I had an absolute blast conversing with Joscha Bach, a cognitive scientist, who uses the tool of artificial intelligence to study the human mind and consciousness. I have learned an incredible amount from his discussions with other thinkers (linked below). I couldn’t be happier that he agreed to explore the intersection of subjective experience and learning. We wound through history, philosophy, and some economics to demonstrate how systems theory might be a better lens through which to solve problems. There aren’t many people that can weave a narrative about how Star Wars Episode 1 is a retelling of the Lord of the Rings (as an allegory for the industrial revolution). I can’t recommend his work enough, I especially appreciate his architecture of motivation, discussed in a previous post here. I hope any listeners leave with some optimism as I did; Let’s all work towards the discovery of our shared purpose in common humanity, in other words, love.
Links:
Conversation with John Vervaeke
Subreddit (I’m a Mod!)
Transcript:
keevin bybee 0:00
Welcome to the one school podcast. This is Dr. keevin Bybee. I’m a family physician exploring how we might turn local public schools into 24/7 365. Safe havens for our children. By having conversations with people with experience and expertise, who might inform how a project like this might come to fruition. Today, I am super excited to talk with your robot. He has a variety of interests. And I think rather than butcher it, I prefer to let him kind of tell us what how he describes himself.
joscha bach 0:17
I’m a cognitive scientist. I currently work as an AI researcher for Intel Labs, where I’m interested in figuring out what comes after deep learning and how we can make sense of systems that can do increasingly more across many more dimensions. And I’m personally seeing AI is a tool to understand how our own minds work. So the language of information processing and of computation. And the concepts that have been developed in this context, I think, are the philosophically most fruitful ones that we’ve discovered so far, in order to make sense of our own condition.
keevin bybee 0:55
And what really attracted me to your work is the exploration of consciousness and subjective experience. And so I guess what I was really hoping to get your opinion on, or where your thoughts might go with is how the more we understand about both human and general consciousness, what that would do to help us. You know, educate the next generation of people so that we come up with some sort of civilization that’s a little bit more sustainable than our current one.
Unknown Speaker 1:30
Oh, that’s a hard question. Especially since if you look at civilization, it doesn’t seem to be necessarily correlated with more consciousness, it seems to me that there is a possibility that civilization is the result of a process of domestication, that in some sense, takes away agency from people. So they are less prone to initiate violence, that they are more prone to cooperation, that they are more prone to do what they’re being told. I suspect that in many ways, almost achates is not the smart ape, but programmable ape.
keevin bybee 2:03
Yeah, exactly. And then maybe the recursion between the programming we do for the environments that then reprograms us right.
Unknown Speaker 2:16
There’s also a significant, totally different, a very different world than our ancestors. The world that basically became civilized was built on an extreme inequality. In order to be able to do philosophy in Greece, you needed to be the head of a household that had enough slaves, to do all the work for you. And if you wanted to be a philosopher in the Middle Ages, you also needed to be in a stratum of society, that freed you from working in the fields and toiling away. And so basically, people got a very unequal deal in the way in which they participated in society. And they were living in systems of meaning that were constructed to support this. So the religions that existed, the ideologies that were built, and the modes into which people are pretty much bred by the restock recei of their time, in different societies in the world, were meant to facilitate the organization of society in the way in which it was. And now we have the situation that we can free the individual of, from working in the field for the most part, and it’s only a very small part of us that need to work in the field. And it’s far fewer hours than before, the work is also physically less stressful to do this. And you have freed these people, mostly to push paper around, because you need to give them a job after all. And so this increase in productivity that was tremendous, and so 1950s, and so on, has not led to a corresponding increase in freedom and happiness and time that we have for ourselves for exploration, for self actualization, and so on. And that is, in large part, I also think, because we have not found a new meaning for society, if you need to fight for survival, meaning is easy. If there is a war that is going on, it’s very difficult to escape the meaning that it has to protect your loved ones and to get through this hard time. But in a time, where most of it is about where does my attention go? What is my status in the world in which almost everything seems to be a social construct, meaning is very difficult to pin down and to follow.
keevin bybee 4:19
Agreed, I guess wherein for those years we were described, you were describing as the exploited years, we were given a meeting rather than giving a set of tools to co generate meaning with each other. How do you think about what are the tools that we need or need to be able to co generate a meaning that is shared coherent and sustainable?
Unknown Speaker 4:47
And not sure how much this can be a stable state, the one that we are in right now. So these years were basically the default state for every being that exists in a non technological society, the technological system It is a very recent invention. And it has created a state where we have basically can produce more food than we need for the people who live on the planet. And in this situation situation of abundance, we have the luxury to think about what we want to do with all this freedom that even in this way, and it doesn’t seem to be obvious that the idea that we come up with is very useful. Because we don’t live on this planet by ourselves, we have this notion that we are, of course at the top of the food chain. And this is true in the sense that it’s very hard to defeat us as a species. But we are not alone. And the thing that we need to serve is probably larger than us. And by turning the planet into a big factory farm, we also made it very brittle. You have basically local service opposable thumbs, and this might not be sustainable in the long run. And the question is, if you want to live on this planet for longer, this out big cataclysms in between that periodically wipe out most of the population, you probably would need to find a way to become shepherds of this planet. And there is an optimal number of shepherds for the sheep that exists and the optimal mode to coexist with the nature that you’re in. And at the moment, we are, in many ways, maximizing measures that are not beneficial for our long term survival.
keevin bybee 6:27
When I first came across Sam Harris’s moral landscape, what I liked about it was it centered on subjective experience as primary, and then the valence of suffering kind of tends to be weighted a little bit stronger than the valence is for pleasure. And so if we imagine that every possible thing capable of suffering for as long as it’s capable of suffering for its maximum intensity, call that bad, and then use the tools of science and technology to navigate away from that point, I’m just curious where you again, because of your interest in research into consciousness, and where it comes from, I’m just curious where you go with that?
Unknown Speaker 7:11
Well, if you have acute pain, where something is doing something to your body, it’s very hard to escape this pain. But pain is not the same thing as suffering. Pain is a signal that is being interpreted by your mind to change the current situation. And suffering is what happens when you cannot escape the pain. And most of the things that we suffer from is not the ailments of our body, which we can learn to do this and down regulate. Because our mind understands where they come from, and to which degree we can affect them for the most part, but it’s the elements of the mind. And this means the suffering that we experience, when we are confronted with social issues, for instance, they exist, due to the way in which our mind interprets our relationship to the world. They’re basically tied to our identity. And this construction of the identity is upstream of the self. So we mostly don’t have control over it. It is a very long process to get agency over what we care about and what we identify as and how this identity construct plays out. And maybe this could be one of the most important goals of education to get us to this degree of awareness that he get control over our identity and can understand it, because most of the suffering that I experienced is the result of the way in which I am identified. And when I get into a state where I can understand this identification and modify it, the suffering often disappears. Because I realize things that I’m trying to do, which I cannot do, I don’t have to do them, I can be someone else, I can be someone who actually fits into the environment that I’ve been offered a mobile, I can move to a different place in the world I can make the friends that I want, I can have the direction they want, I can have the identity that I want. And I have this identity not by insisting on other people seeing me in a particular way. But I have this identity by living it by filling it by actually maintaining the relationships that I want to myself and to others and to the world. So I think this is in many ways, the most important goal of an education that makes you aware of your relationship to the world.
keevin bybee 9:31
Yeah, I very much agree with that sentiment. And knowing the components that comprise the contents of our consciousness would be a useful tool for the individual and then relating them to people who haven’t been exposed to them yet, namely, little kids, for example. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 9:50
and I think it’s fine if kids do not understand everything, yeah, training ourselves to understand the world layer by layer. So it’s very normal that in the telco If you don’t sink deeply, you are very much in the moment. And everything above that moment is implemented with priors. So you have innate models of reality that give you an idea of what’s good and what’s bad. And only later you take these moral reflexes and understand them and just assemble them and understand what they are come from, what they’re good for, and replace them is actually functional models of how the world works. And it’s a process that is not being ended his childhood, and in the dollar sense, you are still insane, just in what finance interface and in your 20s, you are still somewhat nuts and unhedged. Right, it’s this is the way in which human mind is set up. And it does take a lot of insight and a lot of observation and maybe guidance to if you want to be faster on that path. And otherwise, you have to go the heart long way. And our life is often not long enough to go all the way.
keevin bybee 10:52
No, certainly not. We as caregivers, are we as notional adults, how do you think about setting up the environment for learners to gather the tools that would allow them to make meaning, like how to caregivers, set an environment for learners, so that they will develop the tool so that they will know about the ways that they suffer or the ways that they can adapt to it.
joscha bach 11:26
I think this depends very much on the base in which we select our teachers. And I don’t know about the exact teachers election process in the US. But teachers are atypical people. Strange in a particular way, teachers seem to be, for instance, more ideological than the average academic. And that I think this is concerning. And I wonder where it comes from. And it could be that teachers are particular role models. So maybe this is the thing that is self selecting, basically, they are giving people an idea of what it’s like to be a teacher, and the next generation that wants to be like them becomes teachers, I don’t know what’s going on there. I also noticed this thing in Germany in STEM, that is, the students that were not good enough to succeed in studying mathematics, or computer science, or physics, instead became teachers for the subjects. So they became exams that were more simple. And they were not expected to perform at the same level. And the idea was, if they’re not able to get to the first principles and understand how the science actually works, and think in the frames of the science, we can still use them for elementary school, and for middle school. And I think this is exactly backwards. It this is completely wrong. If it means if, if you don’t succeed in your math studies, that you don’t understand what math is, you don’t see the puzzle and how it works. Imagine you have a music teacher and the music teacher is the one who was not musical enough to learn how to play an instrument. This is the situation for most maths teachers right now. And I don’t know if the situation is the same in the US. So my apologies to all the good math teachers out there. And I also sure that there are many. But you also have to account for the fact that most of the kids who go to university are basically illiterate in math, despite having had many classes, it seems to me almost as if the purpose of school is to stop curiosity of the children. When they enter school, they tend to be intensely curious and motivated to learn things and they are sponges and school kids this for the most part, and might have to do with the fact that school is actually take care. And the curriculum is not meant to give the kids something that they can actually work with, that they can do something with, but rather it’s interrupt knowledge that is not doing anything with the mind that empowers them to do things that they actually want to do.
keevin bybee 14:00
Another thought leader that I really appreciate Zack Stein talks about how learning needs to be embedded in the community and not isolated between a rigid set of hours in a school building treated like an assembly line or a factory. What are the ways that we can integrate learning and educational opportunities distributed amongst the community at large, so that there is something tangible for the learners to anchor those skills to? Does that Do you agree with that? Or what do you How would you respond to that?
joscha bach 14:36
That is a topic that I don’t yet fully understand myself. And you mentioned at some point, Maslow’s pyramid when we discussed before, and Maslow’s pyramid is hierarchy is something that I’m unsatisfied with and have always been when I read this it didn’t quite convinced me. First of all, because the needs that it describes are not actually needs. They’re too complicated with itself. actualization is not a basic need. It’s at this low level where our mind is implemented. self actualization is hard to conceptualize. And I think instead, it’s a purpose. It’s a hierarchy of purposes. And the needs that we have don’t really form a hierarchy, they all compete with each other. Our need for justice directly competes with our need for food, it’s not that the first eat and then they go to make justice. Sometimes you miss a meal, if that’s the demand set, right. So in some sense, these things, these are social and physiological and cognitive needs that we have, they all compete with each other on the same level, and trust in order to make them compatible with each other and turn this into a plan by which we can live our life and satisfy all these needs, we need to turn them into hierarchy. And this hierarchy is not the same for everyone. Some people eat to make art, and some people make art to eat. And they might be doing the same things in the same proportions, but they do them for different reasons. And the shape of the soul that emerges over this hierarchy of purposes, determines how we can collaborate with people and which purposes we share. And there is a need that is not mentioned in Maslow’s pyramid. And this is the need for transcendence. And it sounds very esoteric, but it just means the need to link up into an external agent. And we are not just individuals, we are state building agents, we want to link up into groups that work together. And the question is, what is the algorithm to do that. And the Christians have suggested to read Thomas Aquinas, that there are basic principles that you need to follow to achieve this linking up. And Aquinas was a philosopher in many ways, he tried to derive this from first principles. So he identifies four criteria of rational agency. He calls these the cardinal virtues, but they’re just policies that a rational agent can discover, intrude, follow this is for instance, you should organize yourself internally optimally, which means live healthy, don’t overeat, exercise and so on, he wants all the things temperance, this the optimal self organization, you should optimize the interaction with others, right, this would be balanced, and he calls this justice. And he should be willing to act on your models and have the right balance between exploration and exploitation. So how much we explore how much you could do and so on. And this is what he calls courage, the willingness to act. Right. And you should pick the right goals and the right plans to follow these goals, you should think about what is actually serving these purposes. And this goal, rationality is what he calls prudence. And this makes sense, right? So there is nothing is Tarek or religious about this. And then he says, in addition to these rational principles that every rational agent can discover, there are three, which have to be revealed. And by revealed, he doesn’t mean that you have to talk to a burning bush. But he means you have to think about what happens if you have them what is going to emerge. Right. So this kind of abductive reasoning, and he got the principles that he identifies is, in order to build a next level agent, you need to, first of all commit to it.
This is what he calls face. So there needs to be this commitment to serving an agency above your purposes above the self. Second, you need to be willing to do this not in some abstract sense for yourself, but you actually need to link up with the people around you to do this. So identify these shared purposes with others, and serve these shared purposes together. And these purposes about the self are the reason why we have non transactional relationships. If somebody else is serving the same purpose above the ego as you do, you can give them something without expecting anything in return, because they help you by serving these purposes to serve your own right. So this is what he calls love, is this basic discovery of shared sacredness, and the residing on transactionality. And the ability to display create the next level of agency. And the third one is, you need to be willing to invest into this before it exists. So of course, once it exists, it can reward you by the social organization you get as a result by the civilization that forms. But before the civilization exists, you need to need to build it. And this means invest in it, even if you don’t expect to reap the rewards right now. And this is what he calls hope. So this is how you get faith, hope and love. The words are slightly different, different meanings from the ones that we have in everyday language. They’re quite specific meanings in his philosophy. But I think it’s a interesting way to think about how we form next level agents. And now there is the next question, how can we coordinate in these groups, and in my observation as somebody who comes to you the US, and notice that there is an extreme groupthink, you probably aware of these tribes in the US. So in some rough approximation that is the blue tribe, the red tribe and the gray tribe. And I think this has changed by now. It’s it different, but this tribal nature is there. And it exists because many people have a preference for group things over individual autonomy. A group thing means group think that you are, it’s more important that you will assimilate into the beliefs of your environment, then getting every detail, right.
And this is not a matter of education. It’s not like uneducated people do this more or stupid people do this more intelligent people do this less. This is not the point at all. This an aspect of this is Credentialism. Or, for instance, when Matt Ecclesias was sort of working for the blog that he started vox.com. He was among the people basically, who argued that we shouldn’t wear masks because they’re more harm, do more harm than good. He was a talking point that people had agreed on in high school, right? So journalists had basically in the Facebook groups or wherever they had their chats, decided this is the narrative. And he himself had already bought masks by this point. And he let us mentioned this a few months later, when he had left vox.com occasionally on Twitter, and I don’t think it was a slip up, I think that he understood that his job as a journalist is to produce this narrative. And that he wouldn’t have the freedom to completely shape the narrative in the way that he was thinking that was correct. But that the narrative was meant to be cohesive, that was creating this solid narrative reality. And once you create such a consensus world, you will not always get it right. And you deal with this difference by just ignoring it. And the job for journalists right now or the meaning creators, is to ignore the differences between the narrative and the ground truths that they can observe themselves. So they might be secretly preaching water and drinking wine, or telling you that mask are harmful and buying masks for themselves. But this is not necessarily a mental defect that they have. But it’s an understanding of the aesthetics in which they’re working of the way in which they do their job. And maybe there is not an alternative to this. But personally, I’m an autonomous mind, I am I find this revolting. I see this as manipulative, it, the idea that somebody manipulates my mind, because they think that on average, it’s going to be better for me if my mind is manipulated in this way, does not respect my dignity as an individual. But this is because I’m a liberal humanist, and this is the particular kind of socialization that I have. This doesn’t mean that it’s objectively correct. If I run a simulation, where everybody is a liberal humanist, have I run a simulation where everybody is an ideologue, and you have a handful of people who design the ideology based on the best credentials that they can find, based on the best education system to create these credentials. I don’t know if the rebel humanists are better. I just noticed this is my innate preference is my identity. And I can retrace this and deconstructed and try to find out what’s better. But I suspect that many of the difficulties right now exist, because of the tangents between the different groups and the fact that due to social media, you don’t have a cohesive narrative anymore. But narratives are going to split off as soon as individuals see differences between their own round tools, and the reality of the narrative. And this, what happened in the media is that they became more coherent in their own narratives. I suspect that before social media, the US had basically multiple narratives, for instance, the Fox News and the CNN narrative. And there are basically two big tunes, there’s lots of detail that we’re capturing the reality of a lot of people to some approximate degree. And after the blue tribe has won the cultural war, most of the media are basically now producing only one narrative. And this means that the lift reality of a large part of the population does not find itself anymore, because they’re not college educated, because they don’t show up at Harvard. And because they don’t show up under the Harvard trained or Ivy League trained journalists that write the media. And this creates an enormous split in society. Because media is the consciousness of society. It’s how we share the contents of our attention. And a lot of the people basically don’t get a voice in this it’s like a suppressed subconsciousness that no longer has a voice in your mind and leads to an imbalance in the way in which your process reality.
keevin bybee 24:31
Yeah, I resonate a lot with that. My first thought is, I really, really loved when I first heard your definition of love, which was the discovery of a shared purpose. And you know, my wife who usually bristles at nerdy jargon, Mystic definitions of very strong emotions actually took that one up, and so made me happy when she also used that term. And I guess, how do we as humans have an owl good rhythm for the discovery of a shared purpose. And you know where I go with it is thinking about that as an educational problem. How can we sow the seeds or tend to the garden of personal development in systemically so that it’s easier to see or find that shared purpose, and harder to get distracted by the splintering? Or the hypocrisy is or where our interpretations of reality don’t align? Do you have a sense of how we might do that?
joscha bach 25:35
Personally, I think it’s about discovering our shared humanity, it is about discovering the shared purpose. And what’s gets into the way is the construction of identity in my view, because I don’t think that we intrinsically have an identity, the identity that we have is something like a costume that we can take on and use for a particular purpose. Right, you can have an identity as a banker, or as a teacher, or as an engineer. But if you cannot take this off again, and be a human being, that means other human beings on the shared plane of existence, then you are crippled in a way. And I think that beyond this identity, there is a perceptual being a way, what it feels like to be in the world. And it doesn’t feel the same for all of us to be in the world. But there is there are universals about this. And we can understand what it’s like to feel like the others, if we vary across the space of experience and be might not be able to reach the full range that others reach or the same resolution as other reach. But it’s a quantitative difference, not necessarily a qualitative one. And the qualitative differences come from the depth at which we model reality. So which depth of experience can be understand conceptually and reflect? How many layers can be reflect how, or what can we see what is it possible for us to experience and training this reflection, this observation, I think, would be crucial. And in our education system, we train the people who model and the people who observe in different schools, they almost never meet. So the people that make models, there are mathematicians and computer scientists, and engineers, and so on. And the observers are artists, and maybe writers. And they don’t have they don’t talk, they have very little in common in many ways. And they should be in the same person.
keevin bybee 27:30
Agreed, agreed. And then I guess, thinking about how we can give a language to these emotions so that we can get it gets easier for us to check in with each other as perceptual beings, you know, how do we co generate a vocabulary? I really like how you put some technical definitions to hope, faith and joy, love, purpose, and love and even spirituality? Because then once you have a technical definition, it gets easier for other people to go. Okay. Yes, I recognize what you mean by that, I guess. And the reason it comes up for me personally, is the word spiritual means a billion things to a billion people. But when you say, it’s the innate drive to connect to something larger than the ego or project, a project that’s going to outlive this meatsuit, then I can get on board with that term.
joscha bach 28:24
Yeah, if you go to the events of the consciousness industry, basically, for people who lack meaning, and who seek this, this mystical experience, and there is a large set of events and institutions that caters to that need the sense spirituality is more like a phantom limb that has formed in the absence of culture. If you take the culture of people obey, what you get is this unrequited need for spirituality that is going to drift into superstition, or something that is empty, but you just create the same kinds of emotions over and over again, without feeling any change in your life. And it’s, it’s not about an emotion, it’s about a certain way to be connected to reality. And culture is in some sense, this set of behaviors and ideas and practices that carries a civilization into the future. Right, this is this spirit of civilization, in the spirit is the operating system for an autonomous agent. When the word spirit was invented, the only autonomous agents that are known were not robots, right. This was people and plants and animals and ecosystems and cities and nation states. And they all have spirits in the sense they behave when they’re coherent, as if they are coherent agent that is driven by a certain set of principles by purposes that define the function and the actions and the need for actions of this particular kind of agent, whether it’s a nation state, or a person or a plant, right, it’s a coherent pattern that we see in an in an agent. And in this same sense, The Ages that you formed together like civilizations and groups and families and so on if spirits. And there is nothing as a Tarik about this, this is just the agent that you can recognize in them and you pay attention. It’s it’s really just an emergent coherent pattern that forms because we try to become coherent with each other. And there are certain aesthetics that this agent can have. And spirituality is about developing this agent, I think. Right Is this Is that thing is a Tarik in this term, you can formulate it in a way that makes total sense and does not require any superstition.
keevin bybee 30:33
And as an educational problem, what do you think about how to build in an immune system for lack of a better term, so that we are less likely to fall into superstition and more likely to fall into practices that help each other in the real world rooted in the quantum physics,
joscha bach 30:53
the need to have a need to have a purpose for this, the group needs to have a purpose. And our societies do not have purposes at the moment, at least not the western societies. Basically, don’t plan ahead anymore. And that’s because we don’t see ourselves anymore in this future. And you just muddle through. And we are actually terrified of giving each other purpose because we are afraid of the powers that this ambitious fight when it’ll give the Germans a purpose. They ended the the economic crisis, instantly. They built highways, they built new industry, they gave almost everybody employment. And they build a giant war machine out of nothing extremely short amount of time, and started to conquer the world and eradicate everything that was different. This is terrifying, right? When you make up people into a shared purpose. Who knows what will happen?
keevin bybee 31:48
The naive optimist in me would like to think that we can find alternative purposes that don’t require extermination, perhaps going to the moon or Mars or, and so are you familiar with the comedian, Bill Hicks? Do you remember him from the 90s, when he was talking about the first Gulf War phrase that I really loved was? Couldn’t we conceivably take that same technology and use it to shoot food at hungry people? The naive optimist in me it goes, we’ve got the technology, and how can we leverage it in a way that doesn’t bring out those purposes of tribalism bent towards violence? Do you have any optimism? Or do you have any thoughts on how we can bend that in a different direction?
joscha bach 32:36
In reality, people mostly act on incentives. And I think that we have brought worldwide hunger to an all time low at the moment. So there is an absolute numbers of very large number of people who is hungry, but the fraction of people who are hungry in the world is extremely small, smaller than ever, I think. And the issue is that when the golfer was started, it was not because there was a big purpose there. It was the small purpose, it was just very focused and concentrated. The Gulf War enabled Halliburton to make an extreme profit. And there were a number of people who are interested in doing this. And the story that was created around it was one drafted up by the peanut butter Project for a New American Century that had a plan of establishing and deepening American dominance in this region, by subduing these countries and turn them in some sense into colonies of the empire. And at the same time, this purpose was not taken seriously enough. So yes, I’m not very good at building colonies anymore. The last time they did this successfully was after World War Two, when basically the entire rest of Europe became a colony of the US. And that has been very good for the rest of Europe, it has been very good for Germany to to have to maintain an army by itself, but to be part of this American umbrella. And this doesn’t mean that everything that you did was good, and so on. But on balance, it has been a very good thing for the people who have been part of this European American empire. And all the other attempts that the US did at intervening in other countries later on. They’re not driven by the same ability to build lasting administration’s and social organizations for the people that were conquered by this free world with this free system. Instead, the US played a much shorter game, or didn’t understand the conditions or maybe for various factors, it was just not possible a successful to implement strategies to build functioning states. But by and large, these strategies seem to be short games. And there have been many reasons why it didn’t work out. But in all cases, people are locally acting on their incentives. They don’t act on the notion of a shared purpose in this regard, because they don’t have fun. And there is nothing that enforces it.
keevin bybee 35:01
No, it’s It’s painfully obvious that we don’t have a shared purpose and that our incentives are largely accidental and emergent from people, like you said, playing the short game. That’s the hard question on some level is how can we generate incentives that motivate behavior that invests over multiple generations, an idea I’ve been brewing and I’m just curious what you think about this currency or money as a unit of caring, because in some sense, it’s all just a social friction that we use to lubricate interactions, right. And the way that money is currently created from a central bank, generating it out of thin air to loan it to the government and fractionally loan it back to the corporate banks, than every dollar that’s in existence is debt on some level that if we repeat it, there would be no money in circulation. So what if we generated a unit of caring out of thin air in a different way, for example, like a universal basic income, just as an example, not necessarily anchor to that, but more about what are the alternative ways that we can generate trust tokens or units of caring that lubricate, and incentivize human interaction in a more pro social way?
joscha bach 36:22
If you think of society, as an organism, and every individual as a cell in this organism? The question is, how can you make sure that this organism remains functional, there are several ways in which it can be dysfunctional, for instance, it can get cancer, which means that a part of the organism splits off and builds its own society, which plays a much, much shorter game at the expense of the larger one until the larger one breaks down. Another defective mode that could happen is that you become center centered as the individual organs become old and fed. And they’re mostly start to serve themselves and not the organism. So they all become less and less effective. They basically start feeding the cells that exist in the organs for their own sake, rather than for the purpose that the cells have to serve within the organism. And you see that this happens in institutions where the FDA is sent a sent in the sense, the FDA is preventing a lot of useful things from happening, it’s super expensive, and it’s probably by now net negative to the society, if you just would abolish the FDA, and replace it with a minimal placeholder that makes sure that in the box, there is what’s outside of the box, you probably have a net benefit. And this resulted in tuitions become self serving is almost automatic, if you don’t have something from the outside that constantly rejuvenates them, maybe we need to design them in such a way that they die after a generation or two and then have to be reborn. So they can remain fresh and on track. But we haven’t really found a way to make this happen. And our own government seems to be incentivized against error correction, not for it. So there is no way in which these issues are fixed. Once they pop up while you navigate between the different local incentives, you’ll navigate between the interest manifested in the administration’s of these different competing institutions. And so every of these institutions, in some sense, their entire health care system, and so on, they do serve a role, but they’re also largely parasitic. And so they mop up all the resources that society might have to create other things elsewhere and reduce its power of innovation and its productivity, and the well being of the people living in it. And so if you think about this unit of caring, in which way is it able to eliminate nepotism and self serving it’s of administration’s and institutions that rather feed themselves rather than serving society in the things that they’re doing? How can you eliminate this with this unit of carrying, you probably need to have an external system that is hard and true. And you cannot make money totally hard, because if you make money indestructible, like gold, then it will eliminate accumulate and very few pockets. Because money compounds, this is when you have more money to begin with. All other things being equal, you add up even more money in the end. That’s why you get these power law distributions whenever a difference is compounding, which means if you have more of one thing, it leads to even more of it, you get this very skewed distribution. For instance, if you get taller, it doesn’t help you to get even taller. So height is a normal distribution, you get this bell curve, but for money if you have more money, you will make more money in the end. So you get this power law distribution, which gets stronger with every generation even because you can give money to your kids and the ability to make money and so on your kids inherit your credit rating. So what can you do about this you will have to find out money at the top and put it back in at the bottom which means The blockchain cannot work because it doesn’t have such a mechanism, it does not have a central control of the money supply. Without the centralized control of the money supply, monetary system, I think cannot actually work. And the reason why the US abolish the gold standard was not weakness or stupidity, it was insight that it didn’t work, it was not stable. So this software was fixed and family money, it’s like dopamine, it’s a message, it’s not a resource needs to be kind of the other way around. It’s just a message type that we use to allocate resources. And I think this idea of money as goodwill is great, but it only works to a certain degree, because we need to measure what’s actually beneficial to society. And what for instance, produces goods and resources that people want actually use. And that cannot be captured, that cannot be captured by stories. The society that I grew up Eastern Germany tried to basically replace the economic terror of capitalism. And it replaced it with mobile terror.
Right, he did some kind of terrible to get people to work, because otherwise people stay at home and sleep, or play with the kids or spend time on the beach, how do you get people to work, then you cannot be fired from your job, and you basically couldn’t be fired in Eastern Germany, you would get your money regardless of your productivity. So you indoctrinate them, you put up posters everywhere that reminds everybody to work, how important it is for the world peace, and for the destiny of the working class and everything else, that you work hard, and you give prices to the best workers and show them in TV and so on. But, of course, people so you sue this. And eventually, we are stuck with the same productivity as in the 1950s. And our society went bankrupt, we were not able to incentivize productivity, and the proper allocation of resources. So every system that wants to revenue, revolutionize and improve capitalism needs to figure out how this can actually work. It’s not going to work on goodwill, it’s going to work because it’s going to shift the incentives in the right way. And it’s clear that the incentives that are present society are far from optimal. But every improvement needs to be based on actually improving the allocation of incentives.
keevin bybee 42:14
Yes, 100%. Agree. And I guess I’m curious, how do we tie that to subjective experience as it is manifested in us based on our particular physiology, biology and evolutionary history? I don’t know the answer. But I guess I would like to think that exploring incentives from the using the lens of how emotions are generated based on the meatsuit that we occupy, can only lead us in the right direction. I mean, certainly it can be a weapon used against us. But at the same time, I would say critical to know those things, if we are to develop an alternative to what we call late stage capitalism. Do you agree and or what do you think about that?
joscha bach 43:02
I think What’s crucial is systemic thinking. And systemic thinking means that you need not to try to understand the world in terms of the immediate effects of your actions. Most of the conflicts that we see between people at different ages and different ideologies, there is a correlation between ancient ideology, right, when you’re young, you tend to be on the far left, and then you become more liberal, and then you become more conservative. It’s not that this trajectory happens to every individual, but there is a general trend that can be observed over the generations. And I suspect the difference between these worldviews is not the aesthetics of the world that people would prefer. Most people that I know really would prefer a world in which everybody has a good life and can self actualize, and is happy and community works. And there is no war and violence and so on. But the question is, how do we get there? And this is where people differ. And many of the differences are about the order of the effects that people are considering. Which means if you change the following thing, what are the consequences? And what are the consequences of those consequences? And what are the consequences of those consequences? And this is very often counter intuitive. So we tend to see, the differences are between how the world is and how we think it should be and best by eliminating all these differences. Shouldn’t it get better and we don’t realize that the world is the attempt of billion, the result of billions of attempts to fix it. And that’s why it is the way it is. It’s not because nobody has ever tried to fix it. So everything is in a certain balance. If you are defending the police, then you will have fewer people being violated by the police, but you will also have more violent crime and more murders right because the police are basically the T cells of society they are the immune system. And I think that a normal cell when it account is the T cell gets very nervous because T cells make mistakes. Right? They Attack cells and kill them. That’s what they do. And they do this based on some pattern matching. And the pattern matching is not always perfect. And policeman who works on the frontline against crime is somebody who is willing to risk their life and limb to protect society in the abstract against people who are actually violent. And this is a very specific kind of person. It’s a person who is willing to be violent, and is a person who was willing to take great risk without immediate reward that compensates for that risk. So maybe it’s not the smartest person even right, so they are. You need somebody who was brave in a way, and you need somebody who is willing to be violent and still can be controlled. It’s difficult to find people like this. And they’re still they’re super important, and you need to protect them in a way and they will not be perfect the thing that you get, but if you just go for a simple answer, like so many people have been violated by police. That’s why we should abolish the police and everybody will be nice in return. This is not working, right? It’s a very simple first order effect, that cannot be seen. But the story is much, much deeper than this. Everything that in the world that is ordered is is a result of powers that are in balance. Freedom never emerges by itself, it always emerges in the balance of power. Basically, most governments that exists are the result of organized crime that gets to the top and consolidates. It’s the farmers of the farmers that sit at the top of most societies in a way. And even if the farmers pretend, defend themselves against the standards that get to the top by building a standing army, then the descending army is going to take the same role, right? So you get your aristocracy one way or the other. And how can you balance such a society and so on. And the solution that we have found is not perfect, but it’s better than most of the things that we’ve seen in human history. So instead of measuring against the utopia that we tell the kids in preschool, we should measure it against all the possible alternatives and try to understand how it actually works. Which means seeing society as something that it actually is, it’s far darker, than we make it out to be in school, at this far darker thing that actually is so so much better than most of the alternatives. So this systemic thinking is the really crucial thing that we need to teach where we need to explain how things actually pan out. And this means that we have to go to places that hurt that you don’t want to look at. And the way in which we teach to our children, how society works is, I think, very childish. There is this, it neglects the true incentives. To me, the true enemy of education is Dora the Explorer, this classification of trying to understand human relationships. And incidentally, Dora the Explorer is the role model for teachers, I think, for young teachers.
keevin bybee 48:04
We are a weird species, in that we, we like to put things into neat boxes, you know, it’s a cognitive, it’s a heuristic that tends to be useful, on average, to do reduce things to easily yes, no black, white kind of things, but does not accurately reflect the unfolding of the way quantum wave function, let alone the myriad of human interactions in the face of competing incentives that are poorly understood between each other, right, you know, offering complex human stories, being able to explore the pain of our history rather than some idealized version of it, the People’s History of the United States. But it’s a classic showing of the the opposite of the story of Columbus coming to America in peace, it’s really showing what he did to the Taino people on Hispaniola, for example, and we need to be able to look at that to know how we can shape our trajectory in a more pro social way. iteratively over time, tying into your systems thinking showing kids that the world is complex, and that there are unseen are unpredictable second, and third order consequences, I guess, do you have any insight on what’s a way to role model that for the impressionable mind
joscha bach 49:35
I remember when I learned about ancestral societies in Europe when I was in school, we had these models of villages which had these big defences around them made initially from wooden spikes, and later on from stone walls and so on. And what I didn’t learn was that these wooden spikes were not the first villages but this was the second generation of the villages, the first generation of the villages were destroyed by invaders who took over the land, and then build spikes against the third wave of invaders. And they were not the last ones. And in some sense, our species has been always very competitive in the same way as we can observe this with chimpanzees, or lions and so on. The we are a species that has prevailed in a murderous competition for limited resources. And so when Columbus came and started genocide, on the Native Americans, debt was not a novel thing. It was not a unique thing. It was this default procedure. This is how homosapiens operates. And homosapiens didn’t operate in this mode in Europe anymore, because Europe was completely consolidated. And absorbed, it is countries that had all large armies. And these large armies were limiting the amount of Canada’s genocide that could be committed because the costs were so high. But when this extremely developed, and highly aggressive, and militarized society, met the Neolithic society that didn’t know how to build many mental tools that didn’t have a military because the military requires mathematics instead of just warriors that are brave. Right, this was the tribal society that met the state building society. And what happened was that society that had a land that was very thinly populated, because their mode of agriculture could not sustain a very large number of people, it was much more in sync with nature, and so on. But it was far from the productivity that Europeans could achieve, they found they have much better use for this land. So they conquered it. And we are the descendants of those conquerors. For the most part, we almost completely eradicated those that lived there before. And now we have become soft. And we don’t have the stomach to look at what the conquerors had been doing, and to tear down their statues. But we are their children. Right? Not me, personally, I’m European. And my family history is different. But this, this identity doesn’t matter. It’s eventually just a story. I’m just born into a monkey body, in this century, looking at the society that I’m in, and then I can craft my identity around this. But what I have to see is that the society that I am in the technological society that I’m in, the one that has internet, and so on, required that this continent was conquered, and the conquest of this continent was not going to be peaceful. So in many ways, we are on a titanic that is going to hit the iceberg. And without this titanic, we would not have been born. Because outside of the Titanic, there is no internet, there is no high productivity, there is no almost free food, there is high child mortality and so on. So and you cannot have one without the other you cannot have in dense industrial society, without first conquering the land on which to build it, and to conquer the resources. So it’s very hard for me to have an answer. And it becomes much easier when I become an alien. When I look at this, what this happens on this planet, not by having empathy for every single individual, which I try to do, and I’m overwhelmed by the suffering when I do this, also, the suffering of animals that we inflict on this planet is unbearable to me. But then I just see this as the history of complex life on the planet, that it all seems to be inevitable.
keevin bybee 53:48
Powerful words, the naive optimist in me wants to think about to what degree can we steer the Titanic, and simultaneously repurpose its innards for as many lifeboats as possible? Do you? Do you have an intuition about the degree to which that’s possible? And how we might move in that direction, as a group and, or BI as individuals?
joscha bach 54:19
Obviously, I don’t have an answer to this, there are too many possibilities how this can play out. And what we can do is we can sketch the space of the possible answers. And so on one end of the spectrum, you will have the transhumanists. And the transhumanist idea is that we solve everything this technology. We modify the body and the mind of humans to make it compatible with survival and the exploration of the stars. And we solve all our existing problems by identifying technological solutions to them that can be implemented in such a way that they avoid human suffering. This is the most optimistic version that I’m aware of. Then, the on the other end of the spectrum, there is pente, Lincoln life finished philosopher, who says that the, if you actually love life, you will, and you are on a lifeboat. And this lifeboat is filled to capacity and there are more trying to get in, you will grab an axe and hack off the hands of those trying to get in. In his view, we need to dramatically reduce the number of people who live on the planet. And we need to scale back and resource use. And we need to turn our society brutally and radically environmentally into something because there’s no alternative to this violence, because people will not peacefully not have kids into something that is sustainable. This is the other end of the spectrum. And within this spectrum, other possible answers. And most societies hope that people find a solution when the time comes. And in between the things that if you want don’t want to go into the direction of a war that established an equal dictatorship, or if you don’t think that there will be a way to modify humanity in such a way that all our problems disappear, then we find ourselves in this middle spectrum, we try to maximize our chances that it goes well, even though we don’t see a guarantee that it goes well. And so some initiatives that I would like to see as, for instance, building simulators of the world that allow us to test the impacts of technology, and of political decisions on our future. So imagine you had something like Google Earth globe, you can zoom in as far as you want. And that is updated in real time using all the data sources that we have. And that allows us to zoom into the past and into the future. And then apply changes and then zoom into the future and see how things might play out. And use this as an educational a decision making tool and have competitions to make this thing better and better. Right, this just as a vision, that could be super interesting to basically have a policy that depends on expected outcome, talk about the next X Prize, we want to build societies where the incentives are better aligned with outcomes. And this could mean that we give more freedom for experimentation, that give people a greater stake in what they’re deciding over. That communities become smaller maybe and that we make more decisions locally. And that only the decisions that need to be coordinated on a central level are going to be coordinated at a central level. I suspect it’s also in principle possible to have a world without wars. The secret to have evolved without wars is very counter intuitive. It’s a big death star in the sky. Now, when we look at Star Wars, the story is being told, it’s actually the story of The Hobbit. Right? It’s the same story in a way you have a middle earth that is testable and friendly. And then you have Mordor and the Empire is Mordor. And it’s going to destroy everything. And you have to you have to brave warriors on their horses that fight against the machines that genetically engineered orcs, and so on and the technology of model and hope to prevail. And the story that is being told is a metaphor for the Industrial Revolution. It’s being written at a time where the pastoral feudalist, England was replaced by an industrialized England that would have factories and roadways and highways and so on and would forever destroy this landscape. Its sustainability and the festival things and so on that existed and its beauty. And this has happened, Mater has won.
And if you don’t tell the story from the perspective of Mordor, but we are in Mordor, we are basically on this other side. And if you look at Star Wars, from this perspective, what you can see is that you have a society of slavers, and of bandits and murderers, and it is medieval and feudalist. And on the other side, you have a technocratic democracy that tries to subdue it. And the reason why Anakin switches sites and becomes dark with Darth Vader is because his mother is being murdered by bandits. And she is not murdered. Because the dependents were oppressed, or because they didn’t have enough food or something like this, or because somebody was mean to them. They did this because they could, it was their way of living. They didn’t care. They were not civilized, they had no rules of how to interact friendly with strangers. And this business first break this this society that he defends on the side of the Jedi, the religious extremists, the defenders who build a society against the technocratic democracy. Now he is breaks completely free after his family is killed, as far as he knows, and there is no love for him or anymore in the world. And he dedicates the rest of This life for making sure that this doesn’t happen anymore, that little boys will lose their mother to benefits. And the only way to do this is to build the Deathstar, which is the monopoly of violence. It means that if you are abandoned, to wants to build a private army, you are going to be destroyed, you now have to because you now have a single force that has a monopoly on violence, everybody else has to be peaceful. And this is a principle that exists in all states that are successful that they have a monopoly on violence. And this is something that is counterintuitive to a lot of people. And the monopoly of violence doesn’t mean that you have to actually use it. The Deathstar is nothing that helps you to win wars, because afterwards, there’s nothing left, there’s only ashes. If the military comes and brings peace to a city by destroying all the gangs, then nothing is left of the city, this is not the way to do it, right. So rule by the military is not a good rule. But it’s to have a military that is firmly established and then keeps out of civilian affairs, is the prerequisite for having a civilian society that by itself is non violent. And once you have this non violence, all the other things like the negotiation about human rights is a result of this non violence because you can only discuss the baud rates, if, if it’s not just made, that makes right if it’s the actual negotiation, if everybody has a voice and your voice and your desires and your willingness to cooperate, play a role, and you cannot be just brutally forced this bland violence to be cooperative. So in this sense, we could prevent something like a war that happens at the moment, if we had a global authority that has a monopoly on violence and forces all states to get along peacefully. But it would also imply that because nobody can force a different group to be part of a state, that gives a universal right for groups in every state to secede to form their own state. And to join states as they see fit. And if he would do this, then also this war would look differently because some of the people in Donbass and Crimea and so on who actually don’t want to belong to Ukraine. Right. So it would completely change the landscape. And many of the changes that we see right now, also, due to the fact that almost all large states have groups that want to secede, and that we need to keep in check, right for it would be bad for the US of California seats. Because it would be a substantial chunk, chunk of the American economy that would be gone.
keevin bybee 1:02:28
Yeah, as much as the southeast might say those words that would only shoot themselves in the foot. And one thing I always wished was why instead of sending in tanks and bombs, why at a border, don’t we just build a bunch of hospitals and schools and so that this, the depth, the, if we did have the Deathstar civilization, it was one where we just make it so attractive from a, you get you, you, you get taken care of, and then you get to do your art on the side, rather than an imposition at the end of a barrel. And I’m just curious, is that possible? Like, what are the steps that we take to to consolidate violence to a Death Star and not by roaming bands of military at the point of a literal barrel?
joscha bach 1:03:24
But you can ask ourselves, why don’t we start in Oakland? Why don’t people better schools and so on in Oakland, and stop the violence there? Right. And it seems that the problem is incentives. If we try to build anything, we need to pay off mafia to build something. Right, as soon as there is money to be made, things disappear. And I think that an issue in the US is organized crime is a very big issue and organized crime takes many forms. It is in the healthcare system, it is in the unions, it is in the government. It’s everywhere, where people are not serving a shared purpose, but are legally or illegally working into their own interest at the expense of the greater whole,
keevin bybee 1:04:09
as a physician and personally torn by my role in the naive place where I just want to do good by people and provide preventative care and alleviate suffering. But at the same time, I am at on some level, a tool of the industrial pharmaceutical industrial complex, who makes the most money by making sure people are just unhealthy enough to need their antihypertensives but not so healthy, that they can live an unfettered life. And so I certainly feel torn. Hence, trying to channel that towards something like building a school. I don’t know how to sit with it, and I resonate with what you’re saying. And I’m just curious if you have any words of wisdom on how to sit with the contradictions of Living in the modern world,
joscha bach 1:05:02
I don’t have an easy answer to this show that I’ve watched recently that tries to deal with this topic was sense of anarchy. It’s an attempt to retell an idealized way of the story of the Hells Angels, what a biker gang. And it’s situated nearby it’s and pleasant, and on the East Coast, it for the purpose of the soul has been renamed into charming. And this gang is sincerely trying to build an anarchist alternative to the existing state. So the enemy is basically what they call the old white money. It’s the thing that buys off the local economy and turns it into chains that extract all the economic surplus from the local economy and transfers into the funds of the investors that sit outside of these communities. And this impoverishes the committees and hollows out their goods and services, and they try to build something local instead. But in order to make this happen, they have to do this outside of the system of laws and norms that have been established to make exactly this exploitation happen. And so what they have to do has to be outlaw, they have to build an outlaw economy. And of course, this fails and fails dramatically. And so that you see this story of trying to build an alternative, outlaw civilization, on the substrate invasion and parallel to the late stage capitalism, as you may call it, right, and neither seems to work. And there is no easy answer to this. So in many ways, what you still can do, I think, is to build communities that love together, the idea would be to basically build an organization something like a club, that as its main purpose is to serve the good of its present and future members. And membership is voluntary. And what this clap is doing is it builds an interface and API that sits on top of the dysfunctional substrate of whatever host society you find yourself in, and replaces those parts of the whole society that don’t work. So for instance, in the US, that would be health care, housing, and are part of the shopping. So you would get better food that is more nutritious, and eliminates the stuff that you don’t want to have in your foot. And because you would have a large group of shared buyers that curate the food that they want to eat, it would be economically viable, in the same way it would own its own housing stock, and have different modes of distributing this housing stock. And it would probably provide educational services, and it would have its own hospitals. And thereby also its own health insurance. And so you could, then would need to make this compatible with the legal system of the whole society, because many things and legal system of the whole society are designed to prevent such competition to make sure that people are exploited by the existing stakeholders, which means that many of the politicians and stakeholders in person to be invited to become members. So they will have a stake in this. And once I realized this, I thought, Oh, God, I’ve just invented the mafia.
keevin bybee 1:08:35
Yeah, they don’t almost seems on some level that there’s no way out. It does. It does. Pretty similar to the game, the movement that Jim Ross is trying to bring to fruition, I really enjoyed your conversations with him as well.
joscha bach 1:08:54
So I do appreciate his attempts. But I think that most of these attempts are probably going to fail and their internal difficulties. And basically, building a new society in an old one that is currently under duress. And failing is a very hard task. And if you look into human history, it has not often succeeded. But sometimes it did. And I mean, in some sense, the US was started in this way there was this network of Freemasons, that has consolidated in Europe, in large part is a result of the horrors of the French Revolution. A lot of the work of the lodges after the French Revolution was directed or preventing another revolution of this kind, and having the future revolutionary changes more peaceful, which means reform the existing systems behind the scenes, and so they try to get many of these smart, powerful, influential people behind the scenes together into a network that made decisions and in the US, I think it was such a network that has basically facilitated the split of the US From the British Empire and turns it into its own country, and divisions that basically the founding fathers of the US develop were developed in these circles. So there was basically a secret society of luminaries that got together and tried to design a better world out of the existing one. But it happened in a time of turmoil, and then many things were unsure and so on. But maybe we have such a time right now, maybe you have such a time right now. But the government is indeed very vague, and doesn’t have a plan. And I thought that, for instance, when the FDA started to prevent testing, and we had test capacities in California, why didn’t care Gavin Newsom, just say, Screw the federal law, let them sue us, we laugh at them, right, who is going to support the legal system, if it forces you to accept a regulation that actually harms and kills people, and everybody can see it. And this would have been, I think, the opportunity to reinvent some of the defective elements of federalism in the US and put pressure on the whole system to renew itself. And I thought, maybe COVID is a chance, but it was an e4, and it didn’t happen. And maybe if there was never a chance, I don’t know, I cannot see it, if it is Festivus was a missed opportunity, or whether there actually was no chance. But whatever is the case, right now, we are in a situation of great possibility for change in the US because the social fabric and unity of the US is very weak. It’s very easy to subvert it from the outside. But it would also be easy to subvert it from the inside, if you have a good purpose.
keevin bybee 1:11:40
Those are harder words to end on, especially given their optimism in the rest of this conversations, context.
joscha bach 1:11:49
Maybe something optimistic at the end, one thing that I really like about the US is that in its core, it is still an optimistic country. And it is an openness that don’t exist in other countries. And I also don’t think that the US is going to be fascist anytime soon. Right, the peanut, the project for New American Century did try to install some kind of fascism, and it failed. And I think that’s because the US is too diverse. And I don’t think that diversity is not as unique, vocally good, as many people make it out to be Switzerland is very successful, because it has almost no diversity. It has drawn its Canton boundaries, exactly along the language families and so on, to minimize the diversity inside of the groups in a way. But historically, the US has been able to be different in this regard. It has been able to leverage the actual diversity of the people and turn it into innovation. And the fact that the US doesn’t speak with one voice that it’s not unified and so on is an enormous potential for innovation and for individual freedom. And it still is this way is us has an amount of personal freedom and power of innovation that still doesn’t exist in China and maybe will never exist. And if you’re able to be discovered this and basically remove many of the obstacles that lead our society calcify. I think something new will grow.
keevin bybee 1:13:09
Thank you for this ride through history, sci fi naming our feelings. Really, really appreciate your time.
joscha bach 1:13:18
Thank you keevin. I also enjoyed this. Thank you very much for this conversation. I enjoyed it very much
Transcribed by https://otter.ai