I, scientist with Balazs Kegl

My fourth conversation with the philosopher Alexander Bard, on his new book project on mysticism, bliss, the importance of phenomenology, the philosophy of time, transcendence, and transformation.Related episodes:https://youtu.be/Y8cuqy6y0fo Alexander Bard part 1: sex, Zoroastrianism, embodied philosophyhttps://youtu.be/eASbv9WA-TQ Alexander Bard part 2: tantric sex, sex and spirituality, men's workhttps://youtu.be/3eAwktR3S3s Alexander Bard part 3: anthropology and AIBard on Sweeney, discussing the book project on mysticismhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFU0ot5daoghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtaDAqbAE3Ahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxlQyzDwTfo00:00:00 Intro: making philosophy.00:03:33 Why mysticism? Transcendence and transformation. The philosophy of time.00:14:53 The right order: phenomenology -> epistemology -> ontology of mysticism. Pathos-mythos-logos and subconscious/conscious. Only present exists. The past subsists and the future absists. The past is determinate, the future is indeterminate, the present is transdeterminate.00:26:08 Animal philosophy.00:28:51 Phenomenology of mysticism. Dancing myself unconscious. Varayana Buddhism. The two subjectless extreme states: pure experience and the infinite now. You can't do science of consciousness. 00:37:47 The historical and sociological context: pillar saints and boy pharaohs, sutra/tantra. The infinite now and orgasm. 00:49:41 Pure experience and the other-world dualism. The psychoanalytical view: neurosis and psychosis. Mamilla and embodiment.01:01:24 Mysticism is minimalism. The job of philosophy to kill axioms. Mysticism is practiced philosophy. Mysticism kills fantasies about how the world works. The importance of integration.01:09:42 The problem with western existentialism is that it assumes the subject is constant.01:10:17 Why go mystic? Why you? Why now? How? The birth of a child: instant bliss. Go deeper?01:14:22 The first thing the mystic says: there is no purpose to this. The phenomenology-epistemology loop has been ignored by philosophers.I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/balazskeglArtwork: DALL-EMusic: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My conversation with Kevin Mitchell, neuroscientist and geneticist at Trinity College Dublin, on free agency and randomness, nested selves, mental causation and the tension between free choice and control, and artificial agents.Kevin's books:Free Agents: https://www.amazon.com/Free-Agents-Evolution-Gave-Will/dp/0691226237/Innate: https://www.amazon.com/Innate-How-Wiring-Brains-Shapes/dp/0691204152/Related episodes:Michael Levin: https://youtu.be/0nMXYdayQIUEmbodied AI: https://youtu.be/JZ8GTucClpMAlexander Ororbia: https://youtu.be/N83vBfz7_BIYogi Jaeger: https://youtu.be/5UJ4y2L2qpkBaudouin Saintyves: https://youtu.be/NmvzEpz9R84Laura Desiree Di Paolo: https://youtu.be/9txUwVtAOBkAnna Riedl: https://youtu.be/w2ZiSWZNQsgAnna Ciaunica: https://youtu.be/x1QHwhlCn-8Giuseppe Paolo: https://youtu.be/R7tEd65e2i800:00:00 Intro: the psychological angle of theories of consciousness.00:05:00 Free agency and randomness. The world is nondeterministic, but where the possibility of control comes from? Causal slack + selection.00:15:14 The tension of randomness: its harmful but it also needs to be nurtured and amplified. From particle decay to neural "noise".00:21:38 Nested agency and cognition. Vertical dynamics of hierarchical distributed control. Multicellularity. 00:34:58 What looks random from outside may be what the 1st person system experiences as free agency. Psychopathologies.00:40:58 Selves and fuzzy boundaries. Dyads and collectives. Couples' therapy, ant colonies, lineages.00:55:58 Spirituality. Being part of a bigger organism. Rituals. Game theory and incentive design.01:08:30 AI. AGI vs _an_ AGI. Agency in Minecraft.01:18:58 What's next for Kevin? The tension of choice and control. Mental causation. Genetic decoding. I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/balazskeglArtwork: DALL-EMusic: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My first conversation with Michael Levin, a developmental biologist revolutionizing how we think about cellular collective, agency, and life in general. One of those conversations where I feel we dive deep and only scratch the surface, at the same time: nested agents, birth, aging, and death, third person and first person science. Related episodes:Embodied AI: https://youtu.be/JZ8GTucClpMAlexander Ororbia: https://youtu.be/N83vBfz7_BIBaudouin Saintyves: https://youtu.be/NmvzEpz9R84Laura Desiree Di Paolo: https://youtu.be/9txUwVtAOBkAnna Riedl: https://youtu.be/w2ZiSWZNQsgAnna Ciaunica: https://youtu.be/x1QHwhlCn-8Giuseppe Paolo: https://youtu.be/R7tEd65e2i800:00 Intro.04:11 Agency. Cellular cognition. How to prompt cells?18:45 Nested agency. Interpenetrating ecosystems, vertical and horizontal. The life of persistent patterns.23:46 Nested cognitive light cones: how do goals grow in collective agents?31:34 What do the parts think about the whole? How does higher level meaning manifests itself at lower levels? The shamanistic method of first-person "science".38:33 Why do we die? Layered ontology and Bard's process and event: the dynamics of nested agents. Birth, death, self-transformation. Psychological theory of aging. Vervaeke's reciprocal narrowing.I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/balazskeglArtwork: DALL-EMusic: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Meet my two wonderful colleagues with whom we wrote a position paper last year "A Call for Embodied AI". We talk about the limits of the current "internet AI" paradigm. We agree that singularity, if even a thing, is very far, LLMs will not lead there, but that social media AI is already an embodied AI that is seamlessly rewiring us.Paper: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/paolo24a.htmlRelated episodes: Yogi Jaeger: https://youtu.be/5UJ4y2L2qpkAnna Riedl: https://youtu.be/w2ZiSWZNQsgAnna Ciaunica: https://youtu.be/x1QHwhlCn-8Alexander Ororbia: https://youtu.be/N83vBfz7_BILaura Desire di Paolo: https://youtu.be/9txUwVtAOBk00:00:00 Intro.00:02:54 Why are we interested in embodied AI? Robotics and philosophy.00:12:10 The ingredients of embodied AI.00:15:30 Affordances. Seeing the world as a set of meanings rather than a set of objects. Who is setting the goals?00:28:29 Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle and Active Inference. Open and closed worlds. The hardware challenge. Filtering and relevance realization. Jaeger's non-computationality argument.00:39:36 Lecun's JEPA and our criticism: representation is not objective, it is transjective. Babies learn interactively. The importance of love (binding) and self-sacrifice. Levin's TAME. Multi-agent emergence.00:52:23 AGI. What do we want from AGI to be? Life? Slaves? Asimov's I, Robot, and the impossibility of propositional alignment.01:01:50 The issue with optimization: timescale. Levin's cognitive cones. The only answer is love.01:07:44 Social media AI. The Algorithm, feed, companies, advertisement. The subconscious of internet. The danger. How are they embodied? They are spirits. I want access to the Algorithm at an intermediate level. I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/balazskeglArtwork: DALL-EMusic: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alexander Bard, a philosopher and futurist, dives deep into the complexities of technology's impact on humanity. He discusses the concepts of 'anaject' and 'hyperject,' exploring anonymity and heroic figures in society. Bard analyzes AI from an anthropological perspective, pointing out its lack of emotional intelligence and creativity. The conversation also touches on the dangers of misinformation in AI, the societal effects of consumer practices, and the need for more humane interactions with technology, all peppered with reflective insights.

We get deep into identity and death. If you are fascinated by Michael Levin and Jonathan Pageau, this conversation is for you.Fascinating discussion where we go beyond the Free Energy Principle, and even Levin's cognitive cones, and postulate that crucial internal structures, a subset of me, are what define identity. If they get damaged, I lose my identity. Deep self-transformation may also rupture my continuity. When does it happen, when do I die, as opposed to my subsystems dying? Very much a sequel to my conversation with Yogi Jaeger (https://youtu.be/5UJ4y2L2qpk). The paradox of self-preservation vs self-sacrifice. Maverick computing and organoids.Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rochester Institute of Technology. He directs the Neural Adaptive Computing (NAC) Laboratory where they work on developing new learning procedures and computational architectures that embody various properties of biological neurocircuitry and are guided by theories of mind and brain functionality. His research focuses on predictive processing, active inference, spiking neural networks, competitive neural learning, neural-based cognitive modeling, and metaheuristic optimization.Alexander's webpage: https://www.rit.edu/directory/agovcs-alexander-ororbiaPaper link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09589Biological learning survey: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.0925700:00:00 Intro00:01:37 Geoff Hinton's "mortal computation" idea: what if software and hardware were inseparable? Cybernetics, thermodynamics, 4e cognitive science, basal cognition.00:11:20 Hinton's energy consumption argument.00:21:01 The self-preservation directive is the source of intelligence. The free energy principle. The non-equilibrium steady state is your identity.00:32:21 The paradox of the membrane: a permeable separation of inside and outside. The nestedness of inside and outside: fractal structure. Beyond FEP: identity-defining internal structures. Subsystemic death. Bottom-up and top-down causation.00:52:12 Why mortal (as opposed to living) computation? The crucial role of finite time horizon.01:01:49 The paradox of self-preservation vs self-sacrifice. Life drive vs death drive. Is death a must? Maverick computing and organoids.01:15:38 My take on embodiment and mortality.I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/balazskeglArtwork: DALL-EMusic: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this engaging discussion, philosopher Alexander Bard explores profound topics intertwining technology, sexuality, and spirituality. He delves into yoga's evolution from physical practice to spiritual alignment and its implications for relationships. Archetypes in human dynamics reveal how individuality shapes communities, while rituals' significance in marking life's milestones underscores the connection between spirituality and sexuality. Bard also synthesizes insights from various philosophies, stressing the importance of purpose in both personal and collective journeys.

In this engaging conversation, Alexander Bard, a philosopher, futurist, and former 90s pop star, delves into the fascinating interplay between humanity and technology. He challenges the notion of trust in philosophy based on one’s personal life and critiques Gnosticism’s disconnect from embodiment. Bard also presents his metaphysical ideas, emphasizing the importance of ongoing processes over isolated events. Discussions on Zoroastrianism reveal its community-building aspects, while reflections on personal spirituality highlight the need for authenticity in a rapidly evolving world.

Dan Shipper (http://danshipper.com/)is an entrepreneur, writer, and the CEO and co-founder of Every (https://every.to/@danshipper), a daily newsletter on business, AI, and personal development read by nearly 75,000 founders, operators, and investors. He writes a weekly column at Every called Chain of Thought, where he covers topics like AI, tools for thought, and the psychology of work.I contacted Dan because he makes his living off the writing industry, yet instead of panicking, he took the LLM revolution head on, choosing to lead it instead of ducking. Join us to explore creative uses of generative AI for writing and personal development. Fascinating discussion about science at the end where we are both at the edge of our chairs and knowledge.If you like this, you may also be interested in my conversation with Tatjana (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KJ29Nslbl8) and Joel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmIHnZRY5zo) on creative writing and teaching AI.00:00:00 Intro.00:04:18 Dan's journey: software and writing.00:13:45 The writing industry and the business model of Every.00:19:45 How future works. AI, ChatGPT, creativity, psychology: Dan's writing.00:25:25 ChatGPT and personal development. Mirroring and motivational interviewing. Dealing with dragons, cognitive behavioral therapy. https://www.maxyourmind.xyz 00:33:34 Therapy. Dan's fight with OCD. Embodiment, somatic therapy. Podcast as a therapy.00:46:28 GPT and creativity. Link to interview with David Perell. How to get rid of the GPT smell. Link to Dan's app. Dan's definition of art.01:00:14 GPT and writing. Personalized content vs shared stories and shared game-like media.01:06:52 AI and science. Prediction without theory. Complexity and embodied intuition. Multiplicity of causes and categorization. Connectionist induction. I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/balazskeglArtwork: DALL-EMusic: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Csaba Szepesvári is a prominent figure in machine learning and artificial intelligence, particularly known for his contributions to reinforcement learning. He is a professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta and a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind.Our goal in life: keep eating Yann Lecun's cherry (inside joke, ask GPT).This was a wide-reaching conversation with my good friend Csaba. The first 50 minutes is about AI, we give you insight into what AI researchers and practitioners are dealing behind the scenes, a bit of history and practice of AI.At around 49 minutes we discuss Yann Lecun's view on model-based planning and reinforcement learning, which is one of the most interesting and far-reaching discussion within AI (should we model the world or just learn to reach goals?).This naturally leads into relevance realization: what to learn predict and what to ignore, which is the most important question of AGI.The last 20 minutes it turns more personal, we talk about our life as scientists, the metaphysical no man's land (nonreductionist naturalist metaphysics), and my wrestling with Christianity.If you like this, check out my conversations with Yogi Jaeger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UJ4y2L2qpk, Anna Riedl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2ZiSWZNQsg, and Giuseppe Paolo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7tEd65e2i8.00:00:00 Intro.00:02:39 Google Deep Mind and leading the Foundations team. Theory tells what is possible, and how to do it? What does theory add to practice in machine learning?00:08:58 Probabilistic guarantees. Sorting vs machine learning. Random algorithms and random data.00:15:57 Theory and practice. Support vector machines, boosting, and neural nets. History of AI. Practice-driven ML.00:24:34 Neural nets: history and practice. The fiddliness and the robustification. Overfitting. Overparameterization vs classical statistics. Label noise and regularization.00:35:06 Reinforcement learning. Learning to behave. Learning to collect data.00:39:10 Why did we get into AI: to understand intelligence and ourselves.00:41:48 Reinforcement learning: model of an intelligent agent. Theory: wrt a fully informed agent, how much do you lose by having to learn?00:49:17 To model or not to model? Model-based reinforcement learning.00:58:18 Latent representation of importance, relevance realization. Steelmanning and criticizing Yann Lecun's cherry metaphor. Relevance vs simplicity. The shiny object syndrome.01:12:40 The Jaeger - Riedl - Djedovic - Vervaeke - Walsh paper on naturalizing relevance realization.01:24:12 Fear and technology. Regulation, freedoms, open source.01:33:00 Framing precedes observation.01:35:60 Subjectivity of science. Can we be part of the world we study?01:43:55 The metaphysical no man's land: nonreductionist naturalism.01:48:00 Why am I not yet a Christian? Omnipotence and lack of embodiment, rituals that focus on our responsibility of what is below.I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/balazskeglArtwork: DALL-EMusic: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.