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Sam Barker and David Pearce on Art, Paradise Engineering, and Existential Hope (With Guest Mix)
89 Plays5 years ago
Sam Barker, a Berlin-based music producer, and David Pearce, philosopher and author of The Hedonistic Imperative, join us on a special episode of the FLI Podcast to spread some existential hope. Sam is the author of euphoric sound landscapes inspired by the writings of David Pearce, largely exemplified in his latest album — aptly named "Utility." Sam's artistic excellence, motivated by blissful visions of the future, and David's philosophical and technological writings on the potential for the biological domestication of heaven are a perfect match made for the fusion of artistic, moral, and intellectual excellence. This podcast explores what significance Sam found in David's work, how it informed his music production, and Sam and David's optimistic visions of the future; it also features a guest mix by Sam and plenty of musical content.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-The relationship between Sam's music and David's writing
-Existential hope
-Ideas from the Hedonistic Imperative
-Sam's albums
-The future of art and music
You can find the page for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2020/06/24/sam-barker-and-david-pearce-on-art-paradise-engineering-and-existential-hope-featuring-a-guest-mix/
You can find the mix with no interview portion of the podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/futureoflife/barker-hedonic-recalibration-mix
Where to follow Sam Barker :
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/voltek
Twitter: https://twitter.com/samvoltek
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samvoltek/
Website: https://www.voltek-labs.net/
Bandcamp: https://sambarker.bandcamp.com/
Where to follow Sam's label, Ostgut Ton:
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ostgutton-official
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Ostgut.Ton.OFFICIAL/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ostgutton
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ostgut_ton/
Bandcamp: https://ostgut.bandcamp.com/
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
5:40 The inspiration around Sam's music
17:38 Barker - Maximum Utility
20:03 David and Sam on their work
23:45 Do any of the tracks evoke specific visions or hopes?
24:40 Barker - Die-Hards Of The Darwinian Order
28:15 Barker - Paradise Engineering
31:20 Barker - Hedonic Treadmill
33:05 The future and evolution of art
54:03 David on how good the future can be
58:36 Guest mix by Barker
Tracklist:
Delta Rain Dance – 1
John Beltran – A Different Dream
Rrose – Horizon
Alexandroid – lvpt3
Datassette – Drizzle Fort
Conrad Sprenger – Opening
JakoJako – Wavetable#1
Barker & David Goldberg – #3
Barker & Baumecker – Organik (Intro)
Anthony Linell – Fractal Vision
Ametsub – Skydroppin’
Ladyfish\Mewark – Comfortable
JakoJako & Barker – [unreleased]
This podcast is possible because of the support of listeners like you. If you found this conversation to be meaningful or valuable, consider supporting it directly by donating at futureoflife.org/donate. Contributions like yours make these conversations possible.
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Transcript
Envisioning a Paradise Future
00:00:01
Speaker
I would encourage people to conjure up their vision of paradise and the future can potentially be like that and be much, much better.
Podcast Introduction: Guests and Themes
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to the Future of Life Institute podcast. I'm Lucas Perry. Today, we have a particularly unique episode with Berlin-based DJ and producer, Sam Barker, as well as with David Pierce. And right now, you're listening to Sam's track, Paradise Engineering, on his album, Utility. We focus centrally on the FLI podcast on existential risk.
00:00:41
Speaker
The other side of existential risk is existential hope. This hope reflects all of our dreams, aspirations, and wishes for a better future. For me, this means a future where we're able to create material abundance, eliminate global poverty, end factory farming, and address animal suffering, evolve our social and political systems to bring greater well-being to everyone,
00:01:06
Speaker
and more optimistically create powerful, aligned artificial intelligence that can bring about the end of involuntary suffering and help us to idealize the quality of our minds and ethics. If we don't go extinct, we have plenty of time to figure these things out, and that brings me a lot of joy and optimism.
Sam Barker's Music and Influences
00:01:26
Speaker
Whatever future seems most appealing to you, these visions are a key component to why mitigating existential risk is so important. So, in the context of COVID-19, we'd like to revitalize existential hope, and this podcast is aimed at doing that.
00:01:45
Speaker
As a part of this podcast, Sam was kind enough to create a guest mix for us. You can find that after the interview portion of this podcast and can find where it starts by checking the timestamps. I'll also release the mix separately a few days after this podcast goes live. Some of my favorite tracks of Sam's not highlighted in this podcast are Look How Hard I've Tried,
00:02:47
Speaker
and neuron collider.
00:03:23
Speaker
If you enjoy Sam's work and music featured here, you can support or follow him at the links in the description. He has a bandcamp shop where you can purchase his
David Pierce and the Abolition of Suffering
00:03:34
Speaker
albums. I grabbed a vinyl copy of his album, De-Biasing, from there.
00:03:39
Speaker
As for a little bit of background on this podcast, Sam Barker, who produces electronic music under the name Barker, has albums with titles such as debiasing and utility. I was recommended to listen to these and discovered his album utility is centrally inspired by David Pierce's work.
00:03:58
Speaker
specifically the hedonistic imperative. Utility has track titles like Paradise Engineering, Experience Machines, Gradients of Bliss, Hedonic Treadmill, and Wireheading. So being a fan of Sam's music production and David's philosophy and writing, I wanted to bring them together to explore the theme of Existential Hope and Sam's inspiration for his albums and how David fits into all of it.
00:04:25
Speaker
Many of you will already be familiar with David Pierce. He is a friend of this podcast and a multiple-time guest. David is a co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, rebranded Humanity Plus, and is a prominent figure within the transhumanism movement in general. You might know him from his work on The Hedonistic Imperative, a book which explores our moral obligation to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life through technological intervention.
00:04:54
Speaker
Finally, I want to highlight the 80,000 Hours podcast with Rob Wiblin. If you like the content on this show, I think you'll really enjoy the topics and guests on Rob's podcast. His is also motivated by and contextualized in an effective altruism framework and covers a broad range of topics related to the world's most
00:05:15
Speaker
pressing issues and what we can do about them. If that sounds of interest to you, I suggest checking out episode number 71 with Ben Todd on the ideas of 80,000 hours and episode number 72 with Toby Ord on existential risk. And with that, here's my conversation with Dave and Sam, as well as Sam's guest mix.
00:05:41
Speaker
For this first section, I'm basically interested in probing the releases that you already have done, Sam, and exploring them and your inspiration for the track titles and the soundscapes that you've produced.
00:05:57
Speaker
some of the background and context for this is the much of this seems to be inspired by and related to david's work in particular the hedonistic imperative. So i'm at first curious to know sam how did you encounter david's work and what does it mean for you.
Cognitive Science and Music Manipulation
00:06:13
Speaker
David's work was sort of arriving in the middle of a sort of a series of realizations and kind of coming from a starting point of being quite disillusioned with music and a little bit disenchanted with the vagueness and the terminology and the imprecision of the whole thing. I think part of me has always wanted to be some kind of scientist but I've ended up at perhaps not the opposite end but quite far away from it. Could you explain what you mean by vagueness and imprecision?
00:06:40
Speaker
I suppose the classical idea of what making music is about is a lot to do with the sort of Western idea of individualism and about self-expression and about, I don't know, there's this romantic idea of artists having these frenzied creative bursts that give birth to these wonderful things, that it's some kind of struggle.
00:06:58
Speaker
And I just was feeling super disillusioned with all of that. And around that time, 2014 or 15, I was also reading a lot about social media, reading about behavioral science, trying to sort of figure out what was going on in this arena and how people are being pushed in different directions by this algorithmic system of information distribution. So
00:07:22
Speaker
That kind of got me into the behavioral science side of things like the addictive part of the rewards, variable ratio, reward schedule of likes and it's like a free dopamine dispenser kind of thing.
00:07:34
Speaker
So this was kind of getting me into reading about behavioral science and cognitive science and it was giving me a lot of clarity but not much more sort of inspiration. It was basically like music, dance music especially is a sort of complex behavior of science and you do this and people do that and it's all deeply ingrained.
00:07:55
Speaker
You know, I sort of imagine the DJ is a sort of Skinner box operator pulling puppet strings and making people behave in different ways. And music producers are kind of designing clever programs using punishment and reward or suspense and release and controlling people's behavior.
00:08:12
Speaker
The whole thing felt super pushy and not a very inspiring conclusion. But looking at the problem from a cognitive science point of view was the framework that helped me to understand what the problem was in the first place. So this kind of problem of being manipulative. So behavioral science was kind of saying what we can make people do and cognitive psychology is sort of figuring out why people do that. That was my entry point into cognitive psychology. And that was kind of the basis for debiasing.
00:08:41
Speaker
There's always been a sort of a parallel for me between what I make and my state of mind. And when I'm in a more positive state, I tend to make things I'm happier with and so on.
00:08:51
Speaker
Getting to the bottom of what tricks were, I suppose, with dance music, I kind of understood implicitly, but I just wanted to figure out why things worked. I sort of came to the conclusion it was to do with the collection of biases we had, the confirmation bias and the illusion of truth effects and the mirror exposure effects and these things that I like the guardians of 4-4 supremacy.
00:09:13
Speaker
dance music can be pretty repetitive and we describe it sometimes in really aggressive terminology and it's a psychological kind of interaction. So cognitive psychology was leading me to Kaplan's law of the instrument. The law of the instrument says that if you give a small boy a hammer he'll find that everything he encounters requires pounding and I thought that was a good metaphor.
00:09:39
Speaker
The idea is that we get so used to using tools in a certain way that we lose sight of what it is we're trying to do. We act in the way that the tool instructs us to do.
Music's Role in Pleasure and Pain
00:09:49
Speaker
So I thought, what if you take away the hammer? And that became a metaphor for me in the sense that David clarified in terms of pain reduction, that we sort of put these painful elements into music in a way to give this kind of contrast, this hedonic contrast.
00:10:07
Speaker
But we don't really consider that that might not be necessary and what happens when we abolish these sort of negative elements. Are the results somehow released from this process? That was sort of the point up until discovering the hedonistic imperative. I think what I was needing at the time was a sort of framework. So I had the idea that music was decision-making to improve the results. You have to ask better questions, make better decisions, and you can make some progress looking at the mechanics of that from a psychology point of view.
00:10:37
Speaker
What I was sort of lacking was a purpose to frame my decisions around. I sort of had the idea that music was a sort of a valence carrier, if you like, and that it could be tooled towards a sort of a greater purpose than just making people dance, which was for de-biasing the goal, really. It was make people dance, but don't use the sort of cues, the deeply ingrained cues that people used to and see if that works.
00:11:01
Speaker
What was interesting was how broadly it was accepted, this first EP. And there was all kinds of DJs playing it in techno, ambient, electro, all sorts of different styles. And it reached a lot of people. It was as if taking out the most functional element made it more functional and more broadly appealing. And that was the ventricle point to utilitarianism. There was sort of an accidentally utilitarian act in a way to sort of try and maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain.
00:11:32
Speaker
I suppose after landing in utilitarianism and searching for some kind of framework for a sense of purpose in my work, the hedonistic imperative was probably the most radical, optimistic take on the system. Firstly, it put me in a sort of mindset where it granted permission to explore sort of utopian ideals because I think the idea of pleasure is a little bit frowned upon in the art world.
00:11:58
Speaker
I think the art world turns its nose up at such a direct cause and effect. The idea that producers could sort of be paradise engineers of sorts or the precursors to paradise engineers, that we could have a role in, or that we almost certainly would have a role in a kind of sensory utopia of the future.
00:12:18
Speaker
So there was this kind of permission granted. You can be optimistic. You can enter into your work with good intentions. It's okay to see music as a tool to increase overall net wellbeing in a way. That was kind of a guiding idea for my work in the studio. I'm trying these days to put more things into the system to make decisions in a more conscious way, at least where it's appropriate to.
00:12:42
Speaker
This sort of notion of reducing pain and increasing pleasure was the sort of question I would ask at any stage of decision making. Did this thing that I did serve those ends? If not, take a step back and try a different approach.
00:12:57
Speaker
There's something else to be said about the way you sort of explore this utopian world without really being bogged down. Like you handled the objections in such a confident way. I called it a zero gravity world of ideas. And I wanted to bring that zero gravity feeling to my work and to see that technology can solve any problem in this sphere. Anything's possible. All the obstacles are just imagined because we fabricate these worlds ourselves.
00:13:25
Speaker
These are things that were already instructive for me as an artist. That's quite an interesting journey. So from the lens of understanding cognitive psychology and human biases, was it that you were seeing
Music and a Glorious Future
00:13:38
Speaker
those biases in dance music itself? And if so, what were those biases in particular? On both sides, in the way it's produced and in the way it's received, there's sort of an unspoken acceptance
00:13:52
Speaker
you're playing a set and you take a kick drum out and that signals to people to perhaps be alert to the lighting engineer. They'll maybe raise the lights a little bit and everybody knows that the music is going into a sort of a breakdown, which is going to end in some sort of climax. And then at that point, the kick drum comes back in and we all know this pattern. It's really difficult to understand why that works without referring to things like cognitive psychology or behavioral science.
00:14:21
Speaker
So what does the act of de-biasing the reception and production of music look like and do to the music and its reception? The first part that I could control was what I put into it. So the experiment was whether a de-biased piece of dance music could perform the same functionality or whether it really relies on these deeply ingrained cues without wanting to sort of pat myself on the back. It kind of succeeded in its purpose. It was sort of proof that this was a worthy concept.
00:14:50
Speaker
You used the phrase earlier, 4-4. For people who are not into dance music, that just means a kick on each beat, which is ubiquitous in much of house and techno music. You've removed that, for example, in your album, Debiasing. What are other things that you changed from
AI and the Future of Music
00:15:08
Speaker
your end in the production of Debiasing to debias the music from normal dance music structure?
00:15:15
Speaker
So it was informing the structure of what I was doing so much that I wasn't working so much on a grid where you have predictable things happening. It's a very highly formulaic and structured thing. And that's all keys into the expectation and this confirmation bias that people, I think, get some kind of kick from when the predictable happens. They say, yep, there you go. I knew that was going to happen. And that's a little dopamine rush. But I think it's a sort of a cheap trick. And so I guess I was trying to get the tricks out of it in a way.
00:15:44
Speaker
And so figuring out what they were and trying to reduce or eliminate them was the process for devising.
00:15:51
Speaker
So that's quite interesting and meaningful, I think. Like, let's just take trap music. I know exactly how trap music is going to go. It has this buildup and drop structure. It's basically universal across all dance music. Progressive House in the 2010s was also exactly like this. Yep. What else? Dubstep, of course. Same exact structure. Everything is totally predictable. I feel like I know exactly what's going to happen, having listened to electronic music for over a decade.
00:16:18
Speaker
Yeah. And it works. I think it's a tried and tested formula and it does the job. But when you're trying to imagine states beyond just getting a little kick from knowing what was going to happen, that's the place that I was trying to get to really. So then after the release of debiasing in 2018, which was a successful attempt at serving this goal and mission, you then discovered the hedonistic imperative by David Pierce and kind of leaned into consequentialism, it seems. Yeah.
00:16:47
Speaker
And then in 2019, you had two releases, you had Barker's zero zero one, and you had utility. Now utility is the album, which most explicitly adopts David Pierce's work specifically in the hedonistic comparative. So you mentioned electronic dance producers and artists in general can be sort of the first wave of, or can perhaps
00:17:09
Speaker
assist in paradise engineering insofar as that will be possible in the near to short term future given advancements in technology. Is that sort of the explicit motivation and framing around those two releases of Barker 001 and utility?
00:17:24
Speaker
Bacha 001 was a few tracks that were taken out of the running for the album because they didn't sort of fit the concept so really only the last track was kind of alluding to the album and otherwise it was perhaps not sort of thematically linked.
Exploring Music's Well-Being Potential
00:19:13
Speaker
Hopefully, if people are interested in looking more into what's behind the music, that you can lead people into topics with the concepts. So with utility, I didn't want to just keep exploring cognitive biases and unpicking dance music structurally. It's sort of a paradox because I guess the headmaster comparative argues that pleasure can exist without purpose, but I really was striving for some kind of purpose with the pleasure that I was getting from music.
00:19:35
Speaker
That sort of emerged from reading the Herd Mystic Imperative, really, that you can apply music to this problem, raising the general level of happiness up a notch. I did sort of worry that by trying to please, it wouldn't work, that it would be something that was too sickly sweet. I mean, I'm pretty turned off by pop music, and there was the sort of risk that it would end up somewhere like that. That's it, really. Just looking for a higher purpose with my work in music. David, do you have any reactions?
00:20:05
Speaker
Well, when I encountered utility, yes, I was thrilled. As you know, essentially I'm a writer writing in quite heavy sub-academic prose and Sam's work, I felt helps give people a glimpse of our glorious future, Paradise Engineering.
00:20:24
Speaker
As you know, the reviews were extremely favorable. I'm not an expert critic or anything like that. I was just essentially happy and thrilled at the thought. It deserves to be mainstream. And it's really difficult, I think, to actually evoke the glorious future we are talking about. I mean, yeah, I can write prose, but in some sense, music can evoke paradise better, at least for many people, than prose.
00:20:54
Speaker
I think there's something you can appreciate without cognitive effort, which your pros at least you need to be able to read. It's a bit more of a passive way of receiving music, which I think is an intrinsic advantage it has.
00:21:09
Speaker
That's actually really a relief to hear because there was just a small fear in my mind that I was grabbing these concepts with clumsy hands and discrediting them. Oh, not at all. It all came from a place of sincere appreciation for the sort of world that you were trying to entice people with. When I've tried to put into words what it was that was so inspiring, I think it's that. There was also a sort of very practical kind of making lots of notes. I've got lots of amazing one liners.
00:21:38
Speaker
Will we ever leave the biological dark ages? Or the biological domestication of heaven? There was just so many things that conjure up such vividly heavenly sensations. It sort of brings me back to the fuzziness of art and inspiration, but I hope I've tried to adopt the same spirit of optimism that you approached the hedonistic imperative with. I actually don't know what your state of mind or your approach was at the time, even, but it must have come in a bout of extreme hopefulness.
00:22:08
Speaker
Yes, actually I started taking Selegalene and six weeks later I wrote The Hedonistic Imperative. It just gave me just enough optimism to embark on. I mean, I have fundamentally a very dark view of Darwinian life, but for mainly technical reasons, I think the future is going to be super humanly glorious. But how do you evoke this for dark Darwinian minds?
00:22:35
Speaker
Yeah. How do you get people excited about it? I think you did a great job. It deserves to go mainstream, really. The core idea. I mean, forget the details, the neuro-babble, the genetics.
Creativity, Hope, and Utopia
00:22:46
Speaker
Yeah, of course it's incredibly important, but this vision of just how sublimely wonderful life could be. But how do we achieve full spectrum multimedia dominance? I mean, I can write it as long as you guys need to team up. It's very primitive and I'm excited where it could head, definitely.
00:23:06
Speaker
All right. I really like this idea about music showing how good the future can be. I think that many of the ways that people can understand how good the future can be comes from the best experiences they've had in their life. Now that's just a physical state of your brain. And if something isn't physically impossible, then the only barrier to achieving and realizing that thing is knowledge.
00:23:31
Speaker
So take all the best experiences in your life and if we could just understand computation and biology in the brain and consciousness well enough doesn't seem like there's any real limits to how good and beautiful things can get. Do any of the tracks that you've done evoke very specific visions, dreams, desires, or hopes?
00:23:52
Speaker
I would be sort of hesitant to make direct links between tracks and particular mindsets because when I'm sitting down to make music, I'm not really thinking about any one particular thing rather trying to look past things and look more about what sort of mood I want to put into the work.
00:24:13
Speaker
Any of the tracks on the record perhaps could have been called Paradise Engineering, is what I'm saying. The names for all the tracks are sort of a collection of the ideas that were feeding the overall process. And the application of the names was kind of retroactive connection making.
00:24:30
Speaker
That's probably a disappointment to some people, but the meaning of all of the track names is in the whole of the record. I think the last track on the record, Die Hearts of the Darwinian Order, that was a phrase that you used David to describe people clinging to the need for pain in life to experience pleasure. And that track was not made for the record, it was made some time ago and it was just a technical experiment to see if I could kind of recreate a realistic sounding band with my synthesizers.
00:24:59
Speaker
But the label manager Alex was really keen to have this on the record. And I was kind of like, oh, it doesn't fit conceptually as a kick drum. It's kind of a sombre mood and the rest of the record is really uplifting what we're trying to be. And Alex was saying he liked the contrast to the positivity of the rest of the album. It felt like it needed this dose of realism or something.
00:26:41
Speaker
So I sort of conceded in the end, but we called it Die Hard to the Darwinian order because that was what I felt like he was. Have you told him this? Oh, I told him he definitely took the criticism. But as I said, it's the actual joining up of these ideas that I made notes on and the tracks themselves in the end had to be done in a creative way, sort of retroactively. But that doesn't mean to say that all of these concepts were not crucial to the process of making the record.
00:27:10
Speaker
When you're starting a project, you call it something like new track, happy to mix one or something. And then eventually the sort of meaning emerges from the end result in a way.
00:27:22
Speaker
It's just like what I've heard from authors of bestselling books, they say you have no idea what the book is going to be called until the end. Right, yeah. One of the reasons I think it's so important to stress life based on gradients of bliss ratcheting up hedonic set points is that
00:27:41
Speaker
Instead of me or anyone else trying to impose their distinctive vision of paradise, it just allows with complications everyone to keep most of their existing values and preferences, but just ratchets up hedonic tone and hedonic range. I mean, this is the problem with so many traditional paradises. They involve the imposition of someone else's values and preferences on you.
00:28:08
Speaker
I'm being overly cerebral about it now but I think my favourite track on the album is the first that I would encourage people to conjure up their vision of paradise and the future can potentially be like that and be much, much better.
00:30:16
Speaker
Yeah, this I think relates to the sort of pushiness that I was feeling at odds with. The music does take people to these kind of euphoric states, sometimes chemically underwritten, but it's being done in a dogmatic and singular way. There's not much room for personal interpretation. It's sort of everybody's experiencing one thing. Which I think there's something in these kind of communal experiences that I'm going to hopefully understand one day,
00:30:41
Speaker
All right. I think some of my favorite tracks are Look How Hard I've Tried on debiasing. I also really like Maximum Utility and Neuron Collider. I mean, all of it is quite good and palatable. Thank you. The ones that you said are some of my personal favorites. It's also funny how some of the least favorite tracks, or not least favorite, but the ones that I felt like didn't really do what they set out to do were the people's favorites.
00:31:08
Speaker
Hedonic Treadmill for example, I put that on the pile of didn't work but people I was playing it to were finding things in it that I didn't intentionally put there. Really that attract felt to me like stuck on the Hedonic Treadmill and not sort of managing to push the speed up or the push the level up.
00:32:40
Speaker
This is, I suppose, the problem with art that there isn't a universal pleasure center. There isn't one size fits all way to these higher states. Are you correctly called it the hedonic treadmill? Some people say the hedonistic treadmill. Even one professor I know calls it the hedonistic treadmill. I want to get on that one. I wouldn't mind spending all day on a hedonistic treadmill. That's my kind of exercise for sure. All right. So let's pivot here into section two of our conversation then.
00:33:09
Speaker
For this section, I'd just like to focus on the future in particular and exploring the state of dance music culture, how it should evolve, and how science and technology along with art and music can evolve into the future. This question comes from you in particular, Sam, addressed to Dave. I think you were curious about his experiences in life and if he's ever lost himself on a dance floor or has any special music or records that put him in a state of bliss. Very curious.
00:33:39
Speaker
My musical autobiography, well, sort of my earliest memories is of a wind up gramophone. Showing my age here, apparently as a five year old child, I used to sing on the buses, uh, Daisy, Daisy, give me your aunt to do. I'm so crazy, awful off of you.
00:33:58
Speaker
Then yeah, graduating via the military brass band Plays, apparently I used to enjoy as a small child to pop music. Essentially for me, I very, very, I'm sorry about music. I like to use it as a backdrop, you know, at its best, this little tingle up one spine one gets that it doesn't happen very often.
00:34:24
Speaker
Anything i say is that really important for me music should be happy. I know some people get into sad music i know it's complicated but music for me has to elicit something that's purely good.
00:34:39
Speaker
I definitely have no problem with exploring the sort of darker side of human nature, but I also have come to the realization that there's better ways to explore the dark sides than aesthetic stimulation through perhaps words and ideas. And aesthetics is really at its optimum function when it's working towards more positive goals of happiness and joy and these sort of swear words in the art world.
00:35:06
Speaker
Dave, you're not trying to hide your rave warehouse days from us, are you? Well, yeah. Let's just say I might not have been entirely drug naive with friends. Let's just say I was high on life or something, but it's a long time since I have explored that scene, but part of me still misses it.
00:35:28
Speaker
But when it comes to anything of the art world, just as I think visual art should be beautiful, which I mean, not all serious artists would agree. I think the whole notion is just people find it repulsive somehow, especially in the art world. Like somebody that painted a picture and then the description reads, I just wanted it to be pretty is getting thrown out the gallery. But what greater purpose could it really take on?
00:35:53
Speaker
Yeah, maybe there's some feeling of insecurity and a feeling and a need to justify the work as having meaning beyond the sensual or something. And then there may also be like this fact contributing to it. Seeking happiness and sensual pleasure directly in and of itself is often counterproductive towards that goal.
00:36:13
Speaker
Seeking well-being and happiness directly usually subverts that mission. And I guess that's just a curse of Darwinian life. So perhaps those, I'm just speculating here, contribute to this cultural distaste, as you're pointing out, to joy, pleasure as the goals of art.
00:36:31
Speaker
Yeah, we're sort of intellectually allergic to these kinds of ideas. I think they're just seen as sort of really shallow and superficial. I suppose that was kind of my existential fear before the album came out that the idea that I was just trying to make people happy would just be seen as this shallow thing, which I don't see it as, but I think the sentiment is quite strong in the art world.
00:36:54
Speaker
If that's quite shallow, then I guess those people are also going to have problems with the Buddha and people like that. So I wouldn't worry about it too much. I think you're on the same intentional ground as the Buddha. So moving a little bit along here, do you guys have thoughts or opinions on the future of aesthetics, art, music, and joy and how science and technology can contribute to that?
00:37:15
Speaker
Oh, good heavens. One possibility will be that as neuroscience advances, it would be possible to isolate the molecular experience of visual beauty, musical bliss, spiritual excellence, and scientifically amplify them so that one can essentially enjoy musical experiences that are
00:37:40
Speaker
orders of magnitude richer than anything that's even physiologically feasible today. I mean, I can use all this fancy language, but what actually this will involve in terms of true transhuman and posthuman artists.
00:37:56
Speaker
The gradients of bliss is important here, such that I think we will retain information sensitive gradients so we don't lose critical sharpness, discernment, critical appreciation. But nonetheless, this base point for aesthetic excellence, all experience can be super humanly beautiful. I mean, I religiously star my music collection for a one to five, but what would a six be like? What would a hundred?
00:38:26
Speaker
I like these questions. I guess the role of the artist in the long term future in creating these kinds of states maybe gets pushed out at some point by people who are in the labs and reprogramming the way music is or the way that any sort of sensory experience is received.
00:38:48
Speaker
I wonder whether there's a place in techno utopia for music made by humans or whether artists sort of just become redundant in some way. And I'm not going to get offended if the answer is bye bye.
00:39:02
Speaker
I'd be interested in just making a few points about the evolutionary perspective before we get into the future of ape artists or mammalian artists. It just seems like some kind of happy cosmic accident that for the vibration of air, human beings have developed a sensory appreciation of information and structure embedded in that medium.
00:39:25
Speaker
And I think we're quite lucky as a species that music and musical appreciation is embedded in the software of human genetics such that we can appreciate and create and share musical moments. Now with genetic engineering and more ambitious paradise engineering, I think it would be beautiful to expand the modalities for which artistic or aesthetic or the appreciation of beauty can be experienced.
00:39:54
Speaker
Music is one clear way of having aesthetic appreciation and joy. Visual art is another one. And people do derive a lot of satisfaction from touch. Perhaps that could be more information structured in the ways that music and art are, and there might be a way of changing what it means to be an intelligent thing such that there can be just an expansion of art appreciation across all of our essential modalities and even into central modalities which don't exist yet.
00:40:24
Speaker
So the nature of transhuman and posthuman art just leaves me floundering. Yeah, it seems useful here just to reflect on how happy of an accident art is. As we begin to evolve and we can get into say AI here, AI and machine learning is likely to be able to have very, very good models of say our musical preferences within the next few years. I mean, they're somewhat already very good at it. It'll continue to get better.
00:40:53
Speaker
And then we have fairly rudimental algorithms which can produce music. And if we just extrapolate out into the future, eventually, artificial intelligence systems will be able to produce music better than any human. So in that world, what is the role of the human artist? I guess I'm not sure. I'm also completely not sure.
00:41:17
Speaker
But I feel like it's probably going to happen in my lifetime that these technologies get to a point that they actually do serve the purpose. Because at the moment, there is AI software that can create unique compositions, but it does so by looking at an archive of music.
00:41:36
Speaker
with ava it's barking beethoven and Mozart and then it reinterprets all of the codes that are embedded in that and uses that to make new stuff and it sounds just like a composer quoting and convincing. So considering this is going to get better and better I'm pretty confident that we'll have a system that will be able to create music to a person's specific taste.
00:42:01
Speaker
And having not experienced music that would say, look at my music library and then start making things that I might like. I can't say how I feel about that, but let's say if it worked and it did actually surprise me and I was feeling like humans can't make this kind of sensation in me. This is a level above. In a way, somebody that doesn't like the vagueness of the creative process, this really appeals somehow.
00:42:27
Speaker
But the way that things are used and the way that our attention is sort of a resource that gets manipulated, I don't know whether we have an incredible technology once again in the wrong hands and it's just going to be turned into a mind control. These kind of things would be put to use for nefarious purposes. I don't fear the technology. I fear what we in our unmodified state might do with it.
00:42:51
Speaker
Yes. I wonder when the last professional musician will retire having been eclipsed by AI. I mean, in some sense we are, I think, stepping stones to something better. I don't know when the last philosophers will be pensioned off. Hard problem of mind solved announced in nature. Nobel prize beckons, you know, distinguished philosophers of mind announced their intention to retire. Hard to imagine.
00:43:19
Speaker
But yeah, one does suppose that AI will be creating work of ever greater excellence tailored to the individual. I think the evolutionary roots of aesthetic appreciation are very, very deep. But yeah, it can of course sound very disrespectful to artists saying that AI could replace artists, but mathematicians and scientists are probably going to be... Everyone is getting replaced.
00:43:48
Speaker
This may be a similar step to when portrait painters, when the camera was threatening their line of work and compress a button in an instant do what would have taken for several days.
00:44:00
Speaker
I sort of am cautiously looking forward to more intelligent assistance in the production of music, but if we did live in a world where there wasn't any struggles to express or any wrongs to write, any flaws in our character to unpick, then I would struggle to find anything other than the sort of basic pleasure of the action of making music. I wouldn't really feel any reason to share what I made, in a sense.
00:44:29
Speaker
I think there's a sort of moral social purpose that's embedded within music if you want to grasp it. I think if AI is implemented with that same moral ethical purpose, then in a way we should treat it as any other task that comes to be automated or extremely simplified. In some way we should sort of embrace the relaxation of our workload in a way. And there's nothing to say that we couldn't just continue to make music if it brought us pleasure.
00:44:58
Speaker
I think distinguishing between these two things of making music and sharing it was an important discovery for me. The process of making a piece of music, if it was entirely pleasurable, but then you treat the experience like it was a failure because it didn't reach enough people or you didn't get the response or the boost to your ego that you were searching from it, then it's your remembering self overriding your experiencing self in a way.
00:45:24
Speaker
or your expectations getting in the way of your enjoyment of the process. So if there was no purpose to it anymore, I might still make it for my own pleasure, but I like to think I would be happy that a world that didn't require music was already a better place.
00:45:40
Speaker
I like to think that I wouldn't be upset with my redundancy with my P45 from David Pierce. Oh no, with a neurochip you see, your creative capacities could be massively augmented. You'd have narrow super intelligence on a chip. Now, in one sense, I don't think classical digital computers are going to wake up and become conscious, so they're never actually going to be able to experience
00:46:05
Speaker
music or after anything like this. So in that sense, they will remain tools, but tools that one can actually incorporate within oneself so that they become part of you. Friendly flag there that many people who've been on this podcast disagree with that point. But yeah, fair enough, David.
00:46:24
Speaker
So, I mean, it seems that there are like maybe three options. One is, as you mentioned, Sam, to find joy and beauty in more things and to sort of let go of the need for meaning and joy to come from not being something that is redundant. Once human beings are made obsolete or redundant, it's quite sad for us because we derive much of our meaning and thanks a lot evolution from accomplishing things and being relevant.
00:46:52
Speaker
So the two paths here seems like reaching some kind of spiritual evolution such that we're okay with being redundant or being okay with passing away as a species and allowing our descendants to proliferate. Or the last one would be to change what it means to be human such that by merging or by evolution, we somehow remained relevant to the progress of civilization. So I don't know which one it will be, but we'll see.
00:47:21
Speaker
I think the exciting one for me is where we can harness the advances in technology in a conscious way to positive ends, to greater net wellbeing in society. Maybe I'm hooked on the old ideals, but I do think a sense of purpose in your pleasure elevates the sensation somewhat. I think human brains on MDMA would disagree with that.
00:47:48
Speaker
Yeah. So you've obviously also reflected on an experience like that after the event and come to the conclusion that there wasn't perhaps much concrete meaning to your experience, but it was joyful and real and vivid. And you don't want to focus too much on the fact that it was mostly just you jumping up and down on the dance floor. And so I'm definitely familiar with the pleasure of essentially meaningless euphoria.
00:48:16
Speaker
I'll say at the very least, it's interesting to think about in reading a lot about the nature of happiness and the general consensus there being that happiness is sort of a balance of pleasure and purpose. The idea that maybe you don't need the purpose is worth exploring, I think at least.
00:48:34
Speaker
We do have this term empty hedonism, but one thing that's striking is that as one for whatever reason or explanation gets happier and happier, everything seems more intensely meaningful. There are pathological forms like mania or hypermania, which leads to grandiosity, messianic delusions, even theomania and thinking one is God. But it's possible to have much more benign versions. And in practice, I think when life is based on
00:49:03
Speaker
radiance of bliss, eventually superhuman bliss. This will entail superhuman meaning and significance. And essentially we've got a choice. I mean, we can either have pure bliss or one could have a combination of bliss and hypermotivation and one will be able to tweak the dials. This is all such deliciously appealing language as someone who's spending a lot of their time tweaking dials.
00:49:30
Speaker
This may or may not be the appropriate time to ask, but tell me about what future projects have you planned. I'm still very much exploring the potential of music as an increase of wellbeing and I think it's sort of leading me in interesting directions. At present, I'm sort of in another crossroads, I feel.
00:49:53
Speaker
the general drive to realize these sort of higher functions of music is still a driving force. I'm starting to look at what is natural in music and what is learned. And like you say, there is this long history of the way that we appreciate sound that's linked to all kinds of repetitive experiences that our ancestors had. And there's other aspects
00:50:17
Speaker
to sound production that are also very old like use of reverb is connected to our experiences sort of cavemen dwelling in these kind of reverberating spaces and these are kind of sacred spaces for early humans and so this feeling of when you walk into a cathedral for example this otherworldly experience that comes from the acoustics is I think somehow deeply tied to this historical situation of
00:50:45
Speaker
We're seeking shelter in caves, and then caves having a bigger significance in the lives of other humans. There's a realization, I suppose, that what we're experiencing that relates to music is rhythm, tone, and timbrough noise. You know, if you just sort of pay attention to your background noise, the things that you're most familiar with are actually not very musical, and you don't really find harmony in nature very much.
00:51:12
Speaker
So I'm sort of forming some ideas around what parts of music and our response to music are cultural and what a natural is is sort of a strange word to apply. But our sort of harmonic language is a technical construction.
00:51:29
Speaker
And rhythm is something we have a much deeper connection with through our lives as defined by rhythms of planets and that dividing our time into smaller and smaller ratios down to heartbeats and breathing. So we're sort of experiencing a really complex polyrhythmic silence form of music, I suppose.
00:51:51
Speaker
So I'm separating these two concepts of rhythm and harmony and trying to get to the bottom of their function and the goal of elevating bliss and happiness. I guess looking at what the tools I'm using are and what their role could be, if that makes any sense.
00:52:10
Speaker
In some sense, this sounds weird. I think insofar as it's possible, one does have a duty to take care of oneself. And if one can give happiness to others, not least by music, in that sense, one can be a more effective altruist.
00:52:28
Speaker
In some sense, Patch 1 feels ethically ought to want to be working 12, 14 hours a day to make the world a better place. But equally, we all have our design limitations and just being able to relax and either as a consumer of music or if one is a creator of music, that has a valuable role too. It really does. One needs to take care of one's own mental health to be able to help others.
00:52:54
Speaker
I feel like they're kind of under the bonnet tinkering that in some way needs to happen for us to really make use of these new technologies. We need to do something about human nature.
00:53:04
Speaker
I feel like we're a bit further away from those sort of realities than we are with the technological side. So I think there needs to be a sort of emergency measures in some way to improve human nature through the old fashioned social cultural nudges, perhaps as a stopgap until we can really roll our sleeves up and change human nature on a molecular level.
00:53:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think we might need both all the kind of environmental, social, political reform together with a biological, genetic, bio-happiness revolution. I would love to be able to, you know, a hundred year plan, group link to get rid of suffering, replace it with radiance of bliss, paradise engineering.
00:53:47
Speaker
In practice, I feel the story of Darwinian life still has several centuries to go. I hope I'm too pessimistic, some of my transhumanist colleagues, the intelligence explosion or a complete Kurtzweilian fusion of humans in our machines, but we shall see.
00:54:04
Speaker
So David, Sam and I and everyone else loves your prose so much. Could you just kind of go off here and muster your best prose to give us some thoughts as beautiful as sunsets for how good a future of music and art and gradients of intelligent bliss will be?
00:54:20
Speaker
I'm afraid put eloquence on hold, but yeah, just try for a moment to remember your most precious, beautiful, sublime experience in your life, whatever it was. It may or may not be suitable for public consumption and just try to hold it briefly. Imagine if life could be like that only far, far better all the time and with no nasty side effects, no adverse social consequences.
00:54:50
Speaker
It is going to be possible to build this kind of super civilization based on gradients of bliss. I'm going to be over ambitious. Needless to say, if anything I have written, unfortunately you'd need to wade through all manner of love. But I'm really thrilled and chuffed with utility and so anything else is just veganizing on the cake. Beautiful. I'm really, like I say, super relieved that it was taken as such.
00:55:19
Speaker
It was really like a reconfiguring of my approach and my involvement with the thing that I've sort of given my life to thus far and a sort of a clarification of the purpose. And aside from anything else, it just put me in a really perfect mindset for addressing mental obstacles in the way of my own happiness. But then once you get that, you sort of feel like
00:55:43
Speaker
sharing it with other people. So I think it started off a very positive process in my thoughts, which sort of manifested in the work I was doing. So extremely grateful for your generosity in blending these ideas. I hope actually just that people scratched the surface a little bit and maybe plugged some of the terms into a search engine and got kind of lost in the world of utopia a little bit. That was really the main reason for putting these references in and pushing people in that direction.
00:56:13
Speaker
Well, you've given people a lot of pleasure, which is fantastic. And certainly I'd personally rather be thought of as associated with paralyzed engineering and gradients of bliss rather than the depressive, gloomy, negative utilitarian. Yeah. There's a real dark side to the idea. I think the thing I read after the hedonistic imperative was some of Les Knight's writing about voluntary human extinction movement.
00:56:38
Speaker
I honestly don't know if he'd be classified as a utilitarian, but this sort of ecocentric utilitarianism, which you sort of endorse through including the animal kingdom in your manifesto. And there's a sort of a growing appreciation for this kind of antenatal sentiment.
00:56:56
Speaker
Yes, antinatalism seems to be growing, but I don't think it's ever going to be dominant. The only way to get rid of suffering and ensure high quality of life for all sentient beings is going to be essentially get to the heart of the problem to rewrite ourselves. I did actually do an antinatalist podcast the other week, but I'm only a soft antinatalist because there's always going to be selection pressure in, in favor of a predisposition to go forth and multiply.
00:57:26
Speaker
One needs to build alliances with fanatical life lovers, even if when one contemplates the state of the world, one has some rather dark thoughts. Yeah. All right. So is there any questions or things we haven't touched on that you guys would like to talk about?
00:57:43
Speaker
No, I just really wanted to thank you to Lucas for organizing this. You've got a quite a diverse range of podcasts now. And Sam, I'm honored. Thank you very much. Really happy this has gone well. Yeah. David, really, it's been my pleasure and really appreciate your time and acceptance of how I've sort of handled your ideas.
00:58:05
Speaker
I feel really happy that I was able to connect you guys. And I also think that both of you guys make the world more beautiful by your work and presence. And for that, I am grateful and appreciative and also very much enjoy and take inspiration from both of your work. So keep on doing what you're doing. Thanks, Lucas. Thank you, really. Thank you, Lucas. Very much appreciate it.
00:58:28
Speaker
I hope that you've enjoyed the conversation portion of this podcast. Now I am happy to introduce the guest mix by Barker.
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