it with limits
right you're fine with doing that you
don't need any kind of infinity you can
build your computer algebra systems just
as well without believing in infinity in
the first place you're okay with limits
yeah so basically a limit means that
something is behaving pretty much the
same
if you make the number larger
right because it's converging to a
certain value and at some point the
difference becomes measurable and you
can no longer measure it
and uh in this sense you have things
that uh
yeah if every ngon which is has enough
corners then it's going to behave like a
circle at some point right and it's only
going to be in some kind of esoteric
thing that cannot exist in the physical
universe that you would be talking about
this perfect circle and now it turns out
that it also wouldn't work in
mathematics because you cannot construct
mathematics that has infinite resolution
without running into contradictions
so that is itself not that important
because we never did that right it's
just a thing that some people thought we
could
and this leads to confusion so for
instance roger penrose uses this as an
argument to say
that there are certain things that
mathematicians can do
dealing with infinities
and by extension our mind can do
that computers cannot do yeah he he
talks about that there's the human mind
can do certain mathematical things
that the computer as defined by
the universal touring machine cannot yes
what so that it has to do with infinity
yes it's one of the things so he is
basically pointing at the fact that
there are things that are possible
in
the mathematical mind and in pure
mathematics that are not possible in uh
machines that can be constructed in the
physical universe
and because he's an honest guy he thinks
this means that uh present physics
cannot explain operations that happen in
our mind do you think he's right and uh
so let's let's leave his discussion of
consciousness aside for the moment do
you think he's right about just
what he's basically referring to as
intelligence
so
are is the human mind fundamentally more
capable as a thinking machine than a
universal touring machine no
but so he's suggesting that right
so our mind is actually less than a
turing machine there can be no touring
machine because it's defined as having
an infinite tape
and we always only have a finite tape
but you can perform finally many
operations yes
it can do the kind of computation the
yes the touring machine cannot and
that's because he thinks that our minds
can do operations that have infinite
resolution in some sense
and i don't think that's the case our
minds are just able to discover these
limit operators over too many parts to
count
what about his idea that consciousness
is
more uh more than a computation so it's
more than something that uh a touring
machine can can do
so again
saying that there's something special
about our mind they cannot be replicated
in the machine
the issue is that i don't even know how
to construct a language to
express this statement correctly
well
the the the basic statement is
there's a there's a human experience
that includes intelligence that includes
self-awareness that includes
the hard problem of consciousness
and the question is can that be fully
simulated
in the computer
in the mathematical model of the
computer as we understand it today
rajapanos says no
so the the
uh
universal turing machine cannot simulate
the universe
so the interesting question is uh and
you have to ask him this is why not what
is this specific thing that cannot be
modeled and
when i looked at his writings and i
haven't read all of it but when i read
for instance um the
section that he writes in the
introduction to and wrote to infinity
the thing that he specifically refers to
is
the way in which human minds deal with
infinities
and
that itself can i think easily be
deconstructed
a lot of uh people feel that our
experience cannot be explained in a
mechanical way
and therefore it needs to be different
and i concur our experience is not
mechanical our experience is simulated
it exists only in a simulation the only
assimilation can be conscious physical
systems cannot be conscious because
they're only mechanical cells cannot be
conscious neurons cannot be conscious
brains cannot be conscious people cannot
be conscious as far as you if you
understand them as physical systems
what can be conscious is
the story of a system in the world where
you write all these things into the
story
you have experiences for the same reason
that a character novel has experiences
because it's written into the story
and now the system is acting on that
story and it's not a story that is
written in a natural language it's
written in a perceptual language in this
multimedia language of the game engine
and in there
you write in what kind of experience you
have and what this means for the
behavior of the system for your behavior
tendencies for your focus for your
attention for your experience of valence
and so on and this is being used to
inform the behavior of the system in the
next step and then the
story updates with the reactions of the
system and the changes in the world and
so on and you live inside of that model
you don't live inside of the physical
reality
and
i mean just just to linger on it like
you see okay yeah it's in the perceptual
language the multimodal perceptual
language
that's the experience that's what
consciousness is within that
within that model within that story
but do you do you have agency
when you play a video game you can turn
left and you can turn right
in that story
so in that dream world how much control
do you is there such a thing as you in
that story
like
is it right to say the main character
you know everybody's npcs and then
there's the main character and you're
controlling the main character
or is that an illusion is there a main
character that you're controlling i'm
getting to the point of like
the free will point
imagine that you are building a robot
that plays soccer yeah and you've been
to mit computer science you basically
know how to do that
right and so uh you would say the robot
is an agent that solves the control
problem
how to get the ball into the goal and it
needs to perceive the world and the
world is disturbing him and trying to do
this right so he has to control many
variables to make that happen and to
project itself and the ball into the
future and understand its position on
the field relative to the ball and so on
in the uh position of its limbs or in in
the space around it and so on so it
needs to have an adequate model that
abstracting reality in a useful way
and
you could say that this
robot does have agency over what it's
doing in some sense
and the model is
going to be a control model and inside
of that control model you can
possibly get to a point where this thing
is sufficiently abstract to discover its
own agency our current robots don't do
that they don't have a unified model of
the universe but
there is not a reason why we shouldn't
be getting there at some point in the
not too distant future and once that
happens you will notice that the uh
robot tells a story about the robot
playing soccer
so the robot will experience itself
playing soccer in a simulation of the
world that it uses to
construct a model of the locations of it
lacks on and limbs in space on the field
with relationship to the ball and it's
not going to be at the level of the
molecules
it will be an abstraction that is
exactly at the level that is most
suitable for past planning of the
movements of the robot
right it's going to be a high level
abstraction but a very useful one that
is as predictive as we can make it and
in that side of that story there is a
model of the agency of that system so
this model can accurately
predict that the contents of the model
are going to be driving the behavior of
the robot in the immediate future but
there's the hard problem of
consciousness
which i would also
there's a subjective experience of free
will as well
that i'm not sure where the robot gets
that where that little leap is because
for me right now everything i imagine
with that robot as it gets more and more
and more sophisticated
the agency comes from the programmer of
the robot still
of what was programmed in
you could probably do an end-to-end
learning system you maybe need to give
it a few prayers so you nudge the
architecture in the right direction that
it converges more quickly but ultimately
uh discovering the suitable hyper
parameters of the architecture is also
only a search process right and as the
search process was evolution that has
informed our brain architecture so we
can converge in a single lifetime on
useful interaction with the world and
if we define hyper parameters broadly so
it's not just this the uh the parameters
that control this end-to-end learning
system but the entirety of the design of
the robot like the
there's
you have to remove the human completely
from the picture and then in order to
build the robot you have to
create an entire universe because you
have to go you can't just shortcut
evolution you have to go from the very
beginning
in order for it to have because i feel
like there's always a human
pulling the strings
um and that
makes it seem like the robot is cheating
it's getting a shortcut to consciousness
when you are looking at the current
boston dynamics robots it doesn't look
as if there is somebody pulling the
strings it doesn't look like cheating
anymore okay so let's go there because i
gotta talk to you about this so
obviously with the case of boston
dynamics
as you may or may not know
it's
always
either hard coded or remote controlled
there's no intelligence i don't know how
the current generation of boston
dynamics robots works but
what i've been told about the previous
ones was that it's basically all
cybernetic control
which means you still have uh feedback
mechanisms and so on but it's not uh
deep learning for the most part as it's
currently done it's
for the most part just identifying a
control hierarchy that is congruent to
the limbs that exist and the parameters
that need to be optimized for the
movement of these limbs and then there
is a convergence progress so it's
basically just regression that you would
need to control this but again i don't
know whether that's true that's just
what i've been told about how they work
we have to separate several
levels of discussions here so the only
thing they do is pretty sophisticated
control no with no machine learning
in order to be
to maintain balance or to write itself
it's a control problem in terms of using
the actuators to when it's pushed or
when it steps on a thing that's uneven
how to always maintain balance yes and
there's a tricky like set of heuristics
around that but
uh that's the only goal
everything you see boston dynamics doing
in terms of that to us humans is
compelling
which is any kind of um higher order
movement like turning
uh wiggling its butt
uh like uh you know uh
jumping back on its two feet
dancing the dancing is even worse
because dancing is hard coded in it's um
it's choreographed by humans there's
choreography software so like there is
no of all that high level movement
there's no
anything that you can call certainly
can't call ai but there's no uh
even like basic heuristics it's all hard
co