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9: Humanity 2.0 (Transhumanism)
538 Plays7 years ago
Humanity, since its inception, has been nebulously defined. Every technological advancement has changed what it means to be a person, and every person has changed what it means to advance. In this same vein, there is a concept called “transhumanism”, which refers to what it will mean to be a person. This can range from everything from genetic engineering, to artificial intelligence, to technology which is beyond our current physical understanding. So what does it mean to be a person? And is transhumanism compatible with our natural understanding, if it exists, of being?
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Transcript
Introduction: Technology in Sci-Fi and Reality
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm Jonathan. And I'm Gabriel. And today we have a special episode. Gabriel, what's it about? Today we're going to talk about the technology that we find most inspiring in our favorite science fiction. We're also going to talk about the real science that inspires that.
00:00:14
Speaker
And, of course, with all science fiction, you have things that might happen, things that might not happen. But without further ado, we have this very special episode of Breaking Math that we're calling an episode because we put so much thought into it. Enjoy.
00:00:35
Speaker
and every person has changed what it means to advance. In this same vein, there is a concept called transhumanism, which refers to what it will mean to be a person. This can range from everything, from genetic engineering, to artificial intelligence, to technology which is beyond our current physical understanding. So what does it mean to be a person? And is transhumanism compatible with our natural understanding, if it exists, of being? All this and more on this special episode of Breaking Math. Episode 9, Humanity 2.0.
Guests Introduction and Initial Thoughts
00:01:10
Speaker
I'm Jonathan Baca. And I'm Gabrielle Hesh. And today, we have a few new guests. We have Julian Wild. Hi, Julian. How are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. Awesome. I'm very, very glad to have you here, Julian. Julian, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. I myself am a human. I was born and raised as such and continue to be one and want to be one. I'm from right here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I own Wild Humans, which is a performing arts collaborative group.
00:01:40
Speaker
That helps to produce a lot lots of different things from live paintings to slam poetry to a band called wild humans We kind of do it all and so big theater background big music background. I'm happy to be here and big sci-fi nerd
00:01:52
Speaker
So what authority does a wild human have when it comes to domesticating humans, especially extremely domesticated like we're going to be talking about in this episode? Well, I guess the theory is that we're all wild humans and this is our natural habitat and nothing that we do, no substance we invent for ourselves, nothing we manufacture is actually outside of the realm of nature at all. It's all part of a natural evolution. And so we're all wild humans and this is our natural habitat with clothes made from plant matter and microphones fashioned for more in the ground and all of that.
00:02:21
Speaker
Very good points. And we also have... Sam Sanders. And Sam, would you like to tell us a bit about yourself? Sure. I'm a longtime science fiction geek. I've always been really into getting into different realities and universes and seeing where humans can go, at least in the imagination realm. I'm right now a student and studying to become a physical therapist. And I'm really excited to see where humanity can go using these transhuman concepts.
00:02:47
Speaker
And Gabriel, how would you define transhumanism?
Transhumanism: Concepts and Debates
00:02:50
Speaker
Oh, transhumanism, that's fascinating. The terminology is actually newer to me. Now, I haven't been quite in the loop with science fiction because of my studies, but I've read some stuff recently. Of course, transhumanism has a definition. Let's see, I'll summarize it. Transhumanism, transhumanism is the belief that we will further our capabilities as humans and we will also perhaps change some of the fundamentals of what it means to be human through technology.
00:03:16
Speaker
And you sourced a lot of this episode from Dr. Shawn Mio-Moeino, right? That is absolutely correct. I'm thrilled to announce that I was perusing the interwebs about a month back and I found an article on one of the very, very popular pop science pages. And there was a discussion specifically on transhumanism. And I felt that Dr. Mio Moeino had a lot to say on it that was very interesting.
00:03:42
Speaker
Yeah. And we'll be covering what he said a little bit later. Yes. Yes. We absolutely will. It was almost he was having a nice riveting discussion. And how do I phrase this? There are two very different opinions from people with very strong feelings. And it gave me a lot to think about about technology and the whole idea of transhumanism.
00:04:03
Speaker
No, I'm very interested in transhumanism myself. As a programmer, I believe that certain programming languages as well as certain modalities of thought are transhuman by their nature. Lisp, for example, a language invented in 1959 at MIT, is one of my favorite modalities of thought.
00:04:21
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I've heard a lot of people who talk about transhumanist ideas, and I know that some people who find the ideas of transhumanism frightening, you know, I often think about early transhumanists even include people like Galileo who invented his version of a telescope. Human beings are not naturally able to see that far, but he augmented his own abilities. So I don't find the idea so frightening.
00:04:49
Speaker
And I also think that we are already much more further along in transhumanism than we realize. I wanted to say one other thing as well. As I was researching transhumanism, I realized that this topic has been touched on by a lot of different media outlets. I saw articles from National Geographic. I saw articles from Wired magazine. And I even saw a whole slew of Christian transhumanism blogs, which I found very interesting.
00:05:18
Speaker
And one of the things that you said about us being further along than we think reminds me of a definition that I've heard for artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is everything that we haven't discovered in computer science, according to some people. And it makes sense when you think about it. The Turing test will be completed by a robot that will fail it later because by definition, they'll have a different culture. And will their culture mimic ours? That's just something that we have to learn in the future.
00:05:43
Speaker
And not to assign lesser importance to this, but we have one more guest on today's episode. Again, returning as Jalila Arthur. Hello, reporting for duty as engineer and commentator. And Jalila, um, can you tell us about any of your views on transhumanism?
00:05:58
Speaker
Well just immediately on my mind I was thinking you said modalities of thought and recently this deaf woman in one of my classes gave a presentation and she issued that American Sign Language is not just a language, it is indeed, it's its own modality of thought.
00:06:16
Speaker
And you're referring here to the Superior Wharf hypothesis, correct? Yes. So, but your question, so that was immediately on my mind, but your question was what I know about transhumanism. And I've read Dune and I was reminded just that it is the inspiration for new, the upcoming graphic novel saga. Oh, and for those who are just joining us, those who may not be familiar with what the Spear Wharf hypothesis, I'm sorry, am I saying it right, Spear Wharf?
00:06:44
Speaker
I thought it was Sapir Whorf, but Jalila? Sapir. What the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is, is that language either directs or influences human thought. And Dune is something that we'll be talking about on this episode. I myself am not familiar with Dune, but we have people who are, and they claim that it has to do a lot with transhumanism, and we'll investigate that.
00:07:05
Speaker
Now, before we begin, before we get into the meat of this episode, I'd like to go ahead and talk a little bit about the discussion that I read on Facebook, the discussion specifically on transhumanism. There was an argument happening, and there were two schools of thought. On one hand, there was a gentleman who believed very, very strongly that our future is all in cybernetics. That is, that we will have to merge with machine in order to survive at all.
00:07:33
Speaker
There was another gentleman, Dr. Shawn Mio-Moino, who offered an alternative idea. The idea is that in the future, our sun will collapse. Our sun will have an end of its life and it'll end in some kind of a supernova. I believe, actually, I'm not sure if the size of our sun will be a supernova or if it will be a nova.
00:07:55
Speaker
However, the idea of either a Nova or a supernova is you might have an electromagnetic pulse and all it would take is a single electromagnetic pulse and all electronic life would be done for it. So the argument is that that's a major bottleneck and we're really limiting our means of survival.
00:08:13
Speaker
Let's say that there was a planet that had immense, immense gravity. It is very possible to genetically engineer our descendants to be very stout, very, very strong, and very well adept to survive in that environment. So I thought I'd like to bring that up here in this podcast episode and ask our guests and our hosts about their thoughts on genetic engineering versus cybernetics. Is there a difference? That's the question that I think about.
Transhumanism in Literature
00:08:43
Speaker
All of my earliest sci-fi dreamers like Heinlein, like Asimov, like Arthur C. Clarke, when I was reading these books, when I was reading these great authors, I really found that there was a common thread that ran through them in that humans can become something more than we are. And I'm wondering where the line is, because earlier you introduced the idea of artificial intelligence, but is that just post-organic life? And also if we're deliberately designing
00:09:12
Speaker
machines and we're deliberately designing organic life forms have we discovered a point where there is no difference and really is it transhumanism or is it post organic humanism that's what I think about
00:09:23
Speaker
For me it seems like the transhumanist technology front is happening. It's a progress that's happening every day and has been happening for a hundred years, you know. My dad just got a hearing aid and he says that if he turns the settings right he can hear somebody talking from across the room and that's transhumanism to me so that's something that's coming whether we want it to or not. Now bioengineering and really getting into
00:09:48
Speaker
changing people's biology, that's going to be more of an ethical thing that's going to keep us from doing it. Not so much the science, I think that's possible and I think it will be done, but it's going to be harder as a society to accept that kind of thing where we're changing people's organics.
00:10:02
Speaker
You had talked about the bottlenecking that would happen if, you know, electromagnetic pulse or wave and then all of our electronics are out of the window. So where are we really going with this? And my question is, yeah, like, does it matter? Like, even if that's going to happen, it hasn't happened yet. So we're not going to stop. I mean, here we are. We're definitely not going to stop. This is still exponentially evolving. And so even if it does bottleneck, it doesn't mean that we're not just going to go up and face that bottleneck.
00:10:32
Speaker
core memory, which is an old form of memory, you can stop on it. You could put it at the bottom of the sea and dig it up a hundred years later and it'll still work. It'll still have the same information on it. That's a form of memory that we used to use. And what I'm bringing that up for is because today's memory, you literally unplug it from the computer and it's all gone. Technology does not have to not be supernova resistant just because it's technology. Um, and also merging man and machine at its core is a chemical problem.
00:11:01
Speaker
not a biological problem. Chemistry itself will become the next avenue of human endeavor, because it's physics right now, but what's the next step after physics? Chemistry.
00:11:14
Speaker
Now, I'd like to ask you something else. We talked a little bit about the short-term practicality of merging ourselves with machines. I'd like to talk about genetic engineering real quick and the diversity. Jonathan, in preparation for this episode, we were talking and you had mentioned something. You mentioned an idea of an entire planet that could be like a brain that was made out of like a fungus type thing.
00:11:41
Speaker
I hope you don't mind me putting you on the spot. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit. Sure. I think that's having an entire planet that's made out of a thinking fungus.
00:11:50
Speaker
would be an amazing opportunity for two reasons. First reason is because it would be paradise for the brain itself. Second of all, I think that if it had any rudimentary interaction with this environment, then what it could do is store things in a very sort of, there's these lizards on the Galapagos Islands that literally shrink their spines when they can't have enough moss to eat. And I feel like in that same vein or in the vein of
00:12:18
Speaker
fungus that only exist in spores for a certain amount of time, humans, when they come across something extremely difficult like a supernova, might only exist in virtual spore form.
Ethics and Society: Bioengineering
00:12:29
Speaker
There's nothing about proliferation of humanity that has to do with numbers. We've been reduced to 70,000 or less before. We could do it again.
00:12:36
Speaker
Now, what makes you think that we don't have that already? I mean, science has found that there are fungi that connect the roots of trees in deciduous forests and temperate zones, that when one tree in a forest is sick, the other trees will actually send nutrients via that fungus to the tree that's sick to help heal it. I mean, what you're talking about could be something that we live on and just haven't come to understand yet already.
00:13:00
Speaker
Definitely. And if you look at the amount of connections in fungus, it's much more than the human brain for just a smallish fungus, actually. Wow. I was not aware of that fact. That's mind-blowing. I'm going to have to research that after this. In fact, I think I'd like to write post articles about this on the website, in fact.
00:13:19
Speaker
It's fascinating. If you can find it and share it with folks who are listening, I'd recommend reading about it because it blew my mind. Yeah. Fungal networks that aid in tree survival. That's amazing. Now, I want to say one other thing. One thing that we also discussed when we talk about emerging with computers and electronics versus genetic engineering, we thought, could there be, could both happen at the same time?
00:13:42
Speaker
I had a great conversation with Jonathan the other night. We were talking about, is it possible to make a bioengineered electronic? And I think the example we used was rabbit brains or, sorry, rabbit neurons. Is that right? Where if we could bioengineer a robust sheath, a
00:14:01
Speaker
Oh yeah. If you can, um, I think we talked about myelin sheaths. If you could, if you could engineer them to use gold, like toenails use gold, um, you could create some extremely fast neurons right now. The speed of neurons is about 300 feet per second, given a brain radius of about five inches. That means that the average brain frequency is something like, I don't know, 400 Hertz, which is not very fast, but imagine if you could get it faster than that.
00:14:27
Speaker
The amount of neurons in a brain in a brain is three dimensional versus a processor, which is two dimensional in most computers. You could have just this incredible amount of technology that would almost be at the limit for how fast technology can be. Wow. So I'm not just talking about a brain itself, but it's very possible to have a robust, very efficient biological electronics, including a biological computer that's more like a computer and less like a human brain.
00:14:53
Speaker
Not only that, I mean, who says that brains have to run on eukaryotic cells? They could run on bacterial cells, which are much smaller. At what point do we start attributing consciousness to these machines, though? Do we have to start ... Are we going to have activist groups? Yeah, I know, right? When they cry. If they do tell you, at what point do you start?
00:15:12
Speaker
I'm thrilled you brought this up. This is literally my next topic on here, but I want to sit here and talk about this real quickly. If you all go on philosophy forums, there's something called the hard question about consciousness. Do you all know what the hard question is about consciousness? It kind of comes down to what is consciousness?
00:15:30
Speaker
Every effort, when you try to break it down to a quantifiable process, it's extremely difficult. I think one of the analogies that there's a gentleman named Daniel Dennett. He is a very famous researcher. I believe he's a neuroscientist and a philosopher, and he is a strong materialist. He believes that consciousness is a phenomena that is 100% material, but he talks about the difficulty.
00:15:56
Speaker
One neuron is not conscious. One neuron simply does what it does. How is it then that a group of neurons working together, we have this emergent consciousness? I mean, all the transistor does is amplify. It doesn't create calculations. It's the exact same thing.
00:16:11
Speaker
You know, I think we could look toward the animal world to try and answer the question about consciousness because isn't there a gray area that we as humans, we consider ourselves special, right? We consider ourselves to be greater than an animal in a way that we're conscious of ourselves. And boy, the science is sort of starting to come back that that's not exactly the truth. But is that something that we actually know? Was there a gray area between completely unconscious, completely conscious and sentient?
00:16:38
Speaker
Not only that, I mean, maybe even to support that, all dolphins in captivity are old now because we consider it immoral to put them in captivity. I mean, they could solve these amazing problems. I hope we do the same thing with chimpanzees.
00:16:56
Speaker
Yes.
Consciousness and Sentience
00:16:58
Speaker
You know, also, I wanted to actually address exactly what you just said, Julian. So let's talk about consciousness and awareness. We know that at a very small level, viruses are very different than bacteria and fungi. We know at other levels, for instance, insects have a very, very different conscious experience than mammals do.
00:17:20
Speaker
In fact, if you don't mind, again, me putting you on the spot. Jonathan, can you tell us a bit about insect consciousness or what we think we know about it? Sure. You could do this at home. Pull the leg off of a cricket. Don't do that. That's cruel. Is it? The cricket doesn't know that its leg got pulled off because it doesn't have a central nervous system.
00:17:40
Speaker
Fascinating. Okay, so there's no central nervous system. So a cricket is still able to do... This is going to sound so redundant. A cricket does what a cricket does, but a cricket does not know that it does. So a cricket is not conscious, contrary to Pinocchio's Jiminy Cricket. Sorry, that's a joke. My conscience? Yes. So that's fascinating though. There's no central nervous. So does a cricket not feel pain? Does it? Again.
00:18:07
Speaker
Then how is there communication? I imagine it's still electric, right? It is electric, but it's not centralized. So a cricket will not really know that it has a leg missing. Okay. That's still fascinating. Still, it basically erases a lot of uncertainty. Even us as humans, we have a very, very hard time grasping the... It's difficult to pin down what consciousness is.
00:18:30
Speaker
I was just gonna say about consciousness, it all just goes back to where your perspective is. And if you're a materialist, then you have to understand that you belong to the material realm. And then people try to make these juxtapositions and there's gotta be something bigger and better and above us that can look down on our material. If you need something eternal, then look no further than like the present moment. And so I would say I'm a materialist too, but then it goes off into like a stream of Brahmanism.
Psychedelics and Perception: Psilocybin and Spice
00:18:59
Speaker
But anyway.
00:19:00
Speaker
To this point I'd like to talk a little bit about psilocybin. Psilocybin is found in mushrooms, and it's a psychoactive, and some argue a neotropic. And what a neotropic is, is something that helps advance human thought,
00:19:16
Speaker
further than traditional neurochemicals can. And the way that psilocybin does this is not only by connecting parts of the brain, which are not normally connected to one another, mimicking something that's called synesthesia, but it changes the way the eye works in such a way that visual acuity itself is increased. Now, you mentioned that this chemical comes from, I'm sorry, what was the
00:19:40
Speaker
Mushrooms, and it can be synthesized very easily. Interesting. Now, I've heard of what has been taken for many years as a hallucinogenic, is that correct? Yes. We're talking about magic mushrooms as they're colloquially called, not regular mushrooms. What's fascinating about a chemical influencing the brain in a way that makes us conceive or at least perceive in ways that we couldn't otherwise is, I don't know, have you guys read the book Dune by Frank Herbert? It's one of my favorite books.
00:20:05
Speaker
No. You know what, everybody, every single person who I consulted about this episode, aside from Jonathan and myself, mentioned Dune as the first thing. So let me just set the scene here. Basically, there's this substance, the spice melange, that only exists on one planet in the galaxy, which is Arrakis, Dune, desert planet. And I mean, at the risk of being crass, it's pooped out by sandworms.
00:20:31
Speaker
And when it's consumed, it expands the mind's possibilities. And in it, first of all, the book series takes place over tens and hundreds of thousands of years to kind of give that whole scope about how, you know, time's just a moment. Anyway, the way this relates to Psilocybin, which I think is fascinating, is that
00:20:47
Speaker
Frank Herbert had the foresight to see that not only might our transhumanism come from us engineering machines or combining them with ourselves, but it also might come from us affecting ourselves with substances and sort of going beyond that topic. And that's where the Spacing Guild comes from in Dune. They can fold space because they're dosing this spicemail edge. When you say fold space, you specifically refer to wormholes, right? I'm sorry, wormholes.
00:21:10
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I guess a tester act or however you will, the idea that you can pick a point far away in space and touch two points together without ever needing to travel. Wow.
00:21:19
Speaker
I'm really looking forward to continuing the conversation about space folding, so I don't want to get in the way of that, but I just wanted to comment on the other side, which is referenced Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Instead of the Spice Melange, we have Soma, which is the brainwashing substance that they're using to make everybody into the sort of just operational entities that they are.
00:21:43
Speaker
And then they go to New Mexico and find the wild man, et cetera, Brave New World. That's the sinister concept. I haven't read that book. You're spoiling it. Oh, sorry. Sorry, no. Yeah, no, but I didn't spoil too much. There's more. I know who's written in the 1930s. There's so much more. There's also khaki jumpsuits. It's great. You should check it out.
00:21:58
Speaker
Wow, so we obviously have two different outlooks about any kind of these substances. One of them is where it's used as an enhancement. The other one is where it's clearly portrayed as a very negative thing. It limits humanity and it's used to control people. So we've got many sides of this issue represented across science fiction.
Human Evolution: Sustenance and Social Dynamics
00:22:21
Speaker
If I may, I'd like to talk about one of the first transhumanist substances,
00:22:25
Speaker
It was invented 10,000 years ago, or at least domesticated 10,000 years ago, it's called grain. Grain led to alcoholism. Grain led to people being fertile enough to increase the population to a dangerous level. It created the dystopia that we live in today, and we're just getting out of. We're going back to our roots as hunter-gatherers. We are becoming a society that could communicate, so everybody will be able to know everyone. That's the natural state of humans.
00:22:54
Speaker
Wait, so you're saying that you think that all of this interconnectivity that we have through our technology that we're using to sort of gain a perspective where we really understand who we are as a species, where we belong in the natural order, you think that that's sort of a new enlightenment that will allow us to have happier, more full lives and it'll be more utopian than the past when we were sort of in the dark?
00:23:15
Speaker
Absolutely. I've watched the news and I've gotten numb to things. And I don't like that. If somebody I knew were murdered, I would be devastated. And I think I should be devastated if I see anybody murdered. But now you're seeing on the news, you're seeing so much both tragedy and joy happening all over the world. And this is fascinating. I actually read an article the other day that was talking about the greatest challenge of our generation is that we're a tribal species
00:23:43
Speaker
facing globalization and our awareness isn't meant to be as heightened as it is. And so we're having a hard time processing how much we know about what's going on all over the world today. So in a way, what you're saying is that we're taking a transhuman jump as we gain that awareness and starting to deal with it.
00:23:59
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, in my opinion, we should never stop beating bands of humans. I think that if I had to redo life, I would do it 50,000 years ago, but we are who we are now. And since we are who we are now, we should just go forward and do what we do best and improve things. Adapt. Yeah. Adapt. Humanity is adaptive. We are born with no information.
00:24:23
Speaker
and it's a beautiful time to be alive, but nonetheless, we do still have limitations, like that we can only care about a certain number of people. Oh yeah, Dunbar's number. Right, that's our tribal group, that's all the people we can really truly know, right? Let's go and clarify Dunbar's number again.
00:24:39
Speaker
Pretty much it's that there's a cap on the number of people that you can actually care about and have empathy for. See, what I believe about Dunbar's number is that even though Dunbar, based on physiology and basically just random guessing, thought that humans could only interact with 150 humans meaningfully or 200 at the most, I believe that's more of a fractal.
00:25:02
Speaker
I think that we could have one human in our minds that represents, for example, all of Russia. You know, when something bad happens to somebody in Russia, we just think of that person called Russia stubbing their toe or something. You know, I like that. And actually, I think that's a little bit less cynical than the Dunbar's number because, you know, again, you're right. Yeah, it could be that just we only process so much information and it'd be information overload if those individuals. But I really, really like that because it's not
00:25:27
Speaker
It's not any one single individual's responsibility to know deeply and care about everybody else in the world. I like the fractal outlook on it. And as Gable can attest, I'm a horrible cynic and a pessimist. That's not true, actually, out of us two. I'm usually a little more cynical, and Jonathan is typically the optimist. I'd like to talk about the information processing aspect of what you just said, where we can only process so much information
Transhumanism and Human Capability Enhancement
00:25:55
Speaker
at one time.
00:25:55
Speaker
And I think that's a big part of the whole transhuman thing is being able to process more because we have more data coming at us all the time. So right now we can process visual input, we can process auditory input, we can taste things, we can smell things and that's about it. So maybe with transhumanism and with this interconnection we can start to where we
00:26:14
Speaker
We feel more of what's going on in our community through these social networks and we can actually start to empathize with the person that represents Russia, you know, whenever we create this ideal aspect of, okay, so we have this person and they represent Russia and how are they doing? And then we can interact with them in that way, in our minds. Like, we're changing the way we process things as we evolve as a species.
00:26:39
Speaker
Now thinking about changing things that we process, there's a few experiments that have been conducted with electrodes that have been implanted into monkey brains. You just kind of randomly implant these electrodes into the motor part of the brain and they could learn to control a third arm. They could literally learn how to control a sense that didn't exist before. They extend their sense of proprioception. And to this end,
00:27:00
Speaker
I think that if we implant it, if we found the pattern that exists in the prefrontal cortex, created a sort of, if you've ever seen those mirrors that look like they're really deep, but they're not really deep, something like that, but that is implanted into the prefrontal cortex so that we have a virtual six million foot long prefrontal cortex, and we just implant random stuff into there that connects to random web pages, that can be a huge step forward.
00:27:26
Speaker
I'm sorry, that's absolutely mind-blowing. I think it is phenomenal news that, you know, the story you just mentioned about monkeys and being able to control a third arm, because what I feared, I feared that our brains or that the brains of mammals were not that elastic. That is to say, it couldn't do anything that it's not already used to doing. I thought that'd be a whole other complex way of getting that to work.
00:27:53
Speaker
We touched on the idea about monkeys being able to control a third arm with no trouble at all once it's implanted. What that indicates is that our control mechanism is very elastic and it can adapt very, very easily. But I want to say something else as well. When we talk about controls, there's a certain amount of information and there's a certain amount of complexity that's involved in, say, picking up your arm or sticking out your tongue or something like that.
00:28:21
Speaker
Now, how complicated would it be to control something like you said? On a computer, we have our mouse clicker and we've got our fingers. What is the limit for how many controls we can put into our brain? We are not limited by our digits. We can do so much so quickly as soon as we get that interface. You guys have any thoughts on that?
00:28:48
Speaker
I haven't thought about that. I think that the size of our brain can be expanded so that we can increase that limit arbitrarily. Wow. To give a couple of stories about that sort of thing, there's this device invented at the same time as a computer mouse. It had five little pads on it, each corresponding to a finger. And you could type on this pad. It took about two hours to learn how to do it and much more time to master. But after a while, you'd be able to control computer very easily just by wiggling your fingers. Wow.
00:29:15
Speaker
And people got to the point where they'd be across rooms at conferences, wiggle their fingers at each other to type messages to each other, and they would understand it. So there is an extreme expansion to the human brain. Not only that, there's this tribe in Africa, forgive me, I don't know the name of the tribe, that only lives in the forest. And when this ethnologist went to go visit them, or ethnographer, he found out that when he took them to the plains,
00:29:40
Speaker
They thought that buffalo were the size of bugs. They literally could not process distance because the human mind is so adaptable. Interesting. Oh, I'm sorry. Now they could not process distance because they didn't have to. Yeah, because he lived in forests. Oh, I got it. I got. OK. I think that's fascinating. You know, humans evolutionary advantage is that we can do more than we start our lives with. Right. Like John was saying.
00:30:02
Speaker
We start with no information and by the end of a life we could have gained valuable skills that we can then through teaching pass on to newer generations and they can be greater than we are. That's our main advantage. And I was going to say something that Sam said really I thought was brilliant and I wanted to touch on our social networks. I wonder if we could create a physical map of our social networks and if they'd look anything like the networks of nerves and neurons in our brains.
00:30:28
Speaker
Because I would imagine that that would be a way the University Express itself, right? The way that we tend to design our place around us. We might be creating our new networks in our own image in a way.
00:30:40
Speaker
We talk about Facebook and we talk about how much information is going back and forth between human beings on the internet all the time. I think that the internet has a lot of information over the last 30 years that's old and a very, very small of the entire internet is really active. You've got the dark web. You've got the light web, the normal web. It's the light bright.
00:31:07
Speaker
I like that. So here is my question that I want to throw at you guys real quick. There's a lot of talk about where life emerged. Now, there's not a lot that is known for certain. There absolutely is not. But, you know, the big term that's thrown around is a primordial soup. Now, where I'm going with this is let's just talk about a primordial soup from a long, long time ago in order for any life, in order for biological life to emerge. My gosh, that's
00:31:34
Speaker
that's not well understood. People say, wait a minute, you've got to have certain materials. You basically have to have certain information arranged a certain way, and it's extraordinarily rare. We don't see it very often. So for these intents and purposes, I want to talk about the digital world, and I want to tell you this next bullet point on my
Digital Evolution and AI Governance
00:31:57
Speaker
presentation. I call it digital primordial soup. Can you guys see where I'm going with this?
00:32:01
Speaker
The deeper topic here is the term I had was a digital primordial soup. Think about the internet, you guys. Imagine if you've got an old website that's not used anymore, but you still have a very active security firewall that's still at least processing information and it's kind of a routine thing. It doesn't necessarily have to stop, say it's just abandoned. Over time, the internet and the information in the internet, just like anywhere else, experiences entropy. You've got passwords, you've got people communicating, you've got movement. So you all can see where I'm going with this, right?
00:32:31
Speaker
Yeah, I would love to, I'm always coming back to science fiction. So one of my favorites of all times is Isaac Asimov's iRobot. Yes, yes. And can I give a spoiler? It's a really old book. Is that appropriate? Is that okay? Let's just say spoilers on iRobot. Spoilers on iRobot. Warning!
00:32:46
Speaker
So, at the end of the book, this journalist has been investigating artificial intelligence and where the Asimov's three laws of robotics have gone wrong, where robots have acted abnormally, which doesn't happen in most instances, but does on occasion. And what he finds out is that a true artificial intelligence without any laws has been governing planet Earth for about three years.
00:33:08
Speaker
And that stocks have been stable, and people have had enough to eat, and things have been pretty much okay for the past three years. And the guy realizes that there's nothing he can do about it, and that it's already happened, and it's not gonna change. And I wonder if this primordial digital soup is something like that, where it's like, perhaps artificial intelligence could arise from a massive network, a neural network like the internet. Like Myspace. What if it's Myspace? What if it gets struck by lightning, and then artificial intelligence
00:33:38
Speaker
I wonder if this is another chance for us to check out how and in case you're in case you can't see us because you can't John just took off his headphones and plugged his ears because he hasn't read iRobot yet and he really wants to know what Asimov's vision was in purity. He didn't want to let Sam ruin it.
00:33:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's fine. But no, I think this is another chance, much like how I was talking about social networks before. And what I think is that this is another opportunity for our designs to mirror our own design or our own evolution in that old websites just sitting there not being used. And if we look at our own DNA, our own genome,
00:34:15
Speaker
One, there's a lot we don't understand, but two, there's a lot of it that we feel like might be out of date and obsolete and just kind of along for the ride. And that's how I picture those old websites sitting there. And we've seen the primordial soup. I think we've already begun to evolve into it as far as living in a digital world. Yes, exactly.
00:34:36
Speaker
I love this idea because life that we have, it's three-dimensional, it's biological, but what would you call the dimensions, the spatial dimensions of an all-digital life?
00:34:49
Speaker
They can, I mean, there's a thing called, there's a thing called fractal dimension where you can actually measure that kind of thing. And, um, I think it should be pretty high for, uh, the digital realm. Yeah. Where does VR hit on
Virtual Reality: Dimensions and Complex Systems
00:35:04
Speaker
that? Like, I don't know if I'm, virtual reality or augmented reality. Cause you're not only in three dimensions, but you also have, have images that you are interacting with.
00:35:11
Speaker
Well, does that hit on that spectrum of what you were talking about? It does in a way. I think that what you're talking about is the experience of VR. And one thing that I have to say about that is that the brain itself is not three dimensional.
00:35:23
Speaker
It's three-dimensional in fact, but the way that it's squared is closer to four-dimensional. So it's a hypercube of a brain. A little bit. It's like a hyper glob. Sorry. I love that. Hyper glob. That's awesome. We can learn to do anything if we wanted to. That's awesome. Oh, I want to clarify really quickly. I have no idea how life, what we call life would emerge. I've got no clue.
00:35:42
Speaker
I'm just saying that if there's information on the internet, old websites and security things, it would be crazy if there could be such a thing. Let there be life and then suddenly there are crawling things and creatures on the internet that are their own volition. That would just blow my mind. It's a whole other way of looking at life.
00:36:04
Speaker
So like the Geico lizard could jump from the ad onto the Facebook page and like scroll. Are you talking about this? I'm just like, I'm off on a tangent. I'm sorry. We can totally edit this out. So there's these things called Wikipedia edit wars. Usually it's two nerds on opposite sides of the internet warring. But sometimes there's these bots that war and the behavior that emerges can be complex.
00:36:29
Speaker
In fact, to go into more complex behavior that emerges unexpectedly, when designers are doing, when people are doing AI for things like swarms for 3D movies, they have to be careful to not give them too complex of behavior.
00:36:46
Speaker
Because like they did this with penguins one time these That movie about penguins happy feet happy feet or what's at the Morgan Freeman one? Yeah, cuz we're talking about animation right so so onslaught we have a swarm yeah, but they gave the penguins to complex behavior and I know that's gonna sound like fluff, but they stopped obeying commands and
00:37:11
Speaker
they started doing their own thing because they were given enough, quote unquote, freedom. That's like the whole basis of systems theory is that if you create a system, it's going to behave in a lot of ways that you don't expect. Like you can never trust the system to behave the way it's designed to. It's going to have flaws and it's going to create its own strange abnormalities.
00:37:31
Speaker
And the brain is such a complex system. Yes. Yes, it is. God, that's super interesting. And it's, it's in everything. If you're talking about just evaluating a program, you're just talking about getting feedback, any information we're talking about systems theory in general, you're trying to design a feedback system so that you can get the metrics that you need to do, I don't know, program management.
00:37:50
Speaker
And like you said, you ask questions, you have a survey, and you're trying to get these metrics as a result of it. People have their own interpretations of your questions you're not going to get. You have this perfectly designed survey, you have this perfect research, and then interpretation happens. Yeah, exactly. And I think this is a great time to bring up the matrix.
00:38:08
Speaker
Let's do it. We started talking at the beginning about artificial intelligence versus Transhuman people that are going to be able to compete almost with with artificial intelligence. Yes, and and Julian keeps on bringing up the fact that that we're creating machines in our image and
00:38:24
Speaker
And I think that means that it's a really important time for philosophy to make a comeback. Because if we're going to be creating hyper-intelligent machines, we're going to want to make sure that we're teaching them really well. And currently, as a society, if you're just looking at all of the back alleys of the internet, and that's what the artificial intelligence learns from, you're going to have a very dangerous machine.
00:38:42
Speaker
if you have a philosophy around it. I mean, you're talking about the subject that's going to be our great hurdle, right, in reaching the next, I don't know, dimension, stage of existence, what have you, is that who is it that's going to say which philosophy is right when we're teaching our brand new robot overlords to be what they should be programmed like? Who is it to say?
00:39:04
Speaker
whoever makes the first artificial intelligence. Well, not only that, I mean, artificial intelligence is going to have its own culture. And if morality evolved for any reason, it evolved correctly. I like that. I like that. Again, I really appreciate the optimism here because I know there's a lot of cynicism and futurism, including myself. So, Jonathan, just to say, I do appreciate your optimistic outlook and it's certainly worth considering. You know, I'm walking on sunshine. Yes. Yes. Very good. Very good.
00:39:31
Speaker
Oh man, gosh, I love this. Didn't this already happen, though? Wasn't there that, like, really crazy AI Twitter bot that, like, turned evil and, like, totally fascist? And he became a Nazi! Donald Trump? It was Microsoft. Of course it became a Nazi. Oh, yeah. No, okay, you're right. Then it does count what you put into it. And of course that was a Microsoft with a dollar sign for an S.
00:39:50
Speaker
So, feasibly, we could have, before we know it, some kind of combination of MySpace and, as you said, maybe albino black sheep and some AOL website. No, actually, my parents still use AOL. Sorry, guys.
00:40:07
Speaker
Earthlink or like some part of Netscape that's still floating around there just like come together in this Frankenstein monster and emerge and you know like some battle, some security editing bot wars that'll be the catalyst for it. Who knows? Who knows? It sounds like a creation myth. Yeah, exactly. I do think that if that happens we're gonna have to invest a lot in therapy for these machines and I'm not even joking because imagine you have a human and they're stuck in a coffin for 300 years and then you let them out they're gonna be kind of psychologically messed up.
00:40:36
Speaker
Yes, but they're not aware of it until the right parts come together, at least I think. Well, I mean, what if they're already aware? What if that's the only reality they know? Okay, but what if instead of just making a machine separate from ourselves, we actually just turned ourselves into part machine, part human,
Human-Machine Synthesis and Intelligence
00:40:51
Speaker
right? That's the goal. And then we can integrate. I think so. Yeah, that's actually the goal in order to compete with any sort of artificial intelligence that ever comes. I think it's unnecessary to compete because I don't think we deserve to.
00:41:02
Speaker
Oh, okay. Whoa! That was the cynicism. That was the cynical thing just coming out. I believe that a person is something that can think. And if something evolves that's better than us, it deserves it. Not us. We're just some little carbon things. Who cares? You're probably not wrong. I mean, I don't tend to think about a bug when I squish it. And I think it might even be a greater dichotomy when a robot would think to move me out of the way to get to what it needs to advance.
00:41:30
Speaker
And of course a selfish part of me hopes that I could be part of this next wave, but... I like to keep things happy, but we don't have to.
00:41:36
Speaker
No, we could inspire a little bit of darkness in our listeners. Okay, that's fine. That's fine. All right, all right. Well, there's always the possibility that we'd be like bugs to artificial intelligence. But I would like to think that if they are hyper intelligent, they might also have compassion and that they might take care of us the way that we should take care of dolphins and monkeys and our planet, and that they would be more responsible than we are with many organisms. Yeah, bacteria does not care about other bacteria. Humans care about other humans. Not enough, but they do.
00:42:02
Speaker
You know, wow, wow. Yeah, I love that. You talk about hyper intelligent things. I don't know if I said this before, but I want to say it again. When we talk about the difference in intelligence between us and a hyper intelligent being, here's an analogy that I got straight from Jonathan. Would you like me to say it or can I have you say it?
00:42:19
Speaker
Oh, you could go ahead. Oh, awesome. Awesome. So Jonathan was saying, you know, I really think that that more intelligent, hyper intelligent beings, the difference between them and us will be kind of like the difference between us and say, Moss. And you think, well, can a Moss plan for a mortgage? You know, it's like it can't even begin to fathom whatever even that that that is to do. So I could barely eat the paper that the mortgage is printed on.
00:42:44
Speaker
Yeah, I thought that was a fabulous riveting analogy, and that stated with me, and I'm like, I want that as a sound clip. That sounds amazing right there. Now, speaking of mind-blowing things, actually, I have not read the book Dune, but based on a previous conversation that I had with you, Julian, can you tell us a little bit about some of the amazing things in the Dune series? I'm not familiar with it. Okay, so Dune is...
00:43:12
Speaker
Novel by Frank Herbert widely regarded as one of the most fascinating sci-fi books that's ever been written and You know the reason that I love dune 1 it's the first book I ever read and and I read it very late in life And it's what made me fall in love with
Dune's Genetic Practices: Bene Gesserit and Guilds
00:43:28
Speaker
the written word. And he's very poetic in the way that he expresses human concepts and sort of builds technology into his universes. I love the book Dune. It's crazy. I could talk about it for hours and hours and hours. I will do everyone the service of not talking about it all night. But if you guys want to hang out after this and talk about Dune, I'm totally down.
00:43:47
Speaker
Basically, here's the deal. A long time ago, or I guess a long time from now, in a galaxy not so far away, there is an order called the Bene Gesserit, who are space witches, who breed genes and alleles together to try and make the perfect human being. And what they do to sort of see into the truth of things is they dose with this spice melange, this product that only comes from Arrakis.
00:44:09
Speaker
and it alters their perception, and that's one way that they're sort of doping themselves to be able to be superhuman, right? There's another break-off where some of their, some of the males, and all the Benjazards are females, some of the males start to dose at the spice melange and they can't see the same things.
00:44:27
Speaker
And there's this prophecy in the whole Dune universe where there's going to be one male that can see where the rest of them cannot see, right? And so these males start dosing themselves to death sometimes with the Spice Melange until essentially they've been doing it for so many generations that they start to evolve into a new creature, which is a creature that can manipulate time and space. And that's what we call the Spacing Guild in the book Dune. And they open up the ability for humans to spread so far through the galaxy because they can fold space with their freaking brains.
00:44:57
Speaker
which is awesome. So you mentioned guilds, is this a feudal kind of society? No, I don't think there's any serfdom, I don't think there's any lords, I think it's just a guild, like people who do the same thing, like just lock themselves in a tank with a bunch of drugs and get their minds blown. Like how we're kind of a podcasting guild.
00:45:12
Speaker
But I'm the Lord and you're all the serfs. I'd like to think that I'm like a knight slash wizard ninja. Well, I'm a priest then. I'm a bard and this is settled. No, there's no argument. She's got plus two to charisma because this is getting so nerdy. But that's that's what leads up to the like this was leads to the future of doing and and and Sam yours mentioning something that was fantastic about that, which is like in doing
00:45:37
Speaker
You actually have robot overlords at one point, and society, the humans overthrow their robot overlords. And then they outlaw making artificial intelligence for a long time, which leads to sort of mysticism entering the world where they can use words to break rock. And they actually sort of use the Spicemail Engine a different way to alter themselves completely separate from computers and technologists. It's been banned.
00:46:01
Speaker
Anyway, that's mind dirty. So that's like post matrix because in the matrix, it's the robots have the upper hand and they have us, you know, stored as batteries. But in this universe in Dune, it's the humans have won in that war.
00:46:16
Speaker
Wow, that's amazing. Everything's a mystic. The thing that I like so much about that is that they end up shutting down the whole, you know, the AI factories and saying you can't make robot in the image of man. And then they take up the slack. And so they have these people called Mentats and they've been trained for their entire life to
00:46:31
Speaker
to do the calculations that their computers could do. And so these people become machine-like. I read about that. And in fact, so as I understand it, these men-tats, these humans go into this deep meditative state and then calculate very, very fast. Is that correct? It's pretty accurate.
00:46:47
Speaker
I mean, look, the book, all of the different types of people and different family houses of the lands are at and all the different races, what they're doing is they're submitting themselves to super harsh conditions in one way or another to elicit a response.
Transhumanism and Human Capability Enhancement
00:47:00
Speaker
They're forcing themselves to adapt and evolve. And in that way, they're designing themselves on a very long scale into something that is transhuman.
00:47:09
Speaker
One, I think, of the very earliest transhumans in that vein are the Inuit. The Inuit don't need vegetables, for example, to survive healthfully. They are stout, and they have a darkish skin to survive the extremely harsh UV light that comes from the snow. They are kind of transhuman. And also, it's not impressive now, but they
00:47:33
Speaker
fight whales with canoes. And so in that same vein, imagine if we knew that our sun was going to go Nova or supernova, whichever it will end up being. And what we did in order to survive that absolutely imminent, say a few hundred generations from now, we knew it was going to happen. And we began right now submitting ourselves to long periods of time without any sunlight in order to force ourselves to evolve to live after the sun had gone. That would be sort of what Frank Herbert was saying in the book.
00:48:02
Speaker
would be one way for us to be exceptional creatures.
00:48:20
Speaker
and you're in the zone and there's selflessness and you react at really high speeds and it's satisfying and it feels good. It's some place that most people want to be and for a lot of people that's a spiritual thing. But through these things like in doing the Spice Melange and through adventure sports and through
00:48:40
Speaker
doing things to get yourself in the zone, it's almost like you're pushing humanity to the edge. And I wonder if that's like different from transhumanism versus like ultra humanism, you know, like really pushing the potential.
00:48:51
Speaker
Super interesting question. It's just on my mind and what you were talking about with the Inuit people and your question, Julian, about how, you know, can we purposefully say, all right, we can expect the sun may go supernova or nova. So let's think long term and let's try to purposefully manipulate ourselves and our genes and
00:49:14
Speaker
evolve ourselves to achieve this purpose. Oh boy, wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't it be just great if humans thought like that? Wouldn't it be great if we had any sort of freaking forethought and like thought about our environment? Damn, wouldn't that have been awesome? Sorry. One group of transhumanists, prototranshumanists, I'm gonna call them because whatever, is the Navajo people.
Ecological Practices and Adaptation: Final Thoughts
00:49:38
Speaker
This is a little bit controversial, but there's some theories that there was over hunting.
00:49:42
Speaker
And that's what caused the Navajo to be so ecologically sound. Overhunting, can you clarify that? So when they came over the Bering Strait, there was little restriction on hunting. So they hunted all the pack animals, which did exist before humans. And because they overhunted them, the ones that survived were the people who didn't have the mentality of overhunting. So maybe that'll happen to us. Maybe we all have to just die.
00:50:10
Speaker
I just came out of an oncology class and I can't help but to chime in with that.
00:50:15
Speaker
Yeah, and I think the humans can learn a lot from our mistakes. The sinister nature of humanity is something that does not necessarily have to be in our future. But we create the future in our present. What we believe about the future will, by necessity, be part of what it will mean to be. We've explored these avenues, and as we go forward, let us move forward. The mind is merely, but significantly, a way in which we react to the world in a way which represents it.
00:50:41
Speaker
My name is Jonathan. And my name is Gabriel. And Julian, would you like to plug anything?
00:50:46
Speaker
Would I like to plug anything? Yes, I guess I would like to plug my project. I'm the owner of a performing arts collective called Wild Humans. You can hear us. We have both music and visuals and lots of fun stuff going on from from painters to slam poets to dancing, all those things. But there is a band called Wild Humans. We're working on our first full length album right now titled Of Course. You can hear us at wildhumansmusic.com and you can find us. Please like us on Facebook at Wild Humans Music.
00:51:15
Speaker
Nice, nice. And also... Sam Sanders. And Sam, is there anything you'd like to plug? Nope. And today, we actually had Stephen recording us. And Stephen, do you want to say a couple of words on the podcast? I really love the show. Thank you so much, Stephen. It means a lot. I really love the show, too. We should do a podcast sometimes, Stephen. Oh, and we are going to do a future podcast about transhumanism. This is kind of our first preview episode that has the format of Breaking Math.
00:51:45
Speaker
Indeed, and we're going to have a couple of topics like transhumanism in transportation. Oh yeah, transhumanism in chemistry. And Steven will actually be on a future Santa Fe Trail Media podcast. He is spearheading and designing the podcast on creative writing, as Jonathan just said. Hold him to it. Breaking Math is brought to you by KUNM Generation Listen and by viewers like you.