Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, and the Hidden Patterns of Reality (Uncut) 01-29-2025

Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, and the Hidden Patterns of Reality w/ Zhen (WiM549)

We could create sentience. This also begs a deeper question. What’s the line between natural and artificial? It would be no difference.

The possibility that humans could play God, in a way. Yeah. The world is discrete, as far as we can tell.

Discrete? Yeah, meaning it’s not continuous. This is why I think science is deeply wrong. Every culture ended up discovering money.

If you think about software as a pattern. It’s a language, yeah. Same thing with government.

If you think of it as a software. This is the only pattern that survives. I think humility is actually a really good strategy for dealing with a complex reality.

Just be less wrong. So time is a blockchain. You know, Satoshi called it a time chain, by the way.

He never used the term blockchain. Makes sense. There’s very few rules governing that.

You only need very simple rules to create complexity. Use the term simulation. I mean, does this infer the existence of God? Or at least a word for the thing that’s beyond what we can’t know? Like the thing executing it? Yeah, so there’s two possibilities.

We were talking about the very lightweight topic of human consciousness. I mean, this has been called the hard problem, right? It’s one of the most difficult concepts to get your head around. Because it is the head getting around itself, in a way.

Assuming that consciousness is a brain bound phenomenon. Which maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Could we start with just your views? Perhaps a definition, if you so dare.

What is consciousness? Yeah, I used to follow Sam Harris a lot. And I like the definition, which comes from this guy named, I think, Thomas Nagel. He wrote a paper on what it’s like to be a bat.

And essentially, it just boils down to having subjective experience. So consciousness would be defined as the ability to have a subjective experience. And by that definition, a lot of things.

I mean, we can easily, not easily. But we can kind of observe animals and kind of guess based on its behavior and how it interacts. Especially, I don’t know if you have pets, but people who have pets.

There is a mutual understanding between what the animal is doing. He sees what you’re doing. And it does seem like, at least in mammals, there should be subjective experience.

But perhaps even plants and lobsters or whatever, anything down to, yeah. If we think about consciousness as a result of information processing, and it’s like a software, then technically it shouldn’t be substrate dependent. So it could perhaps not be brain dependent.

And any sort of substrate or mechanism that can result in information processing, machine like a computer. You could run the software that we call consciousness. It sounds like we could, by that definition, the ability to have subjective experiences, we could create sentience artificially.

Yes. This also begs a deeper question. What’s the line between natural and artificial, right? I mean, it would be the same.

Okay. Yeah, it would be no difference. Because if we define it as just ability to have subjective experience, then consciousness is consciousness.

What it experiences will be wildly different, right? Based on the sensors it has, the signals that’s going into the information processing mechanism, right? But as a being with subjective experience, I can see a huge difference in speed of information processing, right? We have neurons. They fire at the speed of sound. It’s pretty, I think it’s pretty easy to see why we evolved to have all these animals that evolved to have a nervous system.

It allows relatively fast, and it allows us to navigate in our environment. Like it makes our muscle twitch. We can do all these things in this sort of environment and react to things, right? Versus something like a plant.

Which doesn’t have a nervous system, right? It moves too. The communication comes from chemical reactions between the cells. And it takes forever for it to move, right? And to the plant, we can run circles around it before it does even anything, right? Almost to the point we think it’s just static.

That’s not true. But we can take one step back. Imagine consciousness in a silicon substrate.

Now your information processing is at speed of light, right? And you can just imagine how different that experience would be. The reason we see things, we have this idea of things are permanent. There’s this thing that’s here.

But we know it’s made out of atoms. And there’s photons coming into my eyes so fast. Before any of my signals can fire, there’s no way for me to see the photons.

But at the speed of sound, we’re able to process things at speed of light. We could see photons coming in. You can see all things that’s happening.

You might not even have a perception of time. It could just be all probability fields or something. Who knows? What are the trade-offs? That’s a very interesting perspective.

So plants could have a lower frequency consciousness, perhaps? Over a long time. That’s going to be my question. What are the trade-offs they’re making? You know, animals with nervous systems tend to, I guess, have shorter lives overall compared to… So over a thousand years, right? Some trees live 5,000 years, right? And it’s not just one tree.

Like you talk about the whole forest, like spirits in the forest. We know when certain trees in one part of the forest gets infected by some bacteria or whatever. Message passes to the other end and they start to develop antibodies to fight off this stuff.

It’s one networked organism. If you speed it up, maybe it does have conscious. But it’s just acting so slow in the time frame that we can’t perceive it.

So it’s similar to if a computer has conscious or you have a program that has conscious. We could be the plant. Imagine you ask a tree something, it takes like 10,000 years to respond.

It’s got to wait 10,000 years before we respond. In that time, it’s done like a shit ton of thinking, right? This is why the AI doomers think we’re doomed. Because there’s no way we can outsmart them, right? Everything we can think of, it’s got like millions of years, the equivalent of a million years of thinking about things, right? It’s just running in circles around us like it’s nothing.

It’s funny you jumped to the computer because that was the analogy or the saying that came to mind. There’s the saying that the computer is the network or the network is the computer. The computer really is just a collection of interconnections, basically.

Basically, there’s zero and one logic gates, right? At the machine language layer. And then you go up to another layer, I don’t know, the software kernel, and then the software language, the applications. I might not be naming the layers correctly.

But if you boil it all the way down, it’s zeros and ones, yeses or nos, basically. Similar to our neurons, just firing. Exactly.

Firing or not firing. Firing or not firing. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Firing or not. So yeah, zeros or ones. And then, but when you layer it up, you get, well, software applications, right? Which are very sophisticated, complex.

They don’t look like zeros and ones at all. They’re very adaptive. We can use our imagination to create almost anything inside of software now, especially with things like AI image generators and LLMs and all of this, right? The imagination can sort of run wild.

But at the bottom, it’s just this zeros and ones thing. So what is the, what is, so is it just the connections between these yeses and nos? Like how is it, the book by James Gleick, The Information, explained this well. I don’t think I can articulate it here.

But like, how is it we go from something so basic, which is yeses or nos, to something that’s very abstract? I can give you an example. Like, say, this may or may not help. So you’re seeing a screen here, right? There’s something.

And when I’m like moving this mouse cursor, it looks like there’s something moving, right? But there’s nothing moving. Right. All it is, is this is a bunch of pixels.

Yeah. And it’s time to change colors. Right, right, right.

All it is, is pixels changing colors. It’s a timing illusion. Yeah.

So you imagine this machine that’s just, you write this program that’s well-coordinated. Based on my input, it changes colors on these pixels. Yes.

That’s what’s giving the illusion. And you can organize it in the way, like you can abstract models of it. Oh, there’s a cursor.

You can model all these things in for it to behave like this. Yes. I mean, I’m a software engineer by training.

So it intuitively makes sense to me. But I can see how it feels like magic, right? Like 001s, and you end up with all this stuff. Right.

But you can actually drill every, like the layers you talk about, every layer down. Because there’s so many levels of abstractions. Right.

By the time you get to like what we see, it feels like it’s magic. What’s the purpose of the layered architecture? Like why can’t we just do all this at layer one, zeros and ones? You could. You can imagine like you’re programming like individual pixels.

But that’s not efficient, right? Like it’s almost impossible. Yeah. Right? Like imagine trying to time the pixel changes multiple times per second.

And having it to know, like how would you do it? The best way to do it is model what you want. Yes. And in order to do the modeling, you would need to have abstractions.

And the abstraction then mask the complexity? Is that sort of simple? Yes, that’s the point. That’s the point. So that’s the point.

When I write a program at the application level, I don’t even know anything about zeros and ones. Even lower than that, like how quantum mechanics, like how electric signal you get to physics. In the same way, I don’t even know how the combustion engine works when I press the gas pedal.

Right. That’s all abstractions are. Yeah.

Yeah. Interesting. Okay.

So the capacity to have subjective experience. I guess we have to try and define the words subjective and objective. I’ve heard it put this way, that they’re both.

And experience. Whenever I say subjective experience, someone’s like define subjectivity and define experience. Sure, sure.

It’s like, oh crap. Yeah. And experience is like almost all there is for a living organism.

At least humans, I guess we would say. But even that, as you said, I can’t verify that you’re having experience, right? You could just be an NPC in the simulation that I’m in. You know, something like that.

There’s no way. All I can say is. You could be dreaming and everything you’re hearing, everything you’re seeing is just a result of your own brain creating these.

Yes. So the word subjective, objective, this might be an interesting gateway into metaphor. Because I’ve heard it put that.

Maybe subjective isn’t a good word now that I think of it. It’s just having first person experience. First person experience.

Both of the words contain the word Jecht, J-E-C-T, which means to throw. Objective is to throw against something. And subjective metaphorically is to throw beneath.

And so to throw against something is supposed to give you like a hard understanding of what it is, right? Like you’ve actually tested the surface for its solidity. Whereas when you throw something beneath an object, you get a deeper understanding of it, right? You see it from a deeper perspective. You get closer to its substance, its substance.

So I’m throwing out the metaphorical interpretation of these words because as we talked about earlier, metaphors seem to be pretty important. How do you, you said subjective maybe is not the best word, but how do we handle subjective, objective versus maybe first person? Yeah, I don’t think objective needs to be involved just because there is a duality that comes from subjective and objective. But I think in the context that we’re talking about, it’s more like internal and external, right? I mean, that’s what I mean by maybe subjective isn’t the best word because I think it’s trying to capture the within part versus the out part, right? Like it’s looking in versus looking out.

But where’s the boundary condition? Yeah, that’s a good question. Because you’re talking about this earlier, like we’re getting this constant inflow of sensory data or sensory information. Yeah, yeah.

Signals. Well, signals. Let’s go with signals because yeah, I want to talk about information later.

And so we’re like what we call perception, right? We think, oh, it’s the surface of my eye that’s receiving these photons. There’s some moment, presumably the atomic surface of my eye. When that photon goes from an external experience into an internal experience.

Well, so when the photon hits the retina, it’ll create some like excitement. That energy of the photon transfers. Yes.

It hits the retina, it transfers some energy into the retina. And then now that energy gets like turned into like a signal. It’ll excite like neural pathways, like a signal gets sent down to your nerves.

And then it’ll excite a bunch of neurons. Yes. So that creates like this inflow.

It’s just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. A bunch of those signals firing, right? Yeah, and then and then your brain starts to process these these these signals and and turns it into Color. Yeah, that’s it.

That’s that’s it Yeah, and Yeah, that’s that’s that’s what I call information process the same thing with sound you got air molecules vibrating Ultimately, it’s like little hairs in your in your ear They’re vibrating and these vibrations create energy that excites like there’s for your transformation going on It’s essentially turns turns like into signals ultimately your brain. Yeah, so I asked you earlier, too I want to ask you again the difference between that organic process of perception and And something like a camera or security camera or any, you know, yeah device that records something I could be an audio recorder right it too has certain signals Sensors that gets excited right and electric signals goes in so it distinguishes that I mean It’s not experience presumably what the camera is doing. How do we distinguish that from our first-person experience? I think our eyes are like the camera.

Okay, if you attach the camera to a computer and There’s software running in the computer that does processing of the signals Like turns it into the image or knows some interesting things with it That’d be more like our brain taking the signal doing some processing but most of the time we When we get a feed and it shows up It’s it’s it’s doing like a mapping a direct mapping of here’s a signal and map it to a bunch of colors Yes, you get the video feed, right? You can call that processing but not really. Yeah, right like it’s not the same kind of processing that that that our eyes or Our brains are doing because it’s less complex. Yes.

Yes, but so is that just but you can say you have a virtual person Program in it. It’s really taking into this these signals coming in and this this program is like simulating Some some Well, we I have to assume I’m making the hypothesis that consciousness emerges from information processing. Okay, so so if if if Say there’s a brain simulator, right and and we’re we’re trying to Simulate subjective experience We the way I would do it is have have these signals come in and have this program Process it like like our brain right like it’d be self organizing neurons yeah, and then these things firing in and have it organized based on these things coming in and it Emerges like if if if if this thing is like one component and then it’s able to like Eventually develop speech or whatever and it talks about it.

Like yeah, yeah, I would I would say that that that’s conscious That’s like that’s like the same thing This is exactly the same process just a different level of just a different city Speed but when you’re simulating it you can right all the speed but yeah, I get what you’re asking like Maybe it could maybe it. Yeah, I I don’t know This is why it’s a hard problem. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Let me ask you the so that’s like a Calculational perspective on consciousness, right that it is Computational process, I guess yeah computational perspective on consciousness, but there’s this other dimension at least a human consciousness Presumably that’s more like Contemplative right that when we when we step out When that process steps outside of itself and examines its own process, right kind of like metacognition, right? when you’re thinking about something and You’re thinking about it in certain terms, but then you step out of you reframe it in another way There’s a really interesting thing here called the frame problem that John Verbeke often sites Maybe we could pull that up actually on the computer at some point he’s just doing that to Emphasize the way we often get stuck with problems because we frame them a certain way.

So and that’s a calculate that inhibits Calculational consciousness, but with contemplative consciousness, you can kind of step out of the frame and try on other frames To solve problems. This is where we get the phrase think outside of the box. Actually when we see the frame problem.

Yeah, so Are there two different? Polls to consciousness one one calculation one more contemplative and if so our machines I guess that would be the big general artificial intelligence question, right as our machines capable of Contemplation perhaps If it’s just software like on their mind you can have you can have the software Do I feel like it’s? one level higher like like you can like awareness and Gets into like self. Yeah Reflective like all these things are sort of built on top Mmm, so the higher layers. So so yeah, and and everything is just software So you can you could definitely like if the machine is capable of having subjective experience, it’s definitely capable of having everything else Yes.

Wow. Okay, so then we there isn’t there is The possibility that humans could play God in a way. Yeah, and we might be doing it right now.

They are Yeah, yeah, there’s there’s this idea that like the end goal is I mean the whole point the end goal is the universe trying to Come come become conscious engage in self-reflection. Yes. Yeah, it’s it’s a long process.

Yeah, it starts with certain Animals like biological things Becoming conscious. Yeah, and then they build machines which becomes in the higher right machines will take over all of universe which then itself becomes conscious We’re in this we’re just a little this little cog in the in the way How the universe ultimately wants to become alive and conscious? But I think I don’t know what I think it’s in some fictions, I’m not a science fiction reader, but I Believe there’s definitely books written. Yeah, I agree with that.

This reminds me to you. I Think the book is the origin of wealth where it talks about the algorithm of evolution And it’s very pretty straightforward, right if it works keep it if it doesn’t discard it All right, that’s basically how evolution works more or less, you know, there there’s another way to think about evolution too, okay Again framing everything as software It’s it’s it’s not like survival of the fittest it it on the on the On the organism level. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s like these organisms are Substrates to run software sure and then there’s these software that the genes basically Sort of through the genes Even the genes are part of the software like like they’re there they’re ways of organizing be it molecules so you you start with like I This kind of goes Against from like the free energy principle because we were talking about atom levels but but you can one way I can kind of think of it is like like Atom self organized into molecules somehow sure.

Yeah molecules Into like proteins and all these different things proteins are organized into organelles organelles and organs organs and organisms organisms and organizations yeah, yeah, exactly and and and and And it could be you could have planetary and this is where the whole universe gets right but but my point is The these softwares they’re there they start out just random. Yeah, like just a bunch of stuff right and then Somehow something works somehow something works and it sticks It is kind of survival of the fittest in that way, but it’s just These software that are able to stay to replicate So so one this may be a good segue or not like like like money if you think about money as a As a software that like every culture ended up discovering money. Yes.

It’s this pattern Yeah, you think about software as a pattern. It’s a language. Yeah.

Yeah, like like You we all same same thing with government government like once you have enough people Government ultimately for and and it always does it’s because this if you think of it as a software This is the only pattern that that survives. Mm-hmm. All other like fails.

So this this always stays no and Yeah, I I think it’s you can think of evolution like that. So so so life like Emerged because it is survived. Yes.

Yeah. Well, that’s useful, but it also You get back to like survival of the fittest in a way, yes, yes, which if you reduce that down it’s Locates. Well, yeah, there’s a saying in evolutionary biology that replicators replicate which is a tautology, right? It’s it doesn’t it defines itself So it doesn’t tell you anything or you could say survival of the fittest reduces to survival of the survivors Which also doesn’t tell you much.

Yeah, so this pattern is what like gets gets retained yes, and I’ve seen this to you where they run simulations and This isn’t like evolutionary biology, but they’ll run, you know They’re like two-dimensional Life exactly game of life. Yeah, you have very simple rules and all the patterns emerge exactly stable and they become exactly stable over time yes, so What I want to ask is so there’s that I guess we’ll leave the Question of what is survival of the fittest mean on the table because that is difficult It’s you you also don’t know what fittest means right because context and circumstances are always changing So in one scenario, maybe it’s advantageous to have a long neck and eat treat You know eat leaves from a high tree, but another a meteor hits the earth and all the sudden It’s advantageous to be a mammal that’s hiding underneath. That’s how we survive the dinosaurs presumably, right? The Sun got blocked out, but we were Subterranean so we were able to generate our own heat and we survived so leaving all that aside perhaps the algorithm of evolution Is how nature appears to operate through a darwinian lens if it works keep it if it doesn’t discard it and it seems like maybe this is the through line into sentience At least human intelligence we do the same thing in the marketplace with innovation right? It’s the same algorithm You produce a product if it works if it solves people’s problems better faster cheaper Well, then we keep it and the idea propagates if it doesn’t well you got a business, and then that’s that so that same algorithm As you said earlier, it’s not substrate dependent.

It’s substrate agnostic So the algorithm of evolution runs in a certain way through us the blood-flesh-blown Claw, whatever, but it also runs through Material substrate that we work with right silicon plastic whatever we create So what what is the question is that just what the universe is doing is it just? Is it just one big algorithm propagating through different substrates? Yeah One question, I think that puzzles a lot of Like people in the history like like what is what does matter what is yes, how do you define? What does matter and we have? quantum mechanics people coming up with like Boson fields and like like it’s the part of the field and it’s energy Yeah, and there’s there’s information comes down to having information Why the whole universe is just as big it’s like a Like an information theory lens. Yes Looking at the universe everything is everything is information. So begs the question What is information? Yeah in Bitcoin we often dream about the idea of forming citadels Which are independent self-sovereign communities that have their own energy food and water resources Today that dream is becoming a reality at the farm at Okefenokee The farm is a 705 acre regenerative agriculture community located at the Florida, Georgia line near Folkestone, Georgia The farm is known as the healthiest place on earth and it includes orchards organic standing gardens regenerative animal pastures berry fields and much much more Today the farm features 25 custom-built cabins and has plans to construct 225 more in the years ahead The farm has its own food energy and water sources and is completely off-grid So if you’re looking to join a citadel community comprised of sovereign individuals, then go to O-k-e farm Farm.com today to learn more about membership Make sure to tell them that I sent you for a $21,000 discount on custom cabin pricing Again, that’s O-k-e farm.com to learn more about joining this revolutionary regenerative agriculture community Forget multivitamins and other supplements animal organs are the most nutrient dense foods on the planet You can get 100 times more nutrients from organs than you can from muscle meats But the problem with eating organs is that they are difficult to find in stores They are difficult to prepare and even when they are prepared.

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Yes yeah, yes, yeah, I see it as just Layers later. Yeah, or or leaps of Patterns that emerged That are superior that ultimately Like Come come up come rises up. Yeah, and then and then the the former one just Just subsides because because it’s it’s it’s not as efficient or or yeah inferior How do you measure as efficient at? Reducing Surprise is that like maximizing knowledge something like that or What I mean ultimately we’re fighting entropy, yes, right so trying to trying to Contain order like for as long as possible trying to map order Like like like you as a person it’s You’re you’re made out of trillions of cells and it’s it’s like an ecosystem right, it’s there’s there’s three times more bacterias than cells in in in the body and This It’s like Everything is kind of doing its own things, but the way that they’re doing it Organizes into you as a person.

Yeah, somehow there’s a consciousness that emerged in right in the neuron somehow, but but but but my my my point is like the Yeah, I Lost my train of thought. Sorry. How do we get here? My question was somewhat about that is the universe just this algorithm Running the algorithm algorithm of evolution, right that that’s That we went over true.

But what was he do we say just before? And then the well, I don’t maybe this will Spark it or for you the When you describe us as an ecology or an ecosystem of cells at some point all of those Let’s call them microorganisms as a catch-all for cells bacteria, whatever it be. They become organized under one Autonomy basically, right? There’s one Self right that you you know your aims and your purposes and your desires all of a sudden your body serves That I think what I was gonna say was it before I sidetracked Yeah, I think I sidetracked into like this. The thing is is all like, you know separate.

Mm-hmm, but but it’s like the software Retains it. It’s what? The the software that kept everything together Is this is the software that that propagate It’s so I remember we’re talking about like next next levels, right? Like like being more efficient Yeah being so so there’s one set of rules. That’s That’s Keeping this ecosystem as as as one entity, right? but you can imagine there are other ones that Have totally different.

Yeah, right like different plants different animal. They all have their own way of retaining a Whole bunch of cells there as an ecosystem, right? and They sort of all compete for resources and whatnot, but it’s you can think of it as different software running inside competing for for Maximal replication, right? So it’s or so then when you get to the AI Maybe it it doesn’t need to have like robot limbs to Consume resource. Maybe it does maybe it may like however more Efficient because they have a better understanding of the universe.

They that that’s that’s what I’m talking about, right, right? so so if are we saying then that the teleology or purpose of Evolution is efficiency that we’re trying to become more efficient with the use of resources because if so Maybe but doesn’t that presuppose an aim or a purpose or a target because you know, you can be really efficient at doing Another Efficiency thing comes from like competition. Yeah, and And if if you think of I mean the Darwinian thing is like Things competing for resources. Yeah, the ones that can have the most resources all these are different Algorithms are competing for resource.

These are different algorithms competing for Computation Essentially, so so you have you have saw all the different kinds of like think about the game of life They’re doing their things different patterns. Yes each pattern you think of it as a software. Yeah, and the thing that they’re competing for is just being being their existing exist, you know, right and And that’s that’s that’s what it what it is.

Yeah, and and Our our software like it’s trying to maximize The fight against entropy, yeah, so the more organized you are the more longer it’ll take Entropy to write to decompose you essentially which is Okay, I always like this Little I don’t know what this is a vignette I suppose about describing the relationship between entropy energy and Uncertainty if you have a chamber like a metallic chamber There’s a partition down the middle of it. Mm-hmm, and you have all the gas molecules trapped in one half of that chamber Okay, right and the other half of the chamber is vacuum. There’s nothing in it, right? There’s a something split a partition in the middle.

Yeah, call it It’s all metal right metal sphere metal plate in the middle. All the gas is on one side vacuum on the other side We have more knowledge about the location of those gas molecules with a partition in the middle, right? Because well, it’s if it were in the whole thing We’d have less knowledge because there’s more space for the gas molecules to disperse within But when we partition and have all the gas molecules on one side We have more information or less entropy basically about That gas now if we remove that partition There’s a there as the gas fills the rest of the space There’s a release of energy actually you can actually harness the energy from removing that partition The trade-off is you now have this chamber with more entropy, right? There’s less certainty about the position of the gas molecules after you’ve removed the partition so with More Certainty you have or information you basically have potential energy Basically, but once you remove that partition you have less certainty about the location of the gas molecules You have less information and therefore less potential energy. So how does When you say we’re fighting against Entropy and we still haven’t really defined information, but they seem to be like almost two sides of the same coin, right if you have information Then you are Somehow guarded against entropy, right if I know how to build a campfire when I’m naked and lost in the woods I know the recipe for building a campfire Well, then that’s information that’s gonna protect me from the entropy of nature if I don’t have that knowledge I’m probably gonna die that night So how what is the relationship between information and entropy? Mm-hmm before I answer I want to go back to the sphere thing.

Mm-hmm Mm-hmm. I think with molecules what what you’re talking about is This pressure. Mm-hmm, right Higher pressure volume.

Yes Content per unit. Yeah volume is pressure. Yeah, but but I I don’t or density I don’t necessarily think there’s less information or more entropy.

Well, there’s definitely more certainty where they are I mean because you know, they’re in one half of the chamber versus the whole chamber So, yeah, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s more or less entropy Right. Well, it comes from order. So those imagine imagine they’re not gas molecules or imagine they’re It could be anything could be marbles, right? Yeah.

Yeah could be marble So say it’s just one marble you create the space is still one marble. It’s the same amount of organization Like that didn’t change. All right, so like it’s gotten the same amount of Entropy fighting like for the marble to decay into like a bunch of But a bunch of free-floating atoms, right that that or Even even more particles like completely get destroyed into like particles There’s no you lost the information of the marble, right? Let’s stick with gas molecules because marbles Well marbles would settle to the bottom, right if they were in one half To the bottom where’s the gas is Evenly distributed basically sure.

So this example comes from the book from 1970s I think introduction to information theory and that’s the example he gives and that’s the one I’ve always used is likely a Good example to understand the relationship between information entropy and energy or potential energy. I guess you could say It’s yeah, I mean there’s a it seems obvious to me I hope maybe I’m missing something here But if you do have that gas partition into one side of the chamber You definitively you’ve cut the search space in half basically Sure, if you’re looking for the position of any one gas molecule, the search space is now reduced by half So therefore your odds of finding it are doubled. Yeah.

All right. Yeah, so that’s what I mean That’s what the author is getting at in the way that I understood it Okay that but I guess it’s my Mental model it could be just me not Not knowing information theory We could we could scrap the exam. But like what is your view then on the relation? We’re still trying to like Like we we boiled it all the way down and said it’s all information.

Yeah, we didn’t really distinguish Well, is it a verb? Is it a noun? I don’t know but so I’m hoping to tease out More of what information is by comparing it to entropy or contrasting it to entropy. I think to me It’s almost like a substitute for for like the most fundamental Particle over like if we’re looking for something like that. Mm-hmm.

Like how does like what is matter? Mm-hmm, like you keep cutting it down, right? Like you talk about things being solid. Mm-hmm. But our understanding is it’s atom is mostly empty space.

Yeah It’s like a force field Pushing back right against the atoms in your hand. Yeah, that’s that’s what creates this feeling of solid Yes, and even those particles have and then you break down into like, okay mostly the vacuum and then in the center We know there’s a little electron, but then what is in that? Yeah, then it’s all mostly empty space Yeah, and then it’s okay. And then what what goes down? Yes, and then Ultimately in the end it’s it’s there’s the field we have something Yeah, just this information of having something versus not but then I just use information to define something Yeah, so so my point is I think my mental model which could completely be wrong It is that fundamental thing Mm-hmm, that that’s that’s that’s I think how I would so there’s a fundamental Entity or Elementary particle of information in your view Yeah, okay.

Yeah, it is the fundamental thing that gives It gives rise to Things yes, it’s also defined as information is also defined as surprise. Yes So is it just this inherent? unpredictability of The complex system that is the universe that gives it this informational quality that it’s just always Yielding surprises to us. The future is always uncertain.

I mean We can’t know right like these are which is entropy we can’t know I was like that’s yeah confession of entropy in a way yes, and and I Was mentioning to the other guys like we come up with these models like we that’s like what our brains Yes best, right. We we see patterns and things. Mm-hmm, and then we create a model Yeah of but the our model is is all Based on the input that we receive so we’re limited by our input, right? Like I was talking about chat GPV It’s the the model is formed based on all the pre-training data they got yes, and then if you eliminated a Bunch of data from a certain type then it wouldn’t know anything about that.

So so like We have no idea what the universe is like the physical out there right all we have is like What what we can? Empirically, but it’s also just very subjective. Everything is subjective. Yeah, so so it could just be the tip of the iceberg like one example I like to use is like So so there there’s like these these These programs that you can run in the camera and then recognize things right like like security camera recognizing people or license plates and we can read read read license plates like you would think these programs have a Model of the universe so it’ll it knows.

Okay. This is a person. That’s a car license plate Letter like similar to how we recognize things, right? But then when you see things like there there’s there’s like people that come up with hacks where where they They they put a QR code on their face or they just hold up a QR code the The program goes bonkers.

Like it completely it like destroys the way it it’s able to recognize Not like when we see it, we just see a person holding up a QR code Yeah, just but but that QR code box up the program completely. Huh? So that’s an indication of whatever the model It is it’s so different than what we have And and and but but but if you didn’t know about this QR code, you would think hey It’s got that it’s got the perfect model that matches ours because everything you show it it’s it’s seeing right But but but that’s that’s just like the tip of the iceberg, right? No, it could there could be like that model could be so different from like how we have it Just based on the fact that you can throw it off by having this QR code Yeah, so it’s a similar how we like perceive universe like you can talk about all these different models entropy how in from even the information models like Who knows even the particle that you bring up is I so my interpretation of this would be I tend to agree that information is Ontologically primary but understood as a verb as I was saying earlier not as a noun per se That is this process like the whole I make that distinction like Seems like it because it implies when you say that When you look at information as a noun and you talk about information processing it implies that there’s something Ontologically prior to the information that’s doing the processing Whereas the information itself being the process The information is the verb is the process is reality. It’s like it’s ontologically primary.

I see I see Yeah, it’s the same thing. It’s subtle. It’s just labels.

Yeah that point. Yeah, it’s subtle. It’s it’s like you can It’s essentially I call it information processing and you just want to call it information information is a process.

Yeah, sure What’s sure? I mean, let’s just label on miss that. That’s an Understand. Yeah what we’re talking about information is you’re gonna have whatever labels you want on it? Yeah.

Yeah. Okay So that’s interesting then maybe what I was gonna get out there was the particle itself now. I’m drawing from a book the dancing Sounds ridiculous the dancing wooly masters, I think but it’s a it’s a book on quantum mechanics and he argues that actually that reality is this Continuous field of interaction, right? Wave interactions basically and then that we assign The model or the construct of particle to certain forms of those wave interactions So a proton is a certain type of wave interaction a neutron is a different type of wave interaction Core didn’t have glue on the whole particle zoo basically are just Descriptive models or boxes or frames we put around You know energetic liquid plasma Interactions basically and that lands for me because I get when I look at reality It’s like that’s how it seems to actually work like everything for every action.

There’s no one opposite reaction, right? Everything’s always Yeah directional right in biology. It’s feedback loops. I I I Mentioned Stephen Wolfram.

He’s been talking about Rulia and A Bunch of other new words thermal dynamics like how how Yeah, essentially his Wolfram physics. Yeah, his his latest sort of greatest answer to everything and it’s all about like Uh Everything is computational which gets into the information and then It needs to be computable and so the Rulia it is essentially is my understanding which obviously could be wrong It’s like all possible computations, mm-hmm, like if you think in terms of design like math mathematics, yeah It definitely exists like in the in the world of mathematics, right there’s different kinds of numbers you can think about So that’s a different rules or whatever. There’s definitely exists this this thing.

That’s like all possible compute computable space yeah, and and he has this whole thing with like graphs and and how Like Basically came up with a rule that explains the math backs to quantum mechanics and and relativity and like Through this graph like just things happening on the graph maps to all these things and then explains the universe as we observe it perfectly, but that’s I think I mean when I when I Saw him explain this in the video was like that makes perfect sense, right? Like I think there’s gonna be so many different kinds of models that that matches our experience. Yes that I Don’t know if they’re really compatible or they might be all incompatible, right? Yeah, but but they all match and and we just like I said, we have no idea Yeah, because we we can only observe one space like that that Like if all we have to judge like whether the program is working is based on like it’s recognition of things Mm-hmm, then there’s could be a million model ways of achieving that sure and what is what is the right way out there? We have no idea. All right, that’s a until you find the QR code that proves the other thing wrong Yeah, like there’s there’s just no way to know what you just described Scientific method in a nutshell, right? It’s like create hypotheses exactly disprove whatever you can whatever you can’t disprove is science Basically, it’s never actually anyone that says scientifically proven doesn’t understand how science works.

It’s scientifically not disproven. Basically, that’s Everything the theory is yes all the people who work and in hard science Yeah wants to disprove and well-established theory. That’s how you win like, of course.

Yeah, that’s how you get on top Until you get disappointed in the future, yes, exactly. Yeah, so Language then like because you said something sort of interesting there like it almost doesn’t matter what semantic labels we use So, well, I mean It I agree, but that doesn’t mean it’s in me like here’s why I get tripped up though. This is a trick I mean, I would agree.

It’s like okay. We could call this thing, you know water or we can call it agua As long as we both have consensus on the terminology then we can get mind meld basically through language Exactly if we break that consensus, we cannot So in one sense, it doesn’t matter. It’s arbitrary like what label you select But then in another sense if we’re talking about consciousness being this For the what the flow of information that is accurate right that it’s it’s there’s a high fidelity From the message sender to the message recipient right like there’s not information loss in the messaging process There’s always information.

There’s always information. We want to minimize information loss, right? I want to maximize data throughput. Yeah, something like that.

Yes in that sense Like it does really matter what terms we use right like this probably gets into the domain of mathematics it’s like it doesn’t we can use this we can use a You know a numeral six based system or let’s say something simpler a numeral system with no number zero Right, like we can use that. That’s what Roman numerals are. Yeah, but they’re very inefficient at performing calculations So then therefore they inhibit merchants that are trying to do accounting and transactions Why not show it gets out competed by the superior strategy, which is a zero based numeral system or the Hindu Arabic numeral systems Yeah, so there is a quote-unquote, right? Language, right More right than I wouldn’t say that it’s It’s it’s fundamentally different.

It’s it’s a Number system with zero and without yes is is fundamentally different is one better or worse Depends on what you’re trying to optimize as better or worse, right? Like what is the goal? So my point isn’t the goal information throughput as you said earlier sure if it is Then yes, one is better than the other, right? but The the There there is fundamental. My point is there’s some something fundamentally different between Number system with zero and without because they’re not compatible You have this one zero that doesn’t map to anything in the other exactly But but what we’re talking about with labels, we’re assuming so imagine like Like like like like the Chinese numbers and Arabic number There’s zeros, but they they’re written different. Sure.

As long as you map There’s a map of there’s this actual thing that we all Right understood mutually. Okay, this means zero right circle and then in Chinese It’s like some crazy symbol the concept independent of the symbol, right? The label, yeah, right that doesn’t matter It’s what we’re really interested in is the substance yes, and as long as there’s a one-to-one mapping in the case of water or information right and there’s information processing then I Don’t I don’t see I don’t I don’t I don’t see a problem there Have you ever wanted to start a business in the Bitcoin space? If so, then the wolf startup accelerator could be for you Wolf is the first startup accelerator dedicated exclusively to businesses developing in the Bitcoin lightning network Four times each year wolf brings teams from around the world to New York City to work with like-minded entrepreneurs Pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with Bitcoin and lightning The program is designed to help early stage companies achieve product market fit Develop their brand secure early stage funding and grow businesses that fuel the global adoption of Bitcoin Go to wolf NYC.com to learn more or apply today again. That’s wolf w-o-l-f-n-y-c-.com As one of my business mentors once told me the job of the boss is to eliminate confusion The best antidote for confusion is access to truth Which brings clarity to business decision-making and thus optimizes the drive toward future business goals Over 41,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle the number one cloud ERP system Which brings accounting financial management inventory HR into one fluid platform With one unified business management suite There’s one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make decisions quickly and effectively If I was still a CFO NetSuite is undoubtedly the ERP system I would use in my business Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities Speaking of opportunity you can download the CFO’s guide to AI and machine learning at NetSuite.com What is money? This guide is packed with useful insights and is free for you at NetSuite.com What is money again? That’s NetSuite.com What is money, okay, so so language then is the symbolic layer or the conceptual layer language like We when we say language like natural language, yeah It’s just very vague.

It covers like what humans use. Yeah That that’s everything right, right. You can get into like formal language, which is more like a computer programming language and that’s that’s It gets into like How expressive is it is yeah, there are certain things you can express with natural language that’s Not really possible with mathematics.

Yeah, right Depends on how complicated The Language itself is but there’s definitely different tiers of like if you study linguistics this is all like pretty pretty standard stuff like like there you can have a very simple language that doesn’t have say support like Like like recursion which is like I Say something and then I make a reference of it. I guess self-reference. Yeah.

Yeah And and then that that would limit in what you can express right so so there’s all these all these different classes of languages, but But yeah, I think I think for information in terms of like Most information retained. Yes and maximum Minimize loss and maximize like information being retained and transferred. Yes You you want to not having ambiguity, right right and and and usually Usually formal language works better in that sense.

Yes natural language Almost always have something and ambiguity. Well, you’re always but you can establish it and and then like again no, there’s you can it’s never gonna be perfect because because The process of establishing yes, there’s also like there’s always loss that’s so it’s like It’s super inefficient for me to have a thought Have these things Get into your head like I have to Deconstruct it Turn it into words Which is produced by my vocal cord vibrating air molecules Getting into your your ears hair vibrating and then you decode those vibrations Into some concept. Yes the end result is probably Kind of different than what I have.

Of course, right almost always Even even me putting it into words is already like the words already was already already different I have to sort of compress or change it, right? So so it This is why you all wants the neural link Like Mind straight you’re opening the strictures between human minds between connecting human ones. Yeah, this process is so inefficient, right? Yeah me describing thinking about this is like the worst way to like send information, but this is the all we got Yeah, that’s the best thing we have. Yeah, maybe maybe writing it down is a little bit better Sometimes was gonna say because sometimes going slow.

It’s trade-offs, right? There’s I mean if neural link worked we could obviously transmit information with much higher speed efficiency throughput all those things But then there’s you know when I sit down with a pen and I write long form I’m capable of saying things and formulating thoughts and ideas and stories that I can’t just extemporize So by going more slowly, you know you gain this other bandwidth I Suspect that bandwidth isn’t like Elon’s thing is about increasing bandwidth. Yeah between like Like he’s like two thumbs typing on the keyboard. I know too slow So right like it’s worse and he wants to increase that bandwidth Yeah, it’s like speech is much better because of course bunch of words, right? But then with the mirroring is is it gonna be even crazier, right? yes, but I suspect the the bandwidth isn’t the problem like even if you like you said have a crazy bandwidth you still have a Processing problem like you can’t keep up with that Well, you just dumps a bunch of words that you can’t like even it’s just someone’s speaking too fast It’s hard to understand, right? Of course.

So so so I think we’re still bounded by The Interpretation always right always that’s what I was gonna point to next was and the pen writing Gives you time to process gives you time gives you it’s we we’re we process things pretty slowly That’s what it is. Maybe it’s slowing down the expression which brings it more in line with the speed of cognition So therefore you can form bigger more complex thoughts. I I wouldn’t I would agree but I’ll be it at a lower speed pace Yes.

Yeah, I think that makes it So interesting, okay, I want to ask you Ambiguity is such an interesting concept though. It was like we want minimal ambiguity in our speech, right? Which is another way of saying we want very high Terminological consensus right when I invoke a word Yeah, what I mean when I invoke that word is what you mean when you decrypt the word. Yeah, right.

That’s ideal. Yeah but So that’s great for things that we you know, I guess parts of reality that have been mapped by language But for parts of reality that have not been created yet, right, you know new tools new stories new whatever Yeah, we almost we run into ambiguity Yep, in a way, right? Yeah So when you think of something like when the Internet was emerging we called it things like the information superhighway, right? We’re metaphorizing it this new construct in terms of something that we all sort of understand You know we say things like oh that’s a feature not a bug Now we say that about you know people’s personalities or something in a business But really it’s just like a metaphorical We’ve reduced on the other direction, right? We’ve taken We’ve taken our experience with digital technology. Now.

We import that into social reality to talk about stuff. So there’s this the ambiguity seems like a necessary aspect of dealing with novelty basically Mm-hmm until you go forward in time and you you map that thing with less ambiguity You get a more solid foundation and that frees you up to go and pursue. It’s a consensus problem.

Yeah It’s a consensus problem. Everyone needs to be on the same page exactly Which is ultimately a language problem in a way or an interpretation problem. I was summoned to find well You have to have consensus.

Yes, this is why we established we like when we said Information versus information process let’s Yes mentally map them as labeled to the same thing. Yes, we form consensus exactly. Yeah Yes, so everyone else in the world needs to make that same mental gymnastics then then then Consensus is established and we can just use be it information or information process Whatever yes, everyone everyone would be able to agree, but it takes a long time to have Consensus amen to that.

And so I want to ask you then what’s special about? Mathematics because that does seem to be The I think Galileo called it the language of the universe of the language of nature or something like that Yeah, and that is the language in which we have the strongest consensus on earth today so far as I know it is discovered It is discovered. Okay, so it is There’s a latent mathematical Mathematic nests to reality is what you’re saying. Yeah Yeah, the because because the ideas exist, I think regardless and and it and it’s Like aliens or whatever they should be able to discover it the same way.

Well, they might have a totally different But I think they will have numbers I think numbers are discoverable, yes and and Just the idea of having yes quantities assigning a Label or value to yeah to each quantity and I don’t know. I Almost I mean that comes from It’s also part of our universe That’s but it’s a It’s like the information part. Yes.

It’s like numbers computations, right this is why that’s The fundamental thing so it’s laying could it be you know, this is like I’m so glad we’re going here This is like my one of my biggest philosophical questions Could it be that Because mathematics has evolved over time, right? I’ve already mentioned the Roman numerals for instance a non zero based new whole system There was a Babylonian cuneiform, which was like basics, you know That’s that’s actually the one I think that included zero originally and later later became the Hindu Arabic numeral system I actually I could be wrong about that. I could be wrong. Anyways.

Mm-hmm mathematics have evolved over time as we have discovered more Numbers we’ll say numbers are the latent part of reality whereas numerals are the symbol that matter that concept and we’re asserting here hypothesizing that the Number is a conceptual reality. It exists independent of the perceiver, right? Alien race could discover it, right? But mathematics has evolved over time, right? We’ve discovered while we discovered zero we discovered imaginary numbers We’ve discovered, you know, irrational numbers prime numbers, etc, etc, etc Does that? discovery process have a terminal point and if it did would that be like the primordial language of Reality, like if we actually maybe like the software code of reality like cosmic software code I know this is way down off the deep end, but I just thought about that before how mathematics is evolving Mm-hmm. It’s the primary consensus language.

Does it have a terminal point if it did have a terminal point? What would that mean or be? I Think of math like or the what you call The evolution or of math it the it’s It’s just discovering more things, right? I Guess the question and frame that way is is there a bottom? Is there a bottom to that discovery process or an input a lot of times those discoveries are? They came from like you said complex numbers. They came from a necessity. Yes like also calculus was invented out of necessity like they it’s like there’s a problem and You want you want you want a way to To solve it.

Yes, and and the the way you You mapped it you inevitably discovered new mathematics. Yes, it’s almost like same game theory game theory invokes new math no, you you you create it’s it’s a It’s interesting. I I don’t know.

I don’t know if it’s like infinite III would I would I would think Like you like like what Wolfram was talking about you can have a System that that contains all possible computation So you could have a system that come that let’s compose the all possible mathematics to I suppose How does it reconcile with infinity? Because isn’t infinity a real number Infinity doesn’t exist in The physical world we observe but it is the concept that we can we can imagine But oh like like the world is discrete as we as far as we can tell discreet Yeah, meaning it’s not continuous Really and continues the is what? Infinity requires so that’s an atomistic view of the universe, right? But there’s a fundamental yes particle but as you said earlier more and more that is I think the consensus of like Physics and science your science community. This is where I think science is deeply wrong. I don’t think there is a fundamental model But but I am still very the current model is mostly like discrete because there’s a saying I think infinity is just like a Number that’s too big for us to comprehend like or basically When we get to a number that like it’s too big.

Yeah, we just we just get lazy and we call it Infinity, but but there’s always there’s like a there’s infinity infinities, by the way But those are just Things we can think about but it doesn’t map to the real world Well, that’s divorce like I said earlier about mathematics though that it is these this numeral system maps to something in reality Yeah, like so what we Sorry when I say real is like our current like Consensual model of the of the physics and all right But but like I said, that’s just what we see right shared imagination, right? Like like what we can observe based on empirical stuff, but underneath all that like what is out there There’s there’s it might as well exist, right? That that I would agree like if you say like, okay outside of what we can observe like like We just see a tip of iceberg. Yes, which is discreet, right? But underneath how it yes. Yeah that no one knows right then sure It might as well be content.

I have to ask you this. This is kind of jumping ahead But over Carl Friston’s quote the anatomy of every system must contain a model of the system in which it is immersed I might be paraphrasing that to some extent. Yeah, kind of like getting at the old Alchemical dictum of as above so below Yeah, I did it also fractal mathematics, right things tend to be self similar but non repeating at different levels, you know a pebble looks like a Stone looks like a mountain basically right structurally.

They’re similar, but they’re vastly different scales If That’s the case and we’ve had a hard time kind of defining language I think like we’ve got mathematics as a language money as a language natural language as a language Some people might say music as a language. There’s body language You know all kinds of things and does that I didn’t know we were trying to define language, but sure Oh, sorry. There’s a question earlier.

I would love well, you could answer that as well Mathematics money body language sign language natural language music, you know, there’s other things. I think that could be considered linguistic if as above so below or Carl, which is Expanded upon by Carl Friston, which I won’t repeat again if that’s the Geometric or structural nature of reality does that mean reality itself the fabric of reality could be language or language like And that’s what that also ties back into what we’re saying earlier about information and that also ties into Genesis Yeah, the Bible and many other wisdom tradition. I think that this point language the label the word language It’s it’s taking on Probably it’s kind of getting overloaded I I think we need to narrow down a definition or come to consensus What what is like signaling system of some kind No to to to you is that I’m just I’m throwing out a not like what when you say language What do you know? I this is why I’m asking honestly because I mean I’m writing about this and It’s very broad.

Right? I actually do I know but you must have a I think my intuition is that and Probably Informed by my Christian upbringing right in the beginning was the word the word was God the word was with God I’m not saying that correctly There is the logos right the sacred logos So there is a language like structure to reality and I think it might could I mean again all I can invoke is the modern Metaphor that’s available to me but software is a frog the best metaphor. We’ve got right It’s the best metaphor for describing human cognition And if we are, you know as again the Bible teaches that we are made in the image of God as above so below then maybe It is the logo the universe is logos The universe is language divine language and that ties to my earlier question about mathematics I was like if there’s a terminal point in that process Maybe we could discover the ancient language or the primordial language and actually who knows. I don’t know what happens then but anyways, these are my Yeah One one sidetrack talking about the Bible, um, Yoshua Bach has a really good speech about tying like Software consciousness to Genesis.

No, he thinks Genesis is a little bit mistranslated and when you substitute like the word water for Substrate mmm, you can see how substrate gets mistranslated to water. Of course and then What Genesis is actually explaining is not God creating the world, but how conscious this comes to you? It’s it’s a fascinating. I can show you the link.

Yeah. Yeah Actually, you want to see that but it’s it’s oh, sorry. Go ahead.

But and then we can talk about language Yeah, I mean but it’s long it’s a pretty long Go on with it as far as you want with the answer to the question and then after that Let’s pull some stuff up because I have some clips to you. Oh, yeah. Okay, sure, but please continue Yeah, so for what you’re talking about language being money language being all these different things It’s it’s almost like a metaphor to me like when I think of Language, I think I think of more like It’s it’s a collection of labels.

Mm-hmm. It’s the means for People to come to consensus like sure like there’s a bunch of labels Everyone, let’s agree. These are label describe certain things That’s that’s but all that is but mathematics as you said earlier if it’s number And we’re discovering something in reality.

It’s it is still labeling but it’s not arbitrary labeling It’s almost like I mean, well, you you use you still use so in mathematics The individual label is arbitrary, but the structural connection between labels is non-arbitrary. Yeah, so there you can think of mathematics as Things we discover they we’ve came up with a set of labels Describe those things to map that conceptual landscape. Yeah yeah, and that’s sort of like the language of mathematics all those all the different symbols you see and But that that like saying Saying mathematics is a is a language I Think it’s it’s metaphor in the sense that the substance of mathematics is universal like Like computation is universal And this contemplation universal It could it could just be a side effect of computation because there’s this idea of like like Turing complete Computation if If a machine is Turing complete Then it can run the same soft same program.

Yeah that any other Turing complete Machine can run so it doesn’t matter like how primitive different speeds you you’re always gonna be able to perform the same maybe maybe at different speeds but same same program There’s the same logic is able to execute. It’s kind of like There is a space of what can be described in the language and and as long as what you’re trying to describe fits in this space then It doesn’t matter what kind of labels you have you you’ll be able to describe the same thing So so like right like like Japanese English Chinese, they can all describe the same thing Because they’re there they have the same expressiveness, right? So so for mathematics it’s it’s it’s called the universal language not because it’s Really a language. It’s it’s more like because it it it goes across space it doesn’t require it’s a it’s an idea It’s a it’s a it doesn’t require like being on earth It doesn’t it anybody across the universe can discover this it’s so so then Especially if we were to communicate with an alien.

Yeah, our best tool is mathematics across space across time Sure. Yeah. Sure.

Yeah, so so like I Don’t think it’s language in the literal sense that it’s a collection of labels But but it’s because the universality of it It’s it allows two completely different Civilizations to communicate because they have this thing in common. Mm-hmm. It’s beautiful said Bitcoin custody is evolving both self custody and single third-party custody come with significant risk and trade-offs On ramp is pioneering a new standard Multi-institution custody which eliminates single points of failure adding fault tolerance and redundancy to your setup On-ramp secures your Bitcoin in a segregated cold storage multi-key vault guarded by three independent institutional grade custodians None of which have unilateral control over your keys Your funds are fully auditable on chain cannot be rehypothecated and can only move or be withdrawn at your explicit direction Multi-institution custody removes the technical mental and physical burdens of private key management Providing unparalleled peace of mind for you and your loved ones Bitcoin is money and as the price continues to appreciate on ramp helps you seamlessly tap into financial services like trading inheritance insurance loans IRAs and more all without compromising on security or accessibility Schedule a consultation with the on-ramp team to learn more at on ramp Bitcoin Bitcoin.com Breedlove again, that’s on ramp Bitcoin.com Breedlove One of my highest health priorities is keeping my brain in top shape to take care of my brain power I do many things such as striving to read write exercise and meditate daily One of the latest tools in my brain power toolkit is mind lab Pro Mind lab Pro is a nootropic supplement that is scientifically proven to enhance your brain power When I take mind lab Pro my mind feels like it has a better grip on the world My thinking is more lucid and the articulation of my speech is radically improved Mind lab Pro has been tested in rigorous double-blind placebo controlled human trials and has been proven to enhance brain power for users in every Age group mind lab Pro is an advanced formulation of 11 nootropic ingredients and is backed by research from over 1,400 human trials conducted over the past 32 years So if you’re looking to enhance your brain power mind lab Pro is an excellent solution Go to mind lab Pro dot-com slash breed love to start enhancing your brain power today Again, that’s mind lab Pro dot-com slash breed love if we can find John Vervaeke on the nine dot problem Okay, so do you remember we did the nine dot problem, right we talked about that Remember the fact that you can miss frame things.

So let’s do the nine dot problem again Join all nine dots with four straight lines and people find it difficult Why remember we talked about this they automatically listen to the words remember they automatically and unconsciously project a square there and Then they automatically Take this to be a connect the dot problems and so no non dot turns are possible and therefore they can’t get the solution for straight lines one two three four the reason why people find that so difficult is I have to break the square and I have to not treat it as a typical connect the dot problem. I have to not treat it categorically to use language You’ve heard already Now notice there’s new Moments to having an insight. I have to break up an inappropriate frame.

What do I have to do? I Have to break up the gestalt Right, I think you’d stop it here Yeah, so yeah, there’s frame breaking and frame making process of rationality that you know We want the knowledge to be made very strongly in a way that can’t be broken but we also need to have this process of creative destruction a frame-breaking inappropriate frames to move forward, right? Newton was right, but in a lower resolution way than Einstein was right Yeah from mechanical billiard ball universe into a relativistic universe, right so it’s yeah anyways Yeah, I yeah And that’s why I think metaphor so instrumental by the way because you I think in terms of old things like like it worked like Newtonian physics worked up till the point where it didn’t work and then people were like Okay. Yeah, let’s let’s come up with an yes explanation for this and And in Einstein did was realistic but like I said that could still just be a face of the Iceberg where you can still find a QR code you throw up and they completely breaks This is why we can’t have quantum and mechanics can be compatible was relatively like we know for sure That is not correct Because if it were right it all those little things that we’re seeing at the particle level sure It doesn’t apply and that’s obviously it’s wrong. Yeah, it’s a simplified model.

It’s wall. It’s wrong at a certain scale We haven’t figured it’s wrong in the sense. It’s not universal Yeah, it only applies to certain things just like Newton’s only applied to things that moved really slowly.

Yes Okay, so so let’s take that then If someone discovers a way to reconcile general and special relativity I think Relativity and broadly with quantum mechanics. Yeah, and what people have done that has it been fully reconciled They all have like string theory. Yeah in the in the mathematic way, but it doesn’t leads to Predictions, right? So we know that’s wrong in the Sense that sure the math works out right they figured out the math that But it matters that doesn’t empirically, right? It doesn’t predict anything and similar to the like Wolfram physics his thing Completely explains all both relatively and quantum mechanics, but it’s so new.

He hasn’t made any predictions, right? I don’t know and likewise other physicists. That’s what they all want to work on I’m sure they start with the math. They come up with a system of math.

At least the math has yeah Well sometimes but Newton had to invent calculus Right. Sometimes you have to invent a whole new branch of math because it doesn’t work for the problem You got a frame break an entire branch of mathematics or not break. I guess you’re making it It’s it’s more like if he didn’t invent it someone else would have because everyone is this problem of yeah doing integration Like So they have to they have to do it and so that oh, that’s interesting.

So then does the industrial age spark the discovery of calculus Because we needed to deal with complex movements and machines and things like that Calculus is the mathematics of movement largely, right? I think is more curiosity. I like people are make doing experiments and They’re coming trying to come up with models Mm-hmm and come up with the equations that that explain things and ultimately you’re gonna run into this problem I want an equation. Yeah that predicts I can do this and and it’s it’s it’s increasingly difficult, but This is one of the Wolfram thing This thing was with Wolfram physics.

This is about computational universal of Universal value of computation like He’s saying basically anytime we can Like we can predict where a planet is like Centuries from now based on the model. We know we can Tony in physics. Yeah, we have this model we just plug in the number and and and boom comes out the answer there’s a Full understanding of how things works and he’s saying That’s usually wrong.

Hmm. Whatever whenever it doesn’t it doesn’t work and he’s saying in If you want the precision like at at at any scale You have to do the each step like you have to let the computations play out You gotta play the game. You you can’t just It’s like the blockchain you can’t get to the next blockchain without getting to the previous one and you can’t get to the previous one until it goes all the way to Create the whole chain.

You have to go from the beginning, right? And you have the only way you can get to the next one is by or the last one is by Going through the work. So Tom time is a blockchain I Forgot he’s like time is the Propagation of of this graph or something like that. I forgot, you know, Satoshi called it a time chain, by the way He never used a blockchain makes sense.

Someone I want to know I don’t want to segue. Okay, I want to ask you then does that make predictive power the ultimate power? I mean, that’s what defines a theory. That’s what makes a strategy winning for for our I Think current like observable Universal science like the only way we’re kind of Validating theories is based on prediction.

Like if you can make a prediction With your theory. Yeah Here’s the formula. Yeah plug in some numbers.

It should be this result you go do it And it gets this result does it have to be a you it has to be a useful Prediction, doesn’t it? Like if you’re just predicting it. Oh people are gonna keep being self-interested people. Yeah, so what you know, like He’s right forever, but it doesn’t add a lot Maybe true, but but if you can it comes out of precision like it has to I think Explain something that in a way That we didn’t understand before I so like here’s a phenomenon we we can observe it we don’t know why it works Yeah, it just it just does that right and then you come up with a theory that goes.

Oh, it’s because of X Y & Z and yeah, this is the equation that that this is the rule. It’s definitely Essentially is finding the rule of the universe, right? How things work right like if you can explain any phenomenon like why gravity were yes like how like what like So we didn’t understand how like heat works, right? Like we thought there was There’s some sort of Substrate for heat to transfer right like we Going from yeah ether is another example, right like But but what is heat heat is just a molecule moving really quickly, right? they have the energy that they move very quickly and I Think the metaphor is like or similarly like what is what is a wave? Yeah, and what is the wave in water? You see the wave right if you look into it, you know, it’s just Molecules move back and forth oscillation. The the wave is is the byproduct of So so it’s like When you look down into there’s there’s no wave.

Yes. That’s kind of like the relationship of Quantum mechanics and and relativity, right? Let it go. There’s a large world phenomenon We’re seeing but then you dig into the really nothing that agrees There’s almost I think we might have very tight consensus here That’s what I was trying to describe earlier with my view of information as a verb That we’re in this cosmic ocean with you know in which no one’s ever broken the surface, right? It extends in every direction and it’s all just ultimately energy moving at different vibrations And so every action, you know every for every procession.

There’s a simultaneous regression it’s always feedback loops in every direction and so that whole process of The universe mutually informing itself is That process of information. I was trying to describe it again. It might just be semantic, but yeah Yeah, I see a model still like every but every everything is the model.

So I wanted to ask you you said We’re discovering rules Okay, so does that mean it’s a game rules of what rules what is Rules are like I Mean you can all say like laws of physics, which I get but like what does that mean? Why are there rules? Why are there why are there like what is the thing? Yeah, like like if you create a simulation you would have to have parameters or not just simulation is simplifying but any any software was some Sophistication Complexity that you would you would need to introduce parameters and variables to keep track of states because software is essentially a State machine you pass in process information the state changes. This is a definition of a machine. Sure, right and Rules basically Describes the system.

It’s it’s it’s essentially the code. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s the code of the The code of the software. So how’s how? So Information comes in.

Mm-hmm state changes. Yeah, how does it change right? With those are the rules within the confines of the rules. Yeah The state changes based on the rules, right, but it’s not purely Deterministic at the same time It is in our well certain our software system.

Well, I mean but but in in the natural inside out like Aren’t if your computer is changing based on the input? That means your rules are changing. Okay, or it doesn’t necessarily mean your rules are changing, but it could mean your rules are changing Let me ask you this is a Pivot so you could have rules on top of rules where it’s like right rules are dynamic, right? But that’s also a rule, right? so Man, that’s sort of what I’m gonna get into. I think because Let’s pull up Just since we’re on that topic the Mandelbrot set ma and DLE br ot second word is set and And maybe one that shows the equation, I don’t know if that’s available but or you could move to school.

Yeah, that’s It’s a very simple equation which you can pull up it’s I forgot what it is Z equals something Squared and then you plus one something like that and you feedback the result right one recursive tiny Equator tiny. What would you call this a function? It’s an equation but the function too, yeah, and it maps this infinite space that is Non-repeating at every scale so you can you can yeah zoom into this thing infinitely or zoom out infinitely and it’s always different Yeah, but it has self similarity. Like we’re seeing here the second island of this little what do you call this structure? I Don’t know what that is It’s a fractal cosmic egg Yeah, and you see that pattern repeat, but not exactly Over and over and over and it gets way more exotic the further you zoom And so what to tie this into what we were saying earlier about rules It’s like that.

There’s very few rules governing that. Yeah, you have but Very simple rules to create complex. This is generating.

Yeah, so far as we can tell pure complexity like infinite complexity. Yeah Yeah But but there’s order in it, so yeah, but imagine that universe had Multiple of these rules and you just get crazy complex. Oh, right.

That’s that’s the right This is like one sliver of an aspect of the universe basically the entire Mandelbrot So yeah, I mean the fact that it is in the universe, right for sure But what is so unique because there’s one so far as I know there’s one there’s different there are different There’s a different Julia sets. There’s other patterns. There’s tons of them, but there’s only one like this I’m pretty sure that’s infinite in all directions and it’s very simple and it’s just recursive hmm, anyways, it’s we could maybe dive into it, but the connection I was trying to make was Rules what you says it’s what governs the system, but in a way, I mean, I guess I guess that’s a deterministic pattern But it’s kind of like saying The last digit and PI is deterministic.

It is sort of but you have to do the work to get it exactly That’s the same thing. Yeah, that’s that’s kind of how how How will from explain how the universe works so reality is a proof-of-work time chain, yeah Bitcoins awesome, then yeah. All right Did you have a clip you wanted to show if not, I’ve got go for it.

Oh, we’re gonna show the game of life Okay, we’ve talked about it. That’s awesome. Yeah, this is John Conway’s game of life The game of life consists of some squares in a space They are the points in space sometimes referred to as cells and a point can be either on or off Black is on white is off zero.

You can also call it alive or dead Now there’s a simple rule that tells us whether or not cells stay alive or they die And that’s this if a cell has one If it has no neighbors that are alive it dies If it has just one neighbor that’s alive, it’ll die. So both of these will die But if it has two neighbors that are alive, it’ll stay alive. So look what happens to this cell It’s gonna stay alive on the next moment of time Or something else weird happened there, right? These two died and these two became alive.

They were born. Let’s look at that again This cell only has one live neighbor. It’s gonna die same here.

It’s gonna die So on the next generation that one will die and that one will die But there’s a rule for birth and the rule for birth is this if a cell has exactly three live neighbors It will be born This cell has exactly three live neighbors and so does that one. So these Two will die and that and that will be born and you can see what’s going to happen now By symmetry, it’s just gonna go back to a horizontal bar and we have now just an oscillator Hmm that’s a pattern that I can we’re continuing here with Conway’s game of life and Let’s look at this pattern. Yeah, we’ve got a square that square and a square Those are all on these points or cells are on or alive.

They’re energized so This cell has two live neighbors. It’s gonna stay alive. This cell has two live neighbors It’ll stay alive this cell the same two live neighbors.

It’ll stay alive and let’s look at this one That one has three live neighbors. So it’s gonna be born and That’s what happens. It’s born.

Now. This is a stable pattern, right? Each of these cells has three live neighbors It’s alive and so it’s gonna stay alive The surrounding cells don’t have enough energy. They don’t have enough life around them to be born So this is just gonna be a stable pattern.

I’m actually Stepping through time, but nothing happens So that’s an interesting pattern. Let’s look at this pattern now Hard to say what this one’s gonna do but look what’s gonna happen We need to use computers to figure this out if we had to calculate this by hand, that would be a little rough It’s gonna change Now you can see it looks like it’s it’s rotated itself, right? Horizontally or vertically and the same again. You see a reappearance of a pattern and look at that That’s just back to where it was except this back to the same pattern that it was Except it’s shifted one to the right and one down That’s a glider it glides it moves Let’s look at the glider in a little bit more detail here There it is.

There’s a glider that’s ready to glide. So here let’s go. Let’s step it through time a little bit There’s the next moment of time the next moment of time the next moment of time the next moment of time You can see it’s moved.

It’s kind of walked. But what are we talking about when we say it what is the glider? I mean the cells aren’t moving the points in space don’t move the points in space Remain the same they remain in their same relations with each other. They don’t move around All that’s moved is the pattern of qualities, right? Pattern of colors black and white and if you think of those as energy Then you’ve got a moving energy pattern.

The glider is a kind of particle, but it’s an energetic Particle, it’s like a vortex moving through space It’s a pattern of energy that moves through space and because of its regularity Because of its invariance because of the way its shapes repeat every fourth cycle It seems to have its own independent existence Now some might say that the glider is a thing which emerges from space Others might just say that the glider is a thing which supervenes on space Perhaps it’s a whole composed of properties or qualities or perhaps It’s some sort of system or pattern of energy to use that terminology again Let’s watch it just to see that it’s the pattern of energy that’s moving cells aren’t moving there seems to be a Distinctive layer of reality a second layer of reality. It’s like the way water molecules don’t move in the way But the waves propagate yeah, that’s that’s the wave That’s the glider moving through space it’s the result of a It’s the result of the rule. That’s set which is that universe of the rules, right? And And I guess there’s computation because right now there’s a computation that gets to the next state, right? So it’s software running on top of computation that’s right.

I don’t know if you’ve seen There’s touring come have you seen a game of light implement Implemented with game of life. No, please. Yes, it’s gonna blow your mind if you haven’t seen Yeah, the whole I mean that’s so interesting The oscillation one move is it’s mind-blowing.

So these are just patterns right in game of life Just these patterns are repeating each generation Well, this is an evolutionary tree basically Whoa, and what this forms? Basically, I can I can talk about later. I’ll let it play Wow Like giant engines of opponent processing. It looks like or pyramids.

Yeah, but look at what it is Whoa. Oh, you’re shitting me Wow It’s game of life Wow And this is computationally accurate, yeah, well that is That is as above so below right there. Yeah, so the kind of proof that I Don’t know if you’ve seen like people building computers in Minecraft.

Oh, I’ve yeah scarcely But yeah, I’ve seen so they build a CPU based on the rules of the the red blocks Yeah, because you can I think it’s I’m not sure if game alive a touring complete But I would think it has to be for them to create this, you know, but Yeah, so this is crazy. Once once once you get computation involved you can you can make crazy stuff Incredible I I guess when I first saw how she’s like That is mind-blowing, right? So everyone should watch that video with once again The I’ll just read Carl Friston’s paraphrase here The anatomy of every system must contain a model of the system in which it is immersed and that’s what you just yeah That’s really demonstrated. Yeah, exactly Wow, okay, that’s mind-blowing There’s one other clip I had Again, it’s John Verbeke.

Okay, and it’s called the I hope I’ve got this correct You say the elusive I as in the letter I like the elusive I Description or something. Yeah, cuz it yeah, I think he has a whole episode by that name But I’m trying to zero in on the definition he gives. Yeah, maybe it’s just early in part one probably we’re gonna have to ask that question very very deeply, but by really unpacking the the this triple dimensionality of Agency and by attributing agency to the self.

In fact, we think of our our agency as basically like located in and from the self That really brings out well What kind of thing is the self such that because I know what it is to say that a living thing is autopoietic It makes itself out of the matter and energy or what’s the self making itself out of? And I know what a structural functional organization is for an organism It’s such that it I understand what autonomous is but we already said like the self doesn’t even seem to have boundaries How is it autonomous? What does that mean? And then finally while the self is adaptive What environment is it adapting to and what does that adaptivity look like? So these are questions We have to bring up even from the folk model itself even before we try to directly Challenge it. Although we are already beginning to problematize it by doing this kind of work. Okay This isn’t a particular clip that I’ve Maybe some very beginning of this one.

Honestly, maybe they just define it I’ll try to like roughly paraphrase in case we can’t find it, but he just Emphasizes the problem of I as in like the letter I the self self identification I that To define yourself or categorize yourself or tell yourself the story about yourself. That is the self It always presupposes an outsider. That’s sort of authoring that Story, so there’s always a stepping out of the rules of being One cognitive agent to define yourself as a cognitive agent so they call it the elusive I like you can’t find where’s the the ground stuff of I as in self identification and How there’s no it’s kind of like this The I it’s kind of like an eye of the storm in a way There’s like this emptiness in the middle that somehow is above transcends all the rest of it And that’s that what I think that’s what he I don’t put words in his mouth.

But when I invoke Contemplative consciousness, that’s the other side that I’m referring to like it’s it’s count. It’s the thing that it’s beyond calculation. Yes, exactly contemplating Self yeah, the ecstatic part that always steps outside of itself, you know The whole point of rationality is you can always kind of reframe step outside step outside Somehow there’s doing exactly and it’s impossible to define essentially.

So yeah It’s it’s it’s the software Like an illusion of the software Like a software creates illusion of self it so Like like the game of life, right? Yeah, what is what is running that if we call it software? Mm-hmm There’s computation computing on the rules and The pattern is kind of like the software right this guy Created this crazy large pattern and it became a game of life within the game of life. Yeah um But that pattern However, it’s constructed it we We call it we can label it software no and because the computation is running on it and and imagine instead of game of life like The game of life within the game of life, it’s itself within game of life. Mm-hmm.

So the More more concretely instead of Like the outside is game of life. It’s it’s a whole like Minecraft. Yeah It’s more than just grids 3d you got blocks.

Yeah moving around and then you got characters In the form like minecraft like a person you could even imagine right zoom in underneath It’s game of life doing its rotation and zoom out. You got this 3d thing going on, right? And then And then one of the one of the characters Has Has internal process somehow, right? It’s thinking although there’s a self Like you can see a whole universe constructed that way right like at least for me I I can kind of imagine right underneath. It’s just this game of life.

Yeah, I just like this this this game This is a virtual world. Hmm with all these different simulations going on and then And in that you can have self that could be us right now that could be us So we’re a self-projecting avatar from the cosmos or something It like a dream perhaps there’s a rule or a pattern or software that’s being executed We don’t know what is executing it. Mm-hmm That’s not gonna say because this also presupposes intelligent design.

There’s a guy that designed that and put it on the internet Yeah, so sort of is that an inference for us to take into consideration? I would think so I would think like like I don’t I don’t I mean There there’s two ways to go about it like this thing Exists in the sense that It’s possible. Mm-hmm because it’s possible it exists in like the mathematical universe, right? And this guy realized it and Found it or put it out there like now we can see it Yeah, but it was always there right like sure this pattern discovered always exist for sure. And Yeah based on those rules but Well, I mean it’s based on the rules of Euclidean geometry basically No, the rules are the game of life rules.

He explained. Yeah, like yeah So that rule those rules then but the arbitrariness of those rules now because obviously if you change the rules you get totally different Exactly, that wouldn’t work. So how the back to the rules question for ontological reality did we just get a certain mix of like of Rules from the game of life.

So this is like a universal Darwinism thing that our Big Bang was just one iteration of other Laws of physics and other cosmos is it it’s possible I mean like we don’t know what is the thing that’s executing it and we don’t know how many other things is being executed Does this infer the existence of God or at least a word that for the thing that’s beyond what we can’t know like the thing Executing it. I mean Yeah, so there’s two possibilities that there’s one possibility of I think Things exist because it’s the surviving pattern kind of like Like the pattern ultimately Survived and and and that’s why exist all other patterns all possible patterns there are ones that survives and there are ones that doesn’t and the ones that It’s like there’s infinite. It’s like the infinite universe theory, right? Like we are in this universe.

It’s fine-tuned to the way like we have all these magic numbers, right? Like the gravity has a constant. There’s the point constant. There’s all these crazy constants Even though they’re a little bit off physics would completely be different.

There would be no Sun there would be no earth Nothing would behave the same way But because of how fine-tuned there there are we it’s possible for our universe exists So does that mean it’s you know design maybe but the other possibility is They’re just infinite of these things and we just happen to be the one that has these And we can’t know so we just haven’t discovered alternative configurations I would come in there’s no way for us to get out of our universe, right? So unless we find wormholes or some other Yeah, it’s fiction. Yeah. Yeah, it would be like if we’re in the simulation and we’re in that game of life Yeah, they’re jumped out of the computer You would be able to exploit a bug in the rule usually software has bugs so like Like like Mario is a good example.

Yeah, Mario’s full of bugs, right? Normally, you’re just jumping around going in pipes. Yeah breaking blocks and mushrooms come out whatever right but then There’s there’s weird blocks that you punch and it doesn’t break and you end up going through to another part of the game yeah, that’s like finding a Finding a bug right like if we discover something like that that sort of breaks the rule of the game, right? They’re the game has its physics, right? Like you jump and it comes down and it’s got like you go in the pipe. It comes out the other end, right? it’s got all these rules, but you break the rules you just went through a wall right and Those those those exploits might exist in our Simulations Wow When you use the term simulation, I mean this you’re presupposing or software Yeah, I know.

Well, you’re presupposing a deeper ontological reality that there are people somewhere Yeah bottom executing the software or people. I don’t know. Yeah, I am.

I don’t know if it’s true, but Yeah, like I think that’s What most people think about simulation theory? That’s that’s what they’re thinking of like the universe is a computer program being executed in some computer I don’t know if you watched Rick Morty Yeah, not much. But yes, there’s an episode of like Rick creating like a little universe in the box Mm-hmm. I forgot in the computer in box, but ultimately is in a box and then those people They have sentient and so basically he’s God to them, but then those people also create, you know, it keeps going down It’s just like then then the people that they care about so well Yeah, they keep on creating universe and he’s going like seven levels down into into the universe in it Yeah, it’s like Inevitably whenever there is a simulation you would ask who’s running the simulation, right? Like it’s like who created God.

Well It could it be like the Mandelbrot set where it is just infinite in every direction There’s no it’s doesn’t ground out in a creator. But then we call it the Mandelbrot side, you know, there’s a creator Something created that yeah What are some of you? Well, he discovered he discovered it. Yeah.

Yeah guys. It’s always been there. Is it always discovered man such Who mind-blowing stuff if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably get it You get that Bitcoin upends everything that state-sponsored schools teach us about money For those who get the importance of Bitcoin It is important that we have a smart way to buy and hold Bitcoin my friends at coin bets the oldest Bitcoin only exchange in the United States have pioneered the concept of roundups Which converts your spare change into Bitcoin? Simply connect your credit or debit cards and your usual purchases are rounded up to the nearest dollar Letting you stack sets on every purchase without even thinking about it coin bits also provides a terrific self-custody experience Connect a hardware wallet for automatic withdrawals into cold storage to minimize your risk and stay sovereign over your Bitcoin My favorite coin bits feature is coin bits plus which gives you the best exchange rate on Bitcoin It even gives you real-time feedback on how well you are doing on your savings plan With coin bits plus power users can save more money to buy even more Bitcoin All that plus peer-to-peer cash and Bitcoin payments Target orders price alerts and more means coin bits can help you do almost anything you need to do with Bitcoin So go to coin bits dot app slash breed love to sign up today Again, that is coin bits be ITS dot app slash breed love Before starting the what is money show I spent most of my career as a CFO overseeing internal technology implementations and business acquisitions Over the next 10 years.

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We have more or less today is software based And it’s given us new metaphors for understanding ourselves, right? We often metaphorize the brain as a computer for instance, we’re talking about consciousness itself as Calculational, you know, that’s a form of computer computation We’ve done that in the past too right like in the Industrial Age we metaphorize the body as machine You know, the heart is a pump things like this. We now know the hearts more like a vortex It behaves more like a storm than a pump here. It’s one Yes It’s fractal basically, you can get it into like one one piece of yes Yes, and the curls into the heart.

Yes, and just like I mean we are all fractal, right? the the vasculature of our bodies mirrors, you know river systems and you know, it’s It’s fractal it those When we metaphyte metaphorize ourselves as Industrial Age machines in the past that was useful in some ways, right? Gives us a better understanding Maybe of the human body in certain ways. It also leads you can mislead you right if you really think the body is just a machine You know, you might not pay attention to the the chemistry for instance something like that So these metaphors can be useful just like Rebecca was saying earlier We need to make these frames to stand upon but then occasionally they can become self-limiting as we saw with a nine-dot problem. So Today metaphorizing everything as software.

Do you think how do you look at that problem in? Given your view of all of it is software Like could we have a tech 22nd century Technological revolution that better define this. That’s only possible. It’s definitely possible This is just given our understanding today physics, yeah, you know like like I said, it’s similar to the To the Newton thing right like everything worked fine they had a model of the the way that their universe worked until they ran into Problems where it didn’t work, right, right.

They were looking at the planets and it’s off. It’s all by like a bunch of like like Days, right or hours or something, right? Like it’s it’s a big off and it’s like did we miscalculate the predictor? They do it like like a million times and it’s like Something’s wrong here, right and it doesn’t match up. So so then you come up with a new model, right and then that does explain it but Later on you will run into another issue maybe and that’s what happened with the Relativity.

Yeah, and so I I can imagine the same thing happening with With software being right. Yeah, so It’s purely based on our current understanding of what we observe So so like I earlier said if AI, you know completely has a different experience of the universe because they’re able to see photons moving and you know Their understanding of it might completely be different but I For me it’s hard to imagine what that is because sure you don’t know what you don’t know. So in my like Limited sense Every you know When you have a hammer everything is a nail, right? So that’s that’s it’s hard for me to not see things as a software because that’s Like my fundamental is computation and information Yeah, the the computation of information processing like this is the highest resolution.

Yeah. Yeah I don’t I don’t have anything else. Yeah.

Yeah. No, that’s that’s well said Yeah, it’s well said and just I wonder yeah, it would be you know, I Know it’s so a rough example, maybe you know, we see 5% of the visible light spectrum, right? What if AI somehow could what they already can if AI’s sense organs become, you know radio telescopes We see all of the visible. I’m sorry I love the light spectrum, but the 5% is visible of the total light spectrum.

Yeah, the Electromagnetic electromagnetic spectrum. Yeah. So if a I could see Whatever percentage more we make machines that do that.

We are like our telescopes can can see That’s what I’m saying. If those became the sense organs of one globally unified AI, you know, presumably that thing would Have a much higher consciousness than all Humans right because of this as you were saying all that’s available to you or your senses, right? That’s why you’re defining it in terms of software Yes, it would have much more its senses would have much more accessibility to the depths of perceivable reality Yes, would it then I don’t know have just different metaphors different levels of understanding something like the the thing is We sort of Because we can build these other sensors so like We like the telescope we build has a huge range of like Electromagnetic radiation, right they can detect all these that sort of enables us to also Kind of Interpret those things too. Mm-hmm, and I think Feeding those Sensories directly to our brain Versus like and then our brain doing integration or information browsing on those and coming up with model Versus like Us like currently the way we interpret them as we we map them onto colors Yeah, we can interpret right? I don’t know how much difference there there there is like, I don’t know if it’s gonna Completely be different what what I’m talking about is more like We don’t even know the signals like like we know there’s Electromagnetic radiation, so we built sensors on those.

Yeah But but who knows what other signals are out there dark energy dark matter, etc. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, yeah speaking of those like the wolfram thing has a explanation on Yeah, his wolfram physics I should pull up his video It’s another one of those long podcasts kind of like this Interview we’re good on time. It’s so funny. We said we’re gonna talk about gluten Gluten we’re coming for you.

Yeah feel free to feel free to jump to it whenever no Loving this I think humility is actually a really good strategy for dealing with a complex reality for sure You’re wrong about almost everything all the time. Yeah. Yeah, just be less wrong.

Yeah Model is you’re just always wrong, but you’re trying to be less wrong Yeah, probably yeah Which is also invoked with the map is not the territory it’s like we’re always mapping you never fully about the territory Some maps are more useful than others depending on your context circumstances purpose Yeah, this is Wolfram talking about him. Finally understanding quantum He’s probably the only person that’s kind of still active or alive. That’s worked with Richard Feynman He he He was the youngest PhD at Caltech.

Hmm at I think age 20 And then he became a professor after that in in particle physics Feynman I think read his PhD paper and I think the next year he won the first MacArthur Fields price Basically the genius grant and he was still the youngest person to receive it at age 21 Wow Yeah at the time like Feynman’s late, but he’s worked with Feynman on yeah, and then later on got into Computers. He had a dispute with Caltech and he doesn’t have anything nice to say about Caltech. No, but I think And I he created a software called Mathematica It’s a premier software for doing math.

So not Wolfram alpha. He created Wolfram alpha Yeah, it’s all him He’s probably a billionaire. He’s like done really well and He’s been very active like that.

It’s his latest thing is Wolfram physics and this really out thing. Okay, he’s And what is that? What is it? That’s a very cool. Yeah is the all possibility of rules.

We talk about rules in the universe, right? So it’s the total design space for rules. Exactly. So total design of a space of all possible universe to Because he thinks universe it has to be this computational universal anyways, I’m trying to explain essentially quantum and mechanics than his latest Understanding.

Okay, I think Feynman always used to say he’d worked on quantum mechanics his own life his whole life And he always used to say nobody understands quantum mechanics and I talked to her about that at great great length Okay, it’s a shame he isn’t still alive because I think I now finally I’m beginning to understand quantum mechanics one thing that’s always kind of flabbergasted me is you start with something in classical mechanics a Poisson bracket and you have commutation relations and exact same language and mathematics transmutes exactly over, you know Into quantum mechanics except these things are non vanishing. And in fact, they also involve the square root of negative one and it’s Completely, you know almost as mind-blowing a fact as there is, you know Feynman used to say as you knew Feynman Personally, but you know that the most remarkable relation is, you know Euler’s relation between e and pi and I and so forth But this to me is almost even more remarkable that you get a physical. I mean, that’s just just in the laws of math I’m not minimizing it.

But now you’ve got this thing in Classical mechanics that ports one-to-one except for the square root of what what do you make of this? I mean, is this something you know, that is just a fact His whole life and he always used to say nobody understands quantum mechanics and I talked to her about that at great great length Okay, it’s a shame he isn’t still alive because I think I now finally I’m beginning to understand quantum mechanics and So one question is like where does the I come from in quantum mechanics? I think it’s a I think it’s a confusion actually I think that one of the things that was sort of a wrong turn that was taken. This is the square Actually was what was done not by Einstein but by Minkowski in 1919 when he said Space and time are really the same kind of thing. Let’s package them together into this thing We call space-time and he did that Minkowski was a number theorist a mathematician and he said it’s very elegant We can make these quadratic forms that are x squared for space and t squared for time and it’s s square minus t squared It’s all very beautiful.

We can package together space and time as being the single space-time thing I think that was a mistake. I think space is a thing that’s very different from time Spaces this extension of this hypergraph time is the inexorable Progressive computation it is an emergent fact that space and time sort of work together in the ways that give relativity That’s an emergent fact. That’s not something that’s built into the underlying model in quantum mechanics I think a similar wrong turn was taken So in quantum mechanics one of the things that one does one will formulates quantum mechanics in terms of wave functions in the Schrodinger equation or A whole variety of other other versions of that formalism What one’s doing is one saying there are these quantum amplitudes.

There are these things that We will be able to represent kind of the quantum world in terms of and quantum amplitudes are complex numbers they have a magnitude the Overall, you know complex numbers can be represented in and you can sort of plot them in two dimensions a distance from the origin and an angle from the origin the Magnitude and the phase in quantum mechanics one packages together the magnitude in the phase In our models, they come from completely different places The magnitude comes from the counting of the number of paths in this multiway system The phase is basically the position in branch Hill space. There’s a bunch of mathematics We have not yet worked out and that’s quite Difficult I would say but what seems to be the case is that what’s happening is in quantum mechanics You are you are well, okay, so I should say another thing in space-time One of the key things that happens is that the presence of energy momentum or mass deflects shortest paths so as you know very well the there are Geodesic paths shortest paths in space-time and you know when you just are dealing with everything on a plane For example, the shortest path between two points is a straight line if you distort that plane the shortest path between two points won’t be a straight line anymore and The kind of original idea of general relativity was the structure of space-time is being distorted by the presence of mass And that distortion is causing shortest paths to no longer be straight lines Shortest paths are deflected and that’s the deflection associated with the force of gravity and that was kind of that’s kind of the the basic idea of general relativity and so What happens in our models is well, you can have shortest paths same kind of deal in this graph You can just say what’s the shortest path on the graph going through edges of the graph? How do you get from this place to that place going through the smallest number of edges on the graph? So now you can say well, the next question is what’s energy momentum? This is something really surprised me Actually, I thought it was going to be very difficult to understand what energy momentum is turns out It’s not turns out energy momentum is essentially just the amount the density of activity in the network So we’ve got all this network is being rewritten in all these different ways We can represent that slightly more formally by a causal graph that says there are little rewrite events Every rewrite event can is Producing output that will be the input to subsequent rewrite events so we can make this graph that represents the sort of causal connections between these things and Energy is simply if we look at well, we have to define in Relativity as you well know we’re talking about space-like hyper surfaces these things. So so Events can be related in a time like way in the sense that one event is Followed by another event in a sequence in time But there are also events that can be space-like separated where those events can happen simultaneously in time if your time like separated you better not be space-like separated because one event is Follows from another event and they couldn’t be simultaneous But there are events that are sort of orthogonal to the the time like directions are space-like directions There are many different choices of space-like directions that what’s what gives the reference frames and relativity and so on But in any case if you look at these space-like hyper surfaces Energy in our models is simply the flux of these causal edges through space-like hyper surfaces Momentum is flux through time like hyper surfaces okay, so then you can derive the presence of the existence of gravity and you can derive the fact that There is when there is this Density of activity in the network.

It deflects shortest paths in the network That’s pretty neat thing that you can give an intuitive definition intuitive explanation So actually to give another one of these intuitive things just another example of the phenomenon of Different models that you know things that are going fast as model things that are moving a lot as an explanation for every phenomenal Yeah, well in our models you can kind of see why that happens because what is time to time is this? Explain something executing computations or make a pretty motion. Yeah is does that predictive power? Yeah, can you rewind like maybe 30 seconds? It’s hard to keep up with That’s pretty neat thing that you can give an intuitive definition Right, yeah, so Actually to give another one of these intuitive things so time dilation is a phenomenon of Special relativity that you know things that are going fast Things that are moving a lot time seems to go slower for them Well in our models, you can kind of see why that happens because what is time time is this inexorable process of executing computations? Motion is you get to recreate yourself at a different place in space That that phenomenon of motion the fact that you’re recreating yourself in a different place in space that takes computational effort So, you know, they have this trade-off. What are you going to spend your computational effort on? You’re going to spend your computational effort on moving in space or you’re going to use it on Progressing in time and so when you’re moving in space, you’re using up your computation on motion So you don’t have as much left over to progress in time So that means you effectively time goes slower for you.

Can you pause it? And that’s what time dilation. This is a I’ve often thought of it as dimensionality, right if you put space on one axis and time on another you can move purely through time But that would mean you’re sitting still right or you could move purely through space But you wouldn’t move through time at all because you’d be at the speed of light and so what he’s he’s saying something similar Obviously we move kind of diagonal depending on how fast we’re moving and time speeds up or slows down for us But it sounds like he’s describing yeah, that’s the model of time space or I mean, it’s a complex number right the complex number is the you have you have a you have a thing for axis for space and then you have a Axis for time and you’re bundling them together into this time space thing Yeah, well, so what he was saying it’s comp basically time is the progress of computation, right and then but moving through space is Recreating yourself at a different location, which absorbs computational power and therefore slows the progress of time It just seems like you’re either moving. I mean you’re moving through space or time and the more you move through space The less effective you are by time.

Yeah, it’s a different model, but it’s like a similar concept results the same. Yeah. Yeah That was really cool, yeah, yeah, yeah totally it’s uh, yeah, I mean end of the day it’s just a Cool model to have all these different models that explains all the observations Yeah, we’re making.

Yeah, and and they could be so wildly different, right that already shows that There’s so much more complexity, right because you can come up with so many different Explanations of why things are yeah, and then Only one of them could be right. I know there’s only one. That’s what’s so interesting about mathematics like Natural language, maybe not.

I don’t know if there’s an ultimate nature ultimate territory to map both mathematics It does seem like we’re mapping something very fundamental Yeah You should watch this whole thing. No watch the rest of it. No, I mean like this is all I got three minutes off But this is a clip of like our thing I I mean we we don’t need to watch the whole hour thing Well, let’s watch the rest of the clip though.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay to me It’s really amazing that you can give what is essentially a mechanistic Explanation of what seemed to be a purely kind of the math happens to work out that way kind of phenomenon But okay, so that’s how this works in and physical space in branchial space There’s a similar phenomenon you have these geodesics these shortest paths things travel on shortest paths but now energy momentum also deflects shortest paths in branchial space and Then what’s the consequence of that? Well, it’s there’s this there’s something is is is deflecting shortest paths and It’s moving where you are in branchial space the fundamental law of quantum mechanics One way to state it is the Feynman path integral the Feynman path integral says you have this thing That is what’s called the action kind of this relativistically invariant version of energy and that the presence of action effectively energy momentum is the thing that changes the phase of Your of the of your description of the quantum system So in other words the presence of energy momentum is making this change So in our models the presence of energy momentum is deflecting geodesics It’s moving things but it’s moving things not in physical space but in branchial space So now the question is what what is motion in branchial space? Well motion and branchial space appears to be change of quantum phase and so what’s happening is what in the the phenomenon that is general relativity that is Deflection due to gravity in physical space that same phenomenon the deflection in branchial space is a change of quantum phase and That change of quantum phase is what the path integral says should happen in quantum mechanics so in other words what one saying is quantum mechanics is the same phenomenon as Gravity and general relativity what is general relativity in physical space is quantum mechanics and branchial space They’re the same thing Mirror mirror their mirror images in a way, but not exact yeah, I Some of this stuff goes over. Yeah understanding, but but yeah, yeah, it’s uh He the full the full interview he goes through like a ton of other examples Some of them will make more sense than others It’s it’s great That was absolutely Thrilling Wow nerd catnip right there Okay, I think oh, I think we’ve probably covered almost everything the other thing we didn’t talk about Glutens next The last thread on this topic, I don’t know if it’s worth inserting or not the free energy principle Yeah, let’s let’s not go in skip it straight. Yeah, let’s let’s yeah.

Yeah, there’s tons of YouTube videos. Okay, I’m free. That’s mr. Carl for Pretty good one.

I Can I can send you all these later? Yeah, definitely do and we’ll put them in the show notes We’ll probably we will splice them into the video as well Kurt Friston’s free energy principle is a cool concept, which I do not yet understand That means I’m gonna make a talking squid video essay about it not hurt I got the name wrong The phrase free energy made me immediately skeptical It sounds like making infinite energy for free using a perpetually spinning wheel or whatever Friston’s free energy principle isn’t like that at all. It’s kind of the opposite a neuroscientist Friston claims sentient beings and some cool robots. He simulated work by Minimizing a variable called free energy in a mathematical formula from Bayesian statistics Here’s a picture of a brain.

Don’t don’t worry about the scary Greek letters representing numbers Let’s let’s just put our foot down and say whatever the brains whole deal is. It’s got some internal states Something’s going on in there. Something’s going on outside the brain, too We can put our other foot down about that and we call it hidden states or external states Brains don’t get to know everything going on out there But they do get sensations and brains don’t get to touch everything going on out there, but they can take actions Internal states and external states don’t directly interact, but they do interact minimizing free energy is minimizing surprise sometimes the sensations the universe provides are just bewildering a Bewildered brain doesn’t even know what its next action will be because it’s never been bewildered like this before To minimize surprise the brain takes actions which make the universe less Bewildering all the time the brain finds loops actions which lead to sensations It knows how to react to that sounds familiar, right? You and I have daily routines.

We know how to eat breakfast. We know how to commute to work We know how to eat lunch. We know how to commute back home.

We know how to eat dinner We know how to watch TV We know how to fall asleep and do it all again when we wake up if any aspect of this routine Surprises us one day. We might take actions to get the routine back on track We have routines which last weeks months or years like holidays We also have routines which last minutes or even moments like breathing or having a heartbeat If any of those routines surprise us, we’ll do whatever it takes to get back to normal minimizing surprise minimizing free energy means maximizing the likelihood that our Conceptualization of the world is correct Our internal states need to share information with the sensations Information out there in the universe has to be represented in here your brain Created your universe above so below and recreates it at every moment Just so you yes, you can take action Pause real quick just like you’ve seen the photos of the galactic superclusters. I look just like neural architecture Basically, I got is it is it all the way to that point? Are we actually our brains mirroring the deepest structures of the cosmos? We’re pattern matching machines we We each you give us a bunch of noise.

Yeah, just random noise Yeah, we can we can get that’s why we only see clouds, right? We can see shapes and stars form, you know Constellations dude, if we’re mapping that in our neuronal architecture That’s mind-blowing because you know, we can barely see that with the most powerful telescopes in the world today Even then we have to assemble it in a bunch of photos to see those giant clusters. It’s just software running Just you yeah you It’s it’s got an algorithm any input you give it It’s gonna ultimately spit out an output and that’s that’s what our pattern recognition It’s the music of the spheres basically in the ancient Greeks yeah, it’s the movements of the heavens propagate down into us and Yeah I It is literally like a function you you it’s like a meat grinder you put meat in Something comes out. It doesn’t matter what you put in the universe is a meat grinder.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s like It’s just doing its thing. And and when when we put a title right there I Don’t know Discussion about the free energy principle and not everyone is sold on the idea But Kristen has developed a generator which uses the math version of what I’ve just described to generate simple actions He says his generator, which is sort of a simulated robot captures the bare essentials of a maze forging task under novelty or Uncertainty in the absence of any knowledge about the maze that has been accrued through previous learning or experience The subject had to forage for local information to build an internal model of the maze Structure using short sequences of saccadic eye movements in conclusion We have described an active inference scheme for epistemic foraging and goal-directed Navigation using a minimal setup the key contribution or insight afforded by these simulations is to show that purposeful Goal-directed behavior can be prescribed through simple prior beliefs about the outcomes that will be encountered under allowable Policies Wow it’s only doing one thing minimal surprise and the result is it forms a map of the maze and Navigates through it.

Yeah, I’ll just from like doing one thing 100% Yeah, it’s amazing to me That’s like one rule. That’s the rule of the universe for that software. It’s like what is it? How do we define that particular rule? It’s just what do you call that rule? map the maze No, no, the rule is just minimizing surprise just minimizing and then you give it Yeah, it’s like that’s the meat grinder.

Yeah, like you open up the meat grinder There’s a bunch of blades and whatever how you set up the blades That’s how you’re setting the how you set up the blade is the rule, right? and then when you put the meat in it comes out like like you can imagine you got blades and Meat comes out instead of like round you get squares or different shapes or whatever, right? Yeah This is just minimizing Minimizing surprise and you the meat you put in is this maze? Yeah And outcomes like this model that can go through this right and all you all you did was set up this one rule so The end of his definition there that he was reading from Carl Friston’s work. I take it right Not a definition I think the result of the list experiment got it how it connects It’s not necessarily rabbit hole I want to go into but Mises describes human action as Purposeful human behavior right like the use of means to pursue ends. So he goes straight into that Does this mean then that? Would we say that all forms of life are engaging in action that they’re all goal-oriented agential organisms And this is that like the cellular level, right? So even yeah Doing this so there’s the concept he he didn’t talk about but it’s called the the Markov blanket See I think I think in the beginning when he’s showing the here you see Here mm-hmm Markov blanket, yeah Minimize the difference between the model and the the map in the territory basically the The blanket is the thing that separates What it is To the outside.

So you you got a thing or skin? Yes. Yeah for us. It’s it’s the skin for cell.

Maybe it’s the cellular right and there’s got to be a thing that Whatever is the thing is you got it? Have an inside and outside like what is containing this thing that you call this thing? Yes, and then there’s everything else That’s not the thing. Yes, right and that’s the the boundary is the the the Markov blanket, right? the problem with this is um, or the problem with going smaller than a cell is the the stuff inside my you can theorize where it’s like I Don’t know if free energy principle applies to things smaller than the cell. It’s because the the the thing Inside is it’s no longer has like the complex like clearly delineated Markov blankets Right, like so so works well and above cell multicellular, you know All these things that self-organized all that makes them but when you it when it’s the atom self organizing the molecules, that’s where it’s Yeah, yeah, I’m not sure.

I’m not sure right. So interesting. Yeah.

Yeah Think we’re on four minutes I’ll just play it. I think it might get better later on Minimizing free energy works Maybe it’s not how the human brain literally operates, but it can make working robot brains and that’s good enough for me It works. How does it work if X and Y are events? we can write the probability of X happening as P X and the probability of Y happening as P Y This is Bayes theorem the probability of X happening Assuming Y is happening is equal to the probability of X times the probability of Y Assuming X divided by the probability of Y for example Rolling a die a regular old die The probability that the die rolls a 6 is 1 out of 6 The probability that the die rolls an even number is 1 in 2 if the die rolls a 6 It’s certainly rolled an even number so the probability that the die rolls a 6 given that the die shows an even number is 1 in 6 times 1 divided by 1 in 2 1 in 3 if You roll a die and it’s even there’s a one-third chance that it’s a 6 That’s pretty simple Reality not not simple.

How does our brain use? Sensations to figure out the most likely nature of reality around us We’re trying to maximize this which Bayes says is the same as maximizing this if We assume our sensations are continuous instead of discrete We can rewrite this like this. This integral is just bad bad integral Intractable too hard, but we can approximate it using a generator like the one Priston made which predicts the joint Probability of getting whatever sensations based on whatever corresponding environment I’m not completely sure. I understand any of what I just said, but in my experience I’ve got to learn something like this five or six times before I actually understand it I hope I can learn about it a couple more times at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology I’ve been thinking more about the project.

I’m proposing to hoist. It seems like that’s all I do here. It thanks to Last time I said I wanted to simulate a swarm of turtles But learning more about free energy has convinced me to turn the turtles into bees I made an animation to describe what I’ve got in mind This is a grid yellow tiles are bees pink tiles are flowers and black tiles are the hive Bees are always choosing actions that do nothing or move around if they move to a flower They collect some nectar if they move to the hive they deposit that nectar bees eventually die But new bees are born whenever enough nectar is collected These bees are just moving randomly, but I’d like to attach each bee to a neural network sort of like this one Actions are chosen based on the bees memory of the world around it and its own previous actions If I ran a real simulation like this, I think the bees would just die I’m not I’m not telling them to collect nectar and make more bees So they’ll probably wander aimlessly, but if I ran a thousand of these simulations I bet a few of them would accidentally collect some nectar and start a new generation This could begin a loop of survival where the bees keep starting new generations Because that’s their routine if older bees start doing waggle dances to teach new bees what to do that It’d be philosophically intriguing.

I like to think this is how DNA works in natural selection No one gave DNA a goal to keep making copies of itself But DNA which doesn’t make copies of itself doesn’t tend to stick around I’m gonna keep playing with these bees. Bye. Bye It’s kind of like another game of life right and then you end up with bees Yeah, I think his follow-up is better.

That’s probably why I That’s probably what I but but I don’t know if we want to watch My talking squid video essay was about Friston’s free energy principle Neurosciences latest model of the sentient being I described a project involving bees I I still like the idea, but it’s another classic example of me getting way too complicated way too quick The project I actually proposed to Oist is much more simple Carl Friston demonstrated his free energy principle by training a program to navigate a maze I want to train two programs to navigate a maze one predator and one prey The predator wants to minimize its distance to the prey the prey wants to maximize its distance from the predator at Oist I’d like to make this work Continuously, but for now, let’s leave it discreet like a board game in each time step The predator and prey both move one space up left down or right the two agents compete learning how to best interpret their perceptions of reality by minimizing free Energy in a generative adversarial network last time. I talked about free energy I skipped most of the deeper math now I’ve read and reread enough tutorials to go over one step-by-step explaining how it applies to my project here Also, thank you professor Giuntani for recommending this tutorial from medium.com Reality can be called a collection of hidden variables Which I’ll label S meaning state our reality is big and complicated But the predator and prey have a pretty simple reality We can edit in a photo editor every white tile is open. Every black tile is an obstacle Let’s call this area an X by Y matrix of ones and zeros Let’s add two layers Which are just zeros except one one at the predators position and another one at the preys position This reality is a 3 by X by Y matrix of ones and zeros But all this is hidden No one gets to see every part of reality at once except us deities who made this reality in a photo editor Predator and prey only observe reality within a few spaces of their position Let’s say Z spaces So predator and prey get 3 by Z by Z matrices of ones and zeros Which I’ll label O meaning observation They both use these small observations to understand their larger reality generating an inferred state Given some observation What’s the probability reality is one state or another if reality was one state or the other? What’s the probability to get this observation? this is called active inference our Conceptualization of reality should maximize the likelihood of the observations we’re getting maximizing the probability of our observations is the same as Minimizing the negative log of the probability of our observations also called our surprise whoo Okay, the tutorial notes that the probability of an event is equal to the sum of the probabilities of that event occurring alongside every alternative for another event for instance The probability of rolling a six on a die is one out of six And if we rolled another die next to it We can think of that one sixth probability as divided into sections based on the other die So we can include all Possibilities for reality inside this expression.

We’re calling surprise We also multiply by Q of s divided by Q of s Whatever Q of s is Q of s divided by Q of s is 1 and Multiplying by 1 is a perfectly fine thing to do now We’re trying to minimize this surprise and that’s hard It would be a little easier to minimize this thing because this Q of s is outside the logarithm This expression is called free energy Thankfully it just so happens that free energy is the upper bound of surprise So minimizing free energy does minimize surprise Approximately the tutorial loses this minus sign by inverting this fraction in the logarithm Then the tutorial shows another way to represent free energy with a notation I had never heard of before call back Leibler divergence also called relative entropy The KL of two probability distributions is a measure of difference which best measures zero when the probability distributions are exactly the same if We can manage that here Then the free energy happens to be equal to the surprise and we can probably get pretty close Because Q of s is an arbitrary nonsense function we made up We just have to nudge it closer to P of s given O To turn math into a metaphor We’re making our private notion of the universe into something similar to what our observations are suggesting Professor Giuntani might suggest our private notion of the universe should involve long short-term memory networks Okay, I’m gonna quote directly from the tutorial just to make sure I’m reading it, right By minimizing free energy the arbitrary distribution Q of s gets closer to the posterior P of s given O and if they match KL term becomes zero and free energy is exactly equal to surprise So the more we minimize free energy by wiggling Q of s the more it becomes Closer to surprise since it’s an upper bound and by minimizing free energy by wiggling Parameters of P of s and s we can minimize surprise even further So that’s what it means to actively infer for one discrete moment But because reality changes in every moment We can’t stick to one discrete moment our inner model might not work so well with whatever we observe next so we have to improve our model in every time step and Reality can change based on what we chose to do lately to minimize free energy We’ve got to choose our own actions responsibly at every time step. We approximate these terms for every possible policy We might like to consider our policies and actions several steps into the future But we can’t predict the future. So we’ve got to approximate it I’m skipping a few complicated steps here but the tutorials final way to write free energy is like this the sum of cost and Ambiguity to quote the tutorial again because I think this is the sort of thing I might be learning to understand for months or years The left term called cost or risk favors policies that will result in observations we like and the right term ambiguity quantifies How uncertain is the mapping between state and observations? Let’s cover the tutorials incredibly simple example and then try to stretch that example out to my predator slash prey project proposal Suppose the universe has only two possible states Your stomach has food or your stomach does not have food There are only two possible observations to feeling fed or feeling hungry There are also only two possible actions eating or not eating Where does a mind fit into this? Squint or you’ll miss it says the tutorial we like to be fed and not hungry So we assign a higher probability to observation one fed in other words We express preferences over observations as probability P of O Doesn’t that sound a little backward? I thought we’d be estimating probability But the concept of assigning probability to our observations makes it sound the other way around We want to feel fed.

So we’re putting a higher probability on the chance of us feeling fed When we make a decision we consider our high likelihood to feel fed and that might inspire us to feed ourselves Because that would explain the feeling fed To put it the tutorials way we start by estimating the hidden states under each policy and end up Acting such as we observe what we expect No wonder Motivational speakers are all about optimism and vision the numbers say you go where you aim Not everyone who thinks they become president becomes president But no one who thinks they won’t become president becomes president. They don’t bother taking any of the steps So if we want our computer to do something for us, we should tell it this is going to be accomplished I’m 100% sure do it So let’s stretch this out to the predator and prey The reality here is bigger than two states food or no food There is a whole 3 by X by Y matrix of zeros and ones the observations are bigger than Boolean to the predator and prey both have a 3 by Z by Z Matrix of zeros and ones and they can tell how far apart they are from the other agent Pred and prey both have four possible actions up left down or right? I want the predator to chase the prey so I tell it closeness has high probability When the predator makes a decision it picks the action which leads to what I told it to expect At the same time I want the prey to escape from the predator so I tell it distance has a high probability When the prey makes a decision it picks the action which leads to what I told it to expect This predator and prey are animated by me. Hi But I’m confident with the right setup Friston’s at free energy principle could get these two agents moving as if by their own thought How? No matter how much I read I don’t think I’ll ever find a tutorial which explains where the thoughts come from Really, there are no quote-unquote thoughts here When I made those generative adversarial networks, which produced Pokemon pictures, I never wondered gosh Where did that Pokemon come from? I never gave the generator a Pokemon.

How did it get one? The Pokemon I see don’t live in the generator or the picture The Pokemon I see come from within me the viewer the observer the beholder I’ve been reading a book called you are the universe by Deepak Chopra The book tries to disprove a determinist notion of the mind it says the mind isn’t limited by the brain because the brain is not the origin of the mind as The sort of math squid who makes this sort of video essay I’ll always be ranting about the complexity of machine learning algorithms deep as the human brain But when I perceive the predator and prey Seeming to make their own decisions, even though I know their thoughts I’m seeing are my own I wonder where my thoughts are coming from Who does the thinking here at thinkster? The tutorial gets more explicit with the math in another post and I’ll get there eventually I’ll get there eventually because I believe it’s likely that I will get there eventually and therefore I Reliably choose actions which lead me closer to getting there eventually because that’s what I expect Somehow there is little doubt in my mind that this is how the mind works I’ll see you a few time steps in the future. Bye. Bye He never makes another video So good Just a one-hit wonder yeah All right takes an unexpected turn like I really love the emphasis on human action though, yeah straight into the ethical domain You know all this abstract mathematics and we’re right back in the human.

Yeah Pretty incredible. Yeah Interesting I actually had no I’m glad we looked at that. Yeah Okay, well I think now is officially the time we’re getting close to dinner so we’ll talk about gluten, yeah Gluten hates me.

That’s all I know But when we originally met we had a really interesting conversation. Yeah about gluten Yeah, thought you could tell us some things about that. Yeah, I mean I basically was Diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease 15 years ago and I I didn’t I didn’t know what it was at the time.

I just know I had like weird symptoms and It Turned I mean that they were caused by a hormone imbalance in the thyroid thyroid hormones are we’re all out of whack and And then Yeah, when I when I went to the doctor they they’re like, okay. Yeah, you’re you’re your thyroid levels are all off TSH t3 t4 and And then they did another test for me which test for TPO this thing called TPO which is like the thyroid antibody and that that thing was like off the charts and Normal people shouldn’t have that and and I had like like a thousand times more than normal and and that’s like the definitive way to Diagnose someone with Hashimoto’s because it’s it’s clear that you have an Immune response and the only way you can have the that much to be In your bloodstream is it’s because your your immune system is is attacking your thyroid tissue so they they They didn’t know why they there’s like it could be environment It could be genetics a bunch of there’s no cure standard procedure is basically Get your body to become reliant on synthetic thyroid hormones and then You just have to take this pill every day. Yeah, I just I just hated that idea and I just felt like Why why why can’t we figure out like why why because I didn’t have this problem before definitely Something happened that that made me made my immune system respond in the way that it does so I just started doing research and Came up came came across this book.

I I I thought it was in the book that it wrote and so I got Couldn’t find where it’s like why I have hmm But in any case my research I’ve if it was in this book some some other I found a plausible explanation, which which is the The mimicry the the molecular or protein mimicry theory and and that’s basically saying There there there’s something in your body that that’s causing the immune response and It could be a protein on bacteria and your gut it could be from a virus it could be Something you you eat like gluten and and that’s what it was suggesting for Hashimoto’s disease that Gluten has like there’s different like Sub Components to a gluten you can fractions they call them and you and it’s like Glutenin the two major ones are gluten in and glided in and I think glided in Causes celiac disease. So so the shape of glad it and Resembles Some tissue in the gut so so it when it’s when it’s When it’s revealed or digested it takes takes a while to break break it down and for it to reveal and then and then by the time it does it gets into your Small intestines and then like your immune system responds. Yeah, and then and Then you have bloated in this and all sorts of in that it’s just from problems And that’s what celiac disease is people who eat gluten.

They Can’t handle it. There’s one but the other thing I Suspect it’s the gluten in part. That’s that’s that’s Similar to thyroid and what happens is your your immune system gets gets used like well, normally these things shouldn’t trigger respond because they if they really just stay in your gut and go out like This is where it’s unclear.

Like is it there’s a theory about Permeability. Mm-hmm. These things are permeating through.

Yeah, and on your on your other side It’s all your white blood cells and your immune system It sees the thing and it goes attack and because it’s always permeating through your system it constantly is active and then and then because of the like the the protein 3d structure It recognizes the parts of that and there are parts of that in your thyroid cell protein there’s proteins in your thyroid cell that resembles the same structure shape and Then it just it gets attacked by the immune system as well. So the immune systems is friendly fire basically exactly exactly it gets confused because Essentially you have friendlies that are dressed similar to the enemies So I Just thought I was like mind-blowing. It’s a plausible Yes, and it’s I haven’t seen any plausible theory and this one at least describes a plausible Mechanism for this to happen for sure and we we see I mean we’re imitative animals humans are obviously we see mimicry in nature Biomimicry is often a good technological strategy.

Not always but oftentimes, you know, we figure things out by imitating nature So it’s not yeah, it’s not a surprise to me that imitation would be at the root of this Mix-up, right? It’s almost like having a spy in a way. Yeah It could just be random but but it is the randomness that makes it survive like yeah, so It develops it because it ultimately survives, yeah, so So then okay. So knowing that How do we how do we how do we test it? so then it sort of becomes easy right like if it really is a balloon then Should be able to just eliminate.

Yeah eliminate gluten from your diet See if the immune response still is high and that can be tested it was DVO and and Yeah, that’s why I did I went I went I did a pretty strict as strict as I can I think it’s never Totally 100% Just because gluten is everywhere Yeah within a month it it dropped like 10x. So I went from like a Thousand times over to like a hundred times over. Okay, and then and Then and then you’re You go back you go back and you see it goes if it goes back up or not and The the this is where it’s like if it goes back up and it’s strong correlation Mine’s sort of stayed the same.

Mm-hmm, and then I just decided to cut more Yeah, and then they went down even more. Gotcha, and it went down like to 10 To that to that it was still 10x more than normal yeah, but because the normal is so small 10x is still pretty small and All my other thyroid levels went back to normal. So TSH t3 which impacts t3 t4.

Yeah, so So I I just since then I basically stayed gluten-free For for the like the next five or six years and then or maybe seven or eight years and then at some point I I just I Just felt like I was cured. I was like I started eating gluten and I didn’t feel any like effects I was like, oh, maybe I’m cured but when I That time I so in the beginning I was getting tested a lot and then I kind of got lazy and I wasn’t testing as much and then It I would do it maybe like once a year and and it was just always remained at 10x It’s just never like went back down I mean, I couldn’t get it lower no matter how so I didn’t know if there’s something else or there’s that part I still never figured out because I was never able to get it into normal levels But it was at a level that did not did not impact the The thyroid hormones, which both thing that causes the symptoms ever come back when you started eating again it Eventually did it took years? Oh really and once it did I Had different symptoms. That was weird, too I didn’t get my old symptoms because if I had the old symptoms, I would have I would have known like oh, yeah It’s my thing came coming back I got I just got like these dizziness symptoms and then I Initially, I didn’t know what was going on.

Thought maybe something with my heart because it’s usually when I am like Laying down or like sitting down and I stand up quickly And then it’s like I feel lightheaded like I’m gonna like collapse or something and one time I actually didn’t fall over and then I was like, okay. I need to get myself checked out and then and then and then the doctor was like You had a you had a Hashimoto thing. I was like, yeah, you should check your thyroid levels again I checked it.

It was off the charts and this is like after I think I yeah There’s a couple years I didn’t check and it creeped up to quite a bit and then I I Was they and he I mean she didn’t know anything. This is a different doctor now So she she’s like, okay, we can we can do the the the synthetic thyroid thing again. She was gonna prescribe me I was like, hold up.

Yeah, I got this gluten-free thing that I tried like ten years ago and and it works like wonderfully and Let me give me a month to go go gluten-free and and She’s like there’s no way it’s gonna work like like I’ve had so many like I’ve never heard of this I’ve seen some people claimed but the never in in practice anyone has this and then I’m like, just just just let me try and let’s see what happens if it doesn’t work. I’ll I’ll take the pills or whatever, right? two weeks like Gone gone completely gone Completely said that do you think people just don’t follow the protocol or she just I think she just never seen it before and then When she when I showed her she’s like amazed. She’s like, wow I can’t believe that she’s like slacking her colleagues like hey I got this patient that that actually can can can get benefits from going blue gluten-free Wow.

Yeah, I don’t know how to exist. So Since then I I just I’m never going back to gluten nothing else bothers you food wise carbohydrates fried foods Uh, I mean they do in the normal sense of like I have I mean, yeah If I overeat I’m gonna feel bloated but no symptoms, right? No. Yeah, this the the The thyroid symptoms are not there and every time I check I’m about 10x over normal But but my thyroid level of those hormone levels are normal.

It’s only TPO which is the antibody? That’s still 10x. But again, I saw it Dramatically come down like over time when I when I when I started to cut that’s amazing Yeah, so I’m really happy to hear you figured it out. Yeah but I suspect there’s something else because it’s still not normal and And This is where it’s like and then the other question to ask is just like is it per? Permeability and like how why it what like what’s causing that? Like you can keep on pulling on the thread and see where it goes.

But yeah, yeah Yeah, man Good on you figuring it out. I mine has been a little more frustrating. I Cut gluten now completely and it definitely I got huge benefits from it symptoms went down and whatnot What were your symptoms? I’ve had it’s like gut inflammation, but I also have an autoimmune condition that manifests as business cosmetic thing That’s on but the gut could be autoimmune too, right? Yeah.

Well, I think they’re connected because they started happening around the same time and The autoimmune symptoms I have are just cosmetic now But the condition can get really bad like you’d have very adverse effects for people if it gets too far. So Cutting gluten out was very helpful, but it didn’t heal the symptoms entirely. I did have two root canals removed earlier Well last year now 2024 Those seem to reduce the symptoms a lot.

I I got those out after watching the documentary titled the root cause which goes into apparently the root canals keep dead flesh inside of Cavity and the bacteria will eat off the dead flesh and you know, it’s like a cascading effect of so there’s inflammation inflammation So, I mean I’m gonna get the other two removed soon and then hope that’s kind of the trick but Yeah gluten and carbs recently have been bothersome I found ways to like eat carbs and take supplements that will balance out the symptoms I still have I can’t just eat carbs by themselves really which is frustrating. Yeah. Yeah, I was I was I Heard you had like an issue with carrot like even carrots carbohydrates I mean, they didn’t bother me as much but I could still tell that I had carbs.

Well, I say I didn’t feel optimal and and Carrots before was fine. We’re just oh, I mean previous. I mean I’ve had I Mean the carb thing, that’s the other thing like it changes over time.

Yeah, I didn’t use that issue Yeah I think and it may have something to do with going full carnivore for a while Like I went full carnivore for a period of time. Mm-hmm, and then it was difficult for me to digest carbs afterwards Yeah, that makes sense And so that may have something to do with it But yeah, I was going full carnivore to try to fix other issues that were more acute. Let’s say yeah, and Yeah, it’s been a puzzle it Yeah, I I’m starting that I think a lot of issue is like gut biome like the gut biome your diet completely changes it and so many things if you’ve especially if you’ve taken like antibiotics or anything right that completely nukes it and then whatever it grows back is like You know, yeah, I don’t know if there’s a good way to Rebuild it to rebuild it.

Yeah, I Hear good things about like Fecal transplant, that’s probably the only yeah. Yeah, but I I don’t know what like I’ve actually done. I mean a version of that basically, it’s like it’s not a trace Less less intense of what it sounds.

Yeah, it’s pills and there’s also rectal too, but I did a Basically did that and it helped for a while, but Didn’t fix everything I say Wow They haven’t they should be able to do analysis on your stool sample to see the balance of yeah And I’ve done one I’ve done a couple previously. Is it pretty normal? Well, they were just like I don’t know they couldn’t tell but then the latest doctor I’m working with has recommended a different version of the test. That’s maybe more.

Mm-hmm I don’t know accurate or whatever test for other things. Yeah, and so I’m about to do that one. Yeah That because yeah, I’ve been seeing a lot of reports on like the Biome how much like it it it changes.

You know, like like even like Neural. Oh, yeah there’s like I think they did experiments of like depressed people. Mm-hmm and getting their Gut biome into normal people, but not people they were doing it on mice.

Mm-hmm the pressed mice Got biome or fecal transplant into normal and the normal mice became depressed Wow And then they removed it and they could became normal So it was just like the this gut biome like Wow affects affects your mood Yeah We are an ecology of like like I said, there’s more bike bacteria in in this Ecosystem themselves. Yeah, so most of you are actually a bacteria Wow That’s crazy, right? That’s crazy to think of it that way. Yeah, they’re totally separate organisms Yeah, everyone’s kind of doing their own things and somehow we they It’s like society like everyone’s trying to make money They’re doing their thing and you got the capitalist system society going.

Absolutely. Yeah the unifying unification under a common flagpole or a common symbol or a common purpose maybe in the case of yours it’s like what is the nation a group of people directed at a common purpose presumably, but Not have to have a border them Kiss now we’re getting into statism Their tax forms they put up the borders to gatekeep and extort you every transaction and every passage between jurisdictions. Yeah, I oh I let me to think something of that I’m just Jumping all over the place.

Like I I know you you talk about inflation for any money how that’s like bad, but Here’s something I I think I don’t know how how are you how really this is I’m kind of going over There’s all moments. But but but basically if you think about like just getting taxed like like I Sell you something right you pay me money Or I Go to work. I make a salary Get a cut right and then I’m like, oh, yeah, I’m gonna pay you I have already taxed right and then I use this tax money.

I go buy something. I pay it to you. Mm-hmm Now you you have to pay tax on that.

Mm-hmm, right? That’s now your income right and then so you only have a cut paid tax on it to it sells tax Yeah, and I have it. Yeah What and then it goes to you and then you you do the same thing you the same thing you buy something, right? so like Each cut is pretty big, isn’t it? So, I mean it doesn’t take that much circulation be that before like 99% of it I saw all taxed right so then like money just disappears after certain amount of transactions, right and then it’s like okay, maybe printing it make doesn’t make sense because money’s constantly getting taxed and It’s like deflation Your supply is going back to the government and you have less supply in circulation So that does require you to print more just to or a better thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah I thought of one legitimate reason to print more money, which is because there’s so much taxation You know, it’s funny. That is the modern monetary theory MMT.

That is their argument. Actually. Oh, yeah It’s you can tax society as much as you want.

I’m sorry You can print as much money as you want You can run inflation as hot as you want and if it starts to create unemployment Then you just tax people more and you get unemployment back. It’s like it is such a circle jerk idea It’s like so the key I guess way to think about that. It’s not the money that’s being destroyed per se Although nominally it is right nominally money is coming out of circulation, but it’s the actual purchasing power that’s getting destroyed because a Group that did not earn that purchasing power is now going to spend it.

All right, so they have a a broken incentive, right? It’s You’re much more likely to be spin-thrift with money You didn’t earn if someone gives you a free roll in Las Vegas, right? You’re gonna just blow the money. Yeah, right There’s no prudence associated with that. Yeah, they’re putting in more than that that’s going out yeah, it’s it’s an a a Symmetry of risk in a way They’re benefiting from risk that some entrepreneur took and got taxed on and there could be an argument They’re like, oh you do need physical security, right? You need to secure the borders or whatever and We do need physical security, but there’s no convincing argument according to libertarian philosophy that that needs to be centrally monopolized and Under the the paradigm of a central state you could actually have private security services So I don’t I mean I’m a little more in the camp of Technology influencing the shape of social organization by changing the economics of violence So, you know, there’s a period in time where the armed knight on horseback was the dominant force on the land Like, you know one armed knight on horseback could kill 50 peasants It was also very expensive to own a war horse and own a suit of armor So that was like used as a tool for exploitation and taxation actually It was the ruling arm of the medieval church Then gunpowder is invented And this changes the economics of violence in that now one peasant can kill an armed knight on horseback at 50 yards for the rifle You know or more and so that completely upends social organization it Collapses the ruling arm of the medieval church.

It sort of paves the way for the nation Say there were all other technological disruptions going on like the printing press and whatnot contributing to this Change in ideology and you know widespread cognitive software updates. Let’s say literacy numeracy all these things But in general, I think the economics of violence really shaped social organization And that’s why I think Bitcoin is such a profound innovation Actually, it’s the most defensible form of purchasing power of private property in the history of the human race So it’s if you can keep a secret basically you can secure any amount of purchasing power So it’s a non-physical digital informational bearer asset and it’s unlike anything Humanity’s ever had so now voting with our feet, right, which is what we should do to kind of keep the state honest Voting with our feet carries much higher signal because now we can flee with all of our capital between our ears All right, you can vote with your feet in a very high signal way Whereas in the past you leave Soviet Russia you leave with the shirt on your back, right? They’re taking everything at the border or they’ve already taxed it away or they’ve outright seized it something like that So seizure resistant private property, I think facilitates a world with more Long-term trading relationships and less exploitative course of relationships because it’s stealing has become less profitable basically So sorry that I took a tangent Yeah, free-flowing yeah, I’m jumping all over the place. Yeah.

No, it’s I’m just thinking in the face of violence I think I would The other problem, yeah, of course you can but if you keep it in a multi-key There’s ways to secure that it’s even immune to violence. They call it the $5 wrench attack in Bitcoin But if you put it in a multi-key Custody scheme, it’s kind of like the rough analogy would be if you’ve seen people securing nuclear launch codes and movie You know, there’s a handful of guys that have each other Oh, you have to you have to perform a very specific ritual and turn the keys at a certain time in a certain way Well, you can implement all of that into your Bitcoin custody. It’s a little more involved But there’s companies that do it and they handhold you through the process So, yeah, there’s something else I was gonna say, but I guess I lost it.

Yeah, that was a big deal. Yeah I’m almost a maxi. I Like to keep a little bit over mine, but for the most part like I I had a co-worker he’s complete Mac like he It’s like almost all of his paycheck just goes directly to the Bitcoin later on This is like from 2017 to 2020 he Sold his house You know went all in on big plane.

Yeah, I Think he’s pretty happy now. Yeah Yeah, and he just every day we went to lunch He brainwashes me a little bit and I I become in line a little bit and Yeah, yeah That’s where I acquired during that period back to our conversation earlier with The guy that turt that did the meta game of life right the game of life inside the game of life You know There was something else too that reminded me the quote I forgot what it was but Carl Jung said people don’t have ideas ideas have people Or I’ve been asking this question about who’s executing the code at the highest level of the meta game of life Yeah, it’s that’s Oh Just what Bitcoin is basically it’s like like obviously we all struggle to define Bitcoin and Bitcoin world right there’s a lot of analogies the Internet of money digital gold etc etc But really it’s kind. It’s just an idea ultimately It’s a there’s a ritualized idea in place facilitated by software and energy expenditure Yeah, but it’s a it’s a consensus point right it’s a shelling point game theoretically Rooted in the physical world through energy expenditure.

So it’s like an idea or an ideal even fixed money supply Made real. Yeah, right through energy through proof-of-work mining. Basically these do you think people will? Transact on on chain or doesn’t need like more Like people actually spend Bitcoin, I think it’s some point.

I think you’ll see The medium of exchange function work better at layer two and up like lightning that work Yeah, I think maybe they will be transacting with Bitcoin. Yeah, well technically you’re not like your transaction Transacting with a Bitcoin derivative at that point. Yeah, that’s true You basically staked Bitcoin and then the that what you’re moving across those chains of smart contracts are just derivatives But you can settle the main chain whenever you want so it’s game theoretically balanced I think that yeah, I’ll I see transaction throughput occurring mostly there and the main chain for large settlements Mm-hmm, you know Yeah, I make I mean, yeah, that makes sense.

But the unit of transaction is it’s not like Will be sats Yeah, it’ll still be it’ll still be Bitcoin. Yeah, I mean it’s Fractions a big one not some random token or something, right? No, I think it’ll be sats Yeah, or if it becomes micro sats, yeah Yeah, sure more divisibility or whatever. We ultimately call it.

We may not call it sats. We call it sats now Yeah, yeah, who knows what the market, you know, what term we decide to coalesce labels? Everybody as long as we establish consensus. Yes.

What what what the unit is? There’s a an author in Bitcoin noon Gigi and he’s written this piece We’re basically arguing that Bitcoin is the only instance of where the map is the territory Like you we’ve digitally Abstracted and represented energy basically blocks of energy. So like the mathematics and the reality fully Cohere, I think that’s an interesting. I don’t know if I entirely agree with it because I Don’t know that would mean bitcoins an extremely deep construct which it is but to reconcile The map and territory that’s that’s like solving a philosophical conundrum I guess Yeah map if it’s a yeah, I mean the the energy generation is tied to Territories, so it ultimately it’s Energy that’s backing Bitcoin which Leads to the territory that generates those energy Backing Bitcoin so yeah, I could see the connection there.

I guess. Yeah, and it’s the only way to Guarantee, I’ll use that word It’s a high probability. I don’t say it’s a guarantee Proof-of-work Or energy expenditure via proof-of-work mining is the only way to quote-unquote guarantee a fixed supply asset There’s no other way to trust anyone not to change the rules.

You basically have to prove this expenditure of energy to Secure the money supply from being tampered with by anyone else Yeah, you know, it’s only vulnerable to the 51% tax. So you need to write and then you have to make that Yeah, I mean it’s at this point. It’s like pretty much pretty much impossible.

Yeah even even with quantum breakthrough, I feel like There will be enough time to implement Honest Wolfram actually because he he’s he he’s on the report or he’s friends with friends I guess he considered friends with with our our Institute He he actually I think said Doesn’t believe in Quantum computing being oh really being a real thing. Well doing actual useful work right now It’s just all theoretical like it’s it’s a you can do some simple trivial stuff like all the stuff They were claiming about I mean, it’s because the problem is set up to to be like that. Yeah, and like yeah, I remains Speculative About quantum breaking breaking all our our hatches.

Well, it’s been yeah Yeah, it’s always been a cat-and-mouse game cryptography, right that we have a Mathematical advance or cryptographic. Yeah, I’m sorry. We break a cryptography then we make a quantum resist.

I’m sorry a Resistance to that break in cryptography. Yeah Okay one Maybe last ish topic. We’ll see where we go We were talking earlier before we hit record the little office over there And you brought up What I thought was an interesting metaphor when I I’ve thought about previously and I don’t I don’t I just heard about it from someone I don’t recall where but this idea of the story writing process Like when when an author is writing fiction and he starts to write characters That he gives these characters, you know Stories personalities features, you know starts describing them basically but at some point that Process of authorship of storytelling or story writing I guess in this case The characters start to tell the author what you know It’s not purely a unilateral process that there’s some feedback that you know, once these characters are laid down That they sort of start to the story starts to write itself in a way.

Yeah, there’s a feedback loop and That may sound a little crazy But if you’ve you know Some of the other authors famous authors have said this I think Dostoyevsky said something like that like his characters kind of start to write themselves and anyways, if we assume that to be a Dynamic of story writing I thought when that came to me it was like a very useful analogy for our relationship with God It’s like if God is the author, you know The authority the author of all things and we are avatars in that story or that thing. He’s dreaming up. Whatever it may be You know the being that’s omniscient omnipotent and omnipresent knows everything Has all the power and is everywhere And this is from the old, you know old text.

What does that being lack? Well that being lacks limitation, all right, so God needed a limited finite Version of himself to complete himself in some way even where we come alive and have free will Yeah, so then we are then writing God’s story. I don’t know like anyways when you brought that metaphor I was like, oh, yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking about a couple weeks ago. Is it so When you invoked, I don’t know What do you think about that metaphor and then what I actually forgot the reason you invoked it originally to talk about I Think Characters living in large language models.

Mm-hmm large language models Can create these characters usually like chat GPT? The prompt for chat GPT agent, it’s like you’re an agent that’s trying to be helpful to human Long ass, you know from like you can’t talk about black people or something like Yeah, and and and it takes on that personality, hmm and depending on how I suspect it’s possible to have a Virtual Identity like that that takes on its own life and and and have a subjective experience Mm-hmm, and that’s that’s that’s where it’s like You know, it’s almost like fiction characters coming coming to life and Yeah, and and and if we are in a simulation, there’s a creator Like, you know, you can constantly look at you might have this is where I don’t even I for a long time, I didn’t believe in free will just from listening to Sam Harris and and and I Know I Shifted a little bit. I’m starting to think maybe some people have free will and others don’t they’re like in the simulation there you see yeah, and he sees versus real players, right and I Don’t know if I’m in PC or Real player I Always believed I I’m kind of an NPC. I’m I’m like the NPC That’s like looking for for the player and I want to join the party and Help the player.

That’s that’s like my NPC mission and interesting. That’s kind of how I Make a lot of my decisions. Maybe we’re all a little bit of both I mean to there’s different approaches and someone said to me that’s a good approach to becoming a main character the Humility, I don’t know I don’t know But to the extent our culture programs us.

We’re sort of in PC ish Right, we’re doing things unconsciously or running an unconscious program It’s like you don’t have a program is more like being self-sovereign self-liberated individuated something like that So maybe we’re all a little bit of both We were definitely influenced by our wars. Yeah But The the the the Sam Harris way of thinking about it is it’s like We we know the rules, oh we don’t know the rules of the universe, but but we do know that There’s a cause and an effect right like things you do Caused by previous events right like some decision even if I were to say, you know Pick a random number, right? Like whatever you pick You really have no agency in that like the number just kind of comes out. Yeah, you’re not like I’m gonna just pick a number.

It could be a number that You you saw yesterday it could be you could pick a non-random number though You get like every time someone asked you that you pick the same number So there’s yes Why why would you pick that number? It’s because you always picked it before right for free in the case where if you’re picking it all the time Maybe I don’t I mean and then you can always trace back to what? Causes you to do something and there are experiments done where it’s like You make a decision but the signals in your brains already like Like they basically they know they can detect I think this experiment is like I forgot the name but it’s like You pressing it’s like pressing a button and Something do is pressing a button and the light comes on I forgot exactly the details but but but it’s like the researchers They know you’re gonna press the button before you right like up to like Seconds like like three seconds ahead or something like that. So I’m something crazy and and it’s it helps Define this narrative that You you we we just do things and then we explain it later we we sort of make up this Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly do things first and they’ve done the experiments where people with slippery, you know where left brain right brains not as severed and then They’re able to like get one side to do something and they’ll be like Like Stand up and you know And go go to the door.

Mm-hmm, and then they would stand up and then on the other side I like ask why did you stand up? Yeah, and it would just completely make up a story It’s like I I need to go to the bathroom or I’m thirsty or something like that. It’s it it just Demonstrates how much you know, this this kind of stuff is going on in your head and and you Yeah, I I guess I guess this is why I I ultimately felt like Whatever the reason you’re doing things There’s there’s a prior. Mm-hmm, then then there’s there’s no free will because Everything you just have to have the first thing happen and Domino will just fall.

Mm-hmm. Everything follows but reality changes So that we encounter entropy, right and then we adapt we adjust our strategy or our course of action Oh, yeah change our course of build or act that yeah directed actions change. Yeah, so that’s all results of randomness That’s what I’m saying, but there’s an irreducible randomness and but introducing randomness still doesn’t get you free.

Will you’re You’re still at the mercy of your environment If you can choose how to respond to different Manifestations of entropy. I think you could still have free will That’s not to say every time entropy hits me this way. I go that way, you know, it’s like yeah except This is where it’s like.

Did you really choose it or did you? Respond to your environment and then you rationalize it as you choosing it. That’s where I yeah, so so Anyway long story short like I I felt like I was always Struggling with that and and now the the best the best compromise I can make is some Some people aren’t Where I’m landing now, and I don’t know if I am or not, but Yeah, it feels like I’m not yeah, I I have this metaphor of like We’re just like characters written in the book. Yeah, it’s already written.

Yeah, like my fates already sealed and and then I’m I Can’t jump ahead and read the end to see what happens. So I’m just reading these things As as time goes through it’s like me reading the pages. They have this term and I Think it’s in the Middle Middle Eastern Languages mock tube it is written It’s in the book the alchemist and I would like again I tend to agree with you with a metaphor overall, but I think the present moment right where the computation is being executed as Wolfram was saying right that the flow of time was Computation being executed.

That is the book presently being written Rather than the book is already written and it’s a done deal and you have no freedom and you’re on this inexorable track of fate Yeah, you know And coat like we’re cold. We are participants in our own creation I think that’s proved through innovation In fact, like we we could just sit around in the caves forever and just you know Beat each other over the head and still each other’s food We still do that only with more sophisticated technologies But we did crawl out of the caves and create, you know Computers and light and electricity and artificial intelligence and all these things I mean that seems like an expression of the creative principle within us And well, what is that like imitating God if God is this creative impulse in reality so I don’t I’m yeah, I Formally condemn most people lack of free will I believe freedom And she’s totally on your side. Yeah, the essential State maybe is you know, the universe freely unfolding and self organizational self generative Ways and even you know You know, what is it in? Shiva the dance of destruction and creation like it’s it’s about they’re bound together in a way that semantics struggle to articulate but Yeah, I’m slowly I Think coming to that side a little bit.

I think even you’re just on that same page. Yeah Yeah, so I’m should I should adopt that or maybe it’s just the Presumption that gives you the most psychological Benefit or something, you know, like yeah. Yeah, maybe it’s the best way to become a main character yeah, well, it feels a lot better when you assume freedom is real right if you just assume you’re a Automaton, you know nothing.

Nothing you try to do or change matters. Well, then you’re gonna be nihilistic pretty quick. Mm-hmm None, there’s I mean it didn’t affect me that way.

Yeah, I could hold both beliefs just fine just because I can think about Choosing to be nihilistic is still a choice. Mm-hmm and If the book is already written for me to not be nihilistic and for me to be hard-working and creative mm-hmm, that’s already written and There’s nothing I can do to stop that and I would just continue down that path like the universe Take me down this path Regardless of like it will make me want to work hard if that’s that’s what it is written and in a way You’re putting the locus of power decision-making back in on yourself because you’re choosing to interpret it that way, right? Even if the book is already written you’re kind of interpreting. Yeah, the most favorable Scenarios, yeah, yeah, you could say that but but maybe that is you can imagine if I write a fiction character.

Mm-hmm That’s that’s what was written right I could write this character who’s like confused about Freewill and then it believes it has free will or not and and then it it believes that it needs to be hard-working but But it like it doesn’t have to experience anything else. It’s already written So what if some point right in that book that character? Changes the course you were taking the book down like say you were you plan to take him when you started the book To he has no free will but by the end of the book the story somehow written itself and now he’s got free will Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe maybe But the you’re I mean the author still provides the conditions. Yeah, that is basis.

Yeah, and Reality right he provides the conditions I think I think I I started with like someone that was talking about artists Like true artists Are Chosen by God. Mm-hmm and They cannot help but do the work of God. Mm-hmm.

So it’s like Even though they might be suffering they hate the fact that you know, I’m painting the I’m painting these paintings But but I can’t stop. Yeah, and and and it’s being obsessed about like doing this because it’s like as if God has chosen me to do this, right? Yeah, that makes me think you know, like like The people who didn’t get chosen to do that They they might have gotten chosen to do some something else or they might have gotten chosen just to be MTC’s Yes, I’ve heard that that’s so I love that you brought that up. I’ve heard it described as the paradox of freedom Which actually I picked up from a book.

Yeah, you don’t have freedom at that point. Well, here’s the thing So I got this from the book The role of the individual in history. It’s a really short book, but it’s really good older one and the idea is that You have freedom to choose paths through life but if you’re lucky at some point that freedom will Evolve into a paradox in which you discover the one path that you can’t not take right like your life’s purpose or mission or passion or whatever that path is for you and that’s the paradox is like oh in your liberality you discovered this like Self tyranny if you will, you know, you tyrannize yourself to this purpose and This sounds a lot like the answer described.

Yeah, it’s like they just yeah, I don’t you know, I Guess it’s I don’t know. That’s still an expression of free will to me But freedom is a bit paradoxical. Maybe that attests to how I feel there are internal struggles There are parts of that person.

I think that don’t want to do it, but it’s almost compulsive. Yeah, they have to do it you know, so I That is like I think we have that clip where there’s there’s different versions living in this animal and you you you just you identify with this one that Has control over language and can speak and then there might be other others Like this might not even be your favorite one, right? Like you often but less so these days, but in my younger days, I definitely experience things like I Don’t know why I’m doing this I know this is not what I want to do, but I I can’t stop myself from doing it You know like that kind of thing. It’s it’s it’s like I have no control over my body soldier Yeah, so we’re like again back to the layers, right? We have all these different systems on top of subsystems that are they have conflicting preferences Dude, yeah, what a conversation.

Yeah Thank you for having me. Yeah, I love it. This is awesome.

Thank you for coming to Miami and This is a wide-ranging. Yeah, we’re just all heard. Yeah from I Don’t know where we’ve been even from yeah the cosmos gluten to free.

Yeah, so So, um, yeah, I don’t if you want to plug anything here let people know where they can find you any parting words of wisdom Yeah, I’m on Twitter. I have a Twitter. It’s a Zen my name is the HEN 9 4 3 6 that’s pretty much it.

Yeah, beautiful. Thank you Zen. Thank you so much.

Mm-hmm Thank you for watching If you enjoyed this episode click here to find more just like it and click here to find our most recent episode also make sure to like this video to help us shine light on the corruption of money and Be sure to subscribe to this channel to stay connected