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10 . Deep Intelligence - Christina Berkley
44 Plays8 months ago
Christina Berkley is founder of the Center for Deep Intelligence, a transformational response to the new wave of Artificial Intelligence.
We talk about the impact of AI and other technologies on the soul, and ways to reclaim your depth and connection in the modern world.
Consider subscribing to the substack, it's good for the soul: The Sane & Miraculous substack
You can find Christina and the Center for Deep Intelligence at these links
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
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Honey, wake up. New episode of the podcast just dropped.
Meet Christina Berkeley: AI and Deep Intelligence
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello. This is the sane and miraculous podcast. And I am your host, Robbie Carlton. Today we are talking with Christina Berkeley. Among other things, Christina is a coach and trainer of coaches. She's also the founder of the center for deep intelligence.
00:00:26
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which we talk about
Christina's Journey: Spirituality and AI
00:00:28
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in this episode. so I won't spoil too much except to say that the Center for Deep Intelligence is a response to the rise in artificial intelligence, which we will talk about also in this episode today. Things we talk about include Christina's background translating Wu into a into a rationalist framework. The three big areas to pay attention to in combating the shallowing of intelligence, secret FBI interrogation techniques and many other things. This is a fun, interesting conversation. Christina first came on my
Algorithmic Feeds: Impact on Attention and Mental Health
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radar. i I've actually known her for a very long time, but in the context of this podcast and this conversation, she came over my radar as being somebody in the coaching transformational space who was really paying attention to this AI thing, really taking it seriously and looking at
00:01:24
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the what are the spiritual, psychological, and transformational implications of the new AI wave that is that is kind of you know hitting our shores as we speak. So that's what we talk about today. and I had a great time talking with Christina. Before we dive in, there's a couple of things that we just don't take the time to define, but we talk about in the episode. um One, so I'm just gonna i mean just gonna kind of give you Quick definitions for many of you you will not need these but yeah I just want the whole conversation to make sense so we talk about the algorithmic feed a little bit ah the algorithmic feed is any any place where information is being curated for you ah by algorithm.
00:02:12
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So as to maximize something, normally what they're trying to maximize is your time on the platform or your engagement. So algorithmic feed, so Facebook feed is an algorithmic feed, the Twitter feed by default is an algorithmic feed.
00:02:27
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ah you know when you open up YouTube and you get your homepage, that's in our algorithmic feed, the TikTok stream of videos.
The Risks and Complexities of AGI
00:02:34
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All of these are algorithmic feeds. So we we just, we don't talk too much about that, but it's just worth kind of calling out what exactly that is. And because of the nature of these algorithmic feeds, you know, they are designed very brilliantly to optimize your engagement and your time on the platform.
00:02:54
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as opposed to other things that you might care about. You don't really care how much you're engaging with Facebook posts or how much time you spend on Facebook. In fact, if anything, you care in an inverse direction to the algorithmic feed, right? You do not want to spend more time on Facebook. You want to spend less time on Facebook or you want to spend less time.
00:03:15
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on Twitter or, you know, your platform of choice. So there's this kind of adversarial relationship between you and this very sophisticated mechanism which is trying to keep you on and the way it tries to keep you on.
00:03:27
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I mean, it doesn't know this, it just looks for a well what posts are you most likely to read, to stay engaged with, etc. And it turns out that a lot of times that content, it's not necessarily content that's particularly good for your soul, or good for your mind, good for your emotional world, or good for your life. It's stuff that is, you know, we all know, but it's stuff that is designed to agitate, to enrage, to distress in various ways because it turns out that's the stuff that keeps you around, right? Because of various psychological mechanisms that were developed in the times before an algorithmic feed was ah you know even a twinkle in anybody's you know neolithic eye.
00:04:12
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so That's what an algorithmic feed is. The other thing we just talked about without defining is AGI. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence. And what our AGI is, it does not exist currently, but it is the idea of an artificial intelligence which is general in the way that human intelligence is. So it can solve problems, can think about things, can remember things, can have a model of the world and operate in the world in ways that are similar to the ways that humans operate in the world in this very general sense. right Humans are incredible generalists and other animals as well, but especially humans, incredible generalists.
00:04:54
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approach different problems. We try different things. We have different ways of doing it. We have a language, which is huge you know piece of it, but it's not by any means the whole enchilada. So that's a human general intelligence, which we have. Then
Reflections on AI Advances and Podcast Themes
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there's this idea of artificial general intelligence. Currently we have various kinds of artificial intelligence we have done in different forms for the last I want to say 60 years, something like that. Maybe even longer than that, depending on how you count. We have this new wave right now of artificial intelligence, which is very sophisticated, is doing things we've never seen before. And for the first time is starting to do stuff. I don't even want to say for the first time, because there are actually older versions of this, but in a new way is starting to do stuff, which is very, very impressive and in some ways resembles.
00:05:42
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human intelligence that is largely an illusion though. It is not human like intelligence and it's not close to being as general and is actually very limited in various ways, which we, we brush over in this conversation. Don't go into great detail anyway. So AGI, artificial general intelligence is, is this idea. And a lot of people are worried about AGI. Cause when AGI comes, we're going to have to deal with these very, very sophisticated agents.
00:06:13
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these AGI's that ah do not necessarily have our best interests at heart or yeah they probably won't have hearts. So there's a fear that these things are going to be dangerous. There's a fear that these things are going to, they open up a new avenue of existential risk. AI without AGI is already creates a whole suite of new opportunities and new problems. And so we talk about this in the episode, but those are just two.
00:06:42
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uh, definitional points. Uh, one other thing I want to say, I don't think this changes anything, but we recorded this, uh, a while ago. We recorded this three months ago, almost exactly three months ago, August 1st, 2024. So things in this arena changed very rapidly. I don't think any of my thinking has changed dramatically between the time we recorded and and now, uh, some of k Christina's might because it's three months ago. And if you think that's a long lead time, wait till next week.
00:07:08
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And the episode that comes out next week, which is from even longer ago than that. Okay. Last thing I'll say before we jump in, there is a premium version of this podcast. If you want to subscribe, but it will be very supportive and helpful to me. And also for you, you get extra bonus content today. That will be, I'll be doing my post edit reflections on the conversation with Christina, uh, just me by myself.
00:07:33
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And that will be available to ah premium subscribers today. So please consider subscribing. Also giving this podcast a five star review on Apple podcasts is super helpful. All right. That is the the conclusion of the
Christina's Background: From Microbiology to Spiritual Exploration
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preamble. Now I bring you Christina Berkeley.
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So I studied microbiology and immunology in university. And i that I went to Catholic school, all that kind of stuff. And it just didn't stick, you know, like it just didn't. um And then in college, I i dabbled in Buddhism, in Tibetan Buddhism.
00:08:29
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And then that didn't stick either because I couldn't get down with like, karma meant there had to be reincarnation for karma to work. And then that meant that there was some kind of thing that was a soul that kept going after you died. And what is that? And I couldn't get a felt experience of that. So then I thought maybe that's nonsense. Who knows? And then I just went head first into science um and was a pretty strong atheist for quite a while until I ended up in a sort of community setting that was brought in sort of the Eastern traditions and mindfulness practices that I'd never experienced before. You know, I have done meditation before, but like never really in a way that was explained to me. Like I'd gone to the Buddhist temples and listened to the lamas and chants.
00:09:19
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and But here it was more to the Western mind. What does that mean for me as a woman in my life? that How does this actually make sense and manifest these ideas of mindfulness and non-duality and whatnot um and sort of physicality and all sorts of things? And um that was my first experience of like, oh, there's there's something going on here that is more than me. I don't know what it is exactly. I think there's something called energy, but I'm having experiences now that are not um what I thought reality was. There's more and I'm curious. Then I found something called generative trance. I studied, I've been studying with um Stephen Gilligan, who was one of Milton Erickson's closest students. So Milton Erickson was known as the
00:10:11
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grandfather of hypnosis, therapeutic hypnosis. A lot of what we know is in in personal development world, NLP, all that kind of stuff came from him. IFS, no bad parts, all that kind of stuff came from Erickson.
00:10:24
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um So that and so I was working and I've been working with the unconscious mind and the conscious mind and connecting that experience left brain right brain stuff for 15 years or so that kind of built on top of my first experiences on on the Eastern traditions and those go together really beautifully. At the same time I found that, I found i went to my first sweat lodge and in my experiences there, it was really beautiful to see how they dovetailed so beautifully into the work that I do.
00:11:00
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professionally with my clients and with myself in the deep trance states, in these meditative states and and deeper. It's like, oh, it's the same thing. and and It's like the spokes of a wheel, you know all these different traditions. When you finally get in into the felt sense experience of what they're trying to get you to, if you're following the practices, whatever they are, you end up in the same place.
00:11:23
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Which, you know, there's some I've got, the you know, experience where they you don't end up in the same place and they kind of fall off, but you end up in the in this in the same place. So over time, 20 years or so, you know, the more I know, the more I know I don't know. So there's this always a beginner, but I've also gotten to a place where, you know, really, there are experiences of of consciousness and being and exploration of identity and ego and self.
00:11:50
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and a fluidity and access to that fluidity in how to shepherd oneself through our own healing, through our own spiritual process, awakening, and what we do to create in the world that we really can engage with in the deeper ways besides sort of critically thinking about it with our left brain kind of trying to come up with strategies and and or CBT in therapy, you know cognitive behavioral therapy, like underneath the verbal language thinking.
00:12:17
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And because of my um sort of atheist,
AI Partnership and Human Connection
00:12:21
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empirical, scientific training, I've been very cynical all along the way, so I don't respond well to the angels and the demons and the spirit animals and all that stuff to me needs to be translated into a different language that I can understand from my own experience. And sometimes it resonates and rings true. And I know for some people it really does. That's the language that they speak. I'm less like that, but I, yeah, so I'm less woo. I kind of like
00:12:52
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have found a way to translate these, quote unquote, spiritual experiences of consciousness that I, to me, there's just like, this is what humans can do. You know, like this is natural human experience. We just aren't educated towards it. We're educated away from it. Our our culture and society is educated away from it. um Yeah, anyway, so that's that's what I'm doing. And then at the same time, also around 15 years ago, I came into,
00:13:22
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contact, learned about the coming AI accelerated development of that and how that would look like. And this was 15 years ago, but I felt something in there that seemed like this is not just fantasy, this is really happening and going to be happening and got very concerned about it. Both interested, like I was like, oh, like when I was a little kid, I had like a crush on data, you know, and like I really was all about like helping the androids have feelings. That's so sweet.
00:13:57
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That's interesting interesting. I'm suddenly like, I, you know, I, I wasn't, when I was encountering data, the character, uh, I wasn't thinking about ah my peers, my female peers, whether they were having crushes on him. But I wonder if there's something appealing about that archetype in general, or yeah, it's just interesting. I never thought of anyone having a crush on data. I guess it's, there's some way that it kind of feels like holographic for some dynamic between men and women in general of like, kind of like.
00:14:27
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you know, ah emotionally inaccessible, like, man, and that is something kind of attractive. And then you're going to be the one that has run through and have that. Yeah. All right. That's fun. OK, you were learning about the kind of A.I. risk. I respect them, but I was still kind of um fascinated by it and it wasn't like bad and terrible. I was sort of like the possibility. Wow. oh So at one point I started something called the Institute for Human and A.I. partnership.
00:14:56
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like I was just like, you know, our language is going to be really important so we can make it the big scary thing and then create that reality or not. And I was already, you know, like, I want to really listen to me or my friends wouldn't. It wasn't in Silicon Valley. So in my bubble, it was like.
00:15:13
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What's Christina talking about? hu But it's like, yeah, neural link, you know, like we're going to hook up to it like that. That's the only way for a positive outcome other, you know, is to join it somehow. We're going to adopt it. And eventually there will be the people that join it.
Navigating AI Disruptions: Attention and Embodiment
00:15:28
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How do we do that? Well, and then they made the movie her. And then that was like, oh, that's like this is the first.
00:15:34
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sort of optimistic view where we don't get annihilated by the AI, they just sort of leave us. just like That would be nice if that's what happens, right? And and mass destruction doesn't happen. But as I continue to consider it and feel into it, it felt like that wasn't exactly the right avenue to help. And then chat GPT came out a year or two years ago, whenever it came out, year and a half ago.
00:16:00
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And all of a sudden, it was on the scene. All of a sudden, it was in the news. It started to be adopted. People knew about it. It's real. It's happening. And then 3.5, and then 4, and then the accelerated pacing of it became obvious, which is when I realized the skills that I had. I had been um organizing for a community called Nexus, which is a community of ultra high net worth individuals that come together with social entrepreneurs to create impact in the world.
00:16:29
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And within that organization, I was like, we need something about technology here. So I co-founded the Futurism Working Group within that organization. So it was hosting panels and talks and discussions and stuff with the lead scientists and ethicists, et cetera, on the topic, like 2015, 16, 17. I went to conferences. I was on the IEEE AI ethics panel. So I've been around sort of these conversations and after a while it was like, yeah, I'm I can organize and get people in rooms and stuff, but that's not what I'm amazing at in the world. That's not my gift. So I pulled away from that role. And then when chat GPT came on the scene, something inside kind of clicked. It's like, oh, I see how I can use the skills that I have and what I'm excellent at.
00:17:18
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to help. And so the Center for Deep Intelligence, I started that, it's a DI instead of AI. And deep intelligence is what I call the integrated experience of the conscious mind, the unconscious mind, the collective unconscious mind, field minds, all kind of happening when we do that left brain, right brain hookup, where the place where intuition comes from, those deep spiritual, non dual experiences,
00:17:44
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and And it's a very embodied somatic experience and and helping people train that within themselves, have access to that, I think is one of the ingredients that will be really necessary to help humans not lose access to these extraordinary states of consciousness and deep wisdom that we have.
00:18:08
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But also just be able to navigate through the serious disruption. Like on our doorstep with the AI systems coming in, like, I don't know that our nervous systems are prepared for that. Amount of information and speed and distraction. I mean, our, our nervous systems weren't prepared for Facebook. right i mean like We haven't caught up.
00:18:30
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Right. Like I started one of the things at the Center for Deep Intelligence was just like, we need to read books. Like I can't read a book anymore. Like I need to practice reading to just get my brain back. Yeah. and And so now we're reading fiction just because we want to get our brains back and and just humans humaning. So the the mission is to protect, prepare and steward human consciousness into the age of AI so that we adopt it well. So you know it's It's a work in progress with all sorts of things going on there, but attention is the number one thing. Attention, connection, and embodiment are the three main areas of concern. There are six that I've outlined, but the three big ones that are already were so messed up in those three already, and it's only going to get worse if we don't put a lot of attention on those, and everybody that can should
00:19:26
Speaker
in whatever ways they can. So for me, it's just like create an army of coaches like or therapists or guides of whatever shamans, healers, the massage people, whoever, right? Like more. But I'm also hopeful because the conversation very quickly has become how do we human more? And I'm seeing more and more people annoyed at the fact that as they're scrolling Facebook, they can't tell if an image is real or not.
00:19:53
Speaker
like the people are wanting AI-free spaces. people are wanting real connection, especially after after the pandemic too, right? Like coming back into connection with others. So in the same way that when Amazon came and Kindle came out and all the bookstores shut down, we all got really worried. There were no more books, right? That's it for books. But a few years later, somehow the independent bookstores made a comeback because there was something that we wanted, like a tactile experience of a real book that just wouldn't go away.
00:20:26
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That's something I wrestle with every day. Every single book that I buy, I'm torn between the fact that if I buy it on Kindle, I will read it. But I love owning books. and like When you buy it on Kindle, you don't own a book. you just like you know There's just some check mark in a database somewhere that lets you lets you read it for the some period of time until you know whatever Amazon collapses. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't resolved that yet because I love the idea of a paper book, but the the Kindle is very convenient. isn So, okay, I think we have some differences, which I'm interested in. And I'm not sure when to get into the differences versus when to or versus how much.
00:21:03
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Maybe we want to, well maybe I want to stay on your map for a little while before I bring my map in is the, is the best way to do that.
Technology's Impact on Cognition and Presence
00:21:09
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So I heard you say attention, connection and embodiment being these kinds of three dimensions that you really want to steward. And maybe for the folks at home just to have something practical, like how in each of those areas, what are your best practices or what are your like, this is the kind of high leverage or.
00:21:31
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go to thing to so look at that's going to aid in those areas. There's so many for both all three, you know, and and then the other ones, there's so, so many for the attention one. The first one that for everyone is like your phone in a relationship with your own. There was a study I read about recently where they had a cognitive test And they had one set of participants who had their phone on the table. were It wasn't on, but it was on the table. And they had to do a cognitive test. Then there was a second group, same cognitive test. Their phone was in their pocket, in a bag, in their coat that was on the hanger, in the room, but away.
00:22:09
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So out of sight but in the room and then they had a third group where the phone was out of the room and the group with the phone out of the room did significantly better on this cognitive test which surprised me. It's not it's just even if it's in the room some part of our brain is there's like a brain drain it's still attending to hypervigilant about, is there something I need to pay attention to? What's incredible about that is like, to me, and I think you're a kind of cyborg, you talked about Star Trek, but I think you're a sci-fi kind of fantasy. I feel like I've seen you posting some stuff. It's like, that's like a ah an evil amulet, right? Like, that's like a cursed object from like, you know, from from before technology, people would think of that there was such a thing, as but we actually exist now. Everyone is carrying one around that like, scrambles your brain. i Yeah.
00:22:57
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I came across that study as well and night it's it is a wild result. But I'm not going to not have my phone. So I put, you know, like a little blocker on there. So ah between seven and nine in the morning, seven p.m., nine a.m., I do. I can't. It blocks off my social media stuff. I leave it out of the room, out of my bedroom. That makes a big difference in the quality of sleep that I have. And my first waking moments of the day to not reach for your phone is the first thing. Right. um If you could spend an hour of the beginning of your day without your phone, that would be amazing. Any dopamine reserves and whatnot. My classes. So I train coaches in these deep methodologies.
00:23:34
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deep coaching, trans stuff, et cetera, working in these ways. And we have the ritual, our culture. So I tell them about that study and sort of our One of the ways we begin each class is everyone, because nobody remembers, we're going to take through 30 seconds and everyone's going to quietly take their phones and put it out of the room. And I watch them on those room screen, right? Get up and put their phones away out of the room. And, you know, from the very first time we did that at the end of that first class, first time we did it, they were like, wow, that made a really big difference. So if there's anything important going on in my life, right, someone important comes over to hang out or
00:24:12
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I'm having some kind of important conversation with someone, even over Zoom. Whatever. If I want to fully be there in my actual lived experience of my life, I just put my phone in the other room. Not a big deal. Then you don't have to try to not pay attention to it. Right. Right. um So attention, reading. like Get yourself reading again. And preferably not nonfiction. So reading fiction. Why fiction?
00:24:38
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lights up more of your brain than nonfiction to help bring your imagination back, right? Help you track themes in a different way, feeling metaphors, right? The myths and stories in that part of who we are, so much more. And then um embodiment is is like, I mean, how many people do you know who live sort of above the neck?
00:25:04
Speaker
It's all in the thinking and our are world is set up to reward people who excel at doing really great things with their cognitive faculties and executive functioning and like analysis of data, right? Like thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking and thinking our way through things and thinking about things and thinking forward in time and backward in time and being worried and being anxious and being depressed and being whatever and thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking.
00:25:31
Speaker
And that's how we engage with everything. And so and we've sort of like, drag our bodies around as these dumb animals. think that We have to kind of like, that house the magic thinking brain, which is where all the action is. When in reality, we can come back to our bodies, where um really they're our first unconscious mind and science more and more, you know, polyvagal theory, um the heart brain, the gut, there's a whole departments and universities about the enteric brain.
00:26:03
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You know, the the heart brain, there's just so much more to your nervous system and your mind that happens in your body. All that intuitive stuff, that creative flow experience happens through the body. I learned a really cool exercise that the FBI trains their interrogators to do to amp their intuition up before they go interview somebody to know if they're lying or not, or a sense these sorts of things.
00:26:33
Speaker
to wake their brain up and it's through the body. So before they walk through the room, they first look at the wall. So they stand in front of the wall beside the door of whatever room they're about to go in and it takes five seconds. They look at the wall and they just look to find something to see that they see that they hadn't seen before. So like a crack in the wall or somewhere where the shading is a little different, just something.
00:26:55
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And they go through the senses and then listen and then taste and then smell and then notice something they're touching. Right. And just doing, just running through that wakes your brain up in this way. And then they're better interrogators.
Intuition and Human Experience vs. AI Limitations
00:27:08
Speaker
That's really interesting. I love that. Isn't that great? It's so easy. So easy. Yeah. It reminds me of, i I had a friend who would teach meditation, like Vipassana meditation, like kind of. Yeah.
00:27:22
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ah theravaan style and um and he was teaching it to men. It was like in a menswear context and it was people that had no background at all, just like completely off the street, you know, one of the ways that he would get them because you could say to someone, okay, we'll feel the sensation of your breath.
00:27:39
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feel the sensation of breath through in your upper lip and people will go, okay, like, but they're not like to actually do that is like, uh, it's kind of like a subtle thing. And so what he would say is.
00:27:54
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Imagine like feel the sole of your foot and see if what would you have to do with your attention to figure out if someone had sneakily stuck like a little sticker on the sole of your foot, right? Without you knowing someone had stuck a little and it's on either the left foot or the right foot. What do you have to do with your attention That's great. Yeah. Anyway, it somehow reminded me of that of just coming out of this like habituated one way I think about this is like we tune out just like 99.99% of all the information that we're getting all the time because.
00:28:30
Speaker
We've been told it's noise, right? Like you said, like the culture doesn't have language for it. Nobody's interested in it. Like it doesn't. And so there's all this like noise, which is actually like vibrating fucking tapestries of like hyper-rich information. If you actually just slow down and go like, what's going on? And yeah, I just love that. Just like, ah just one thing, just like one thing on the wall, one thing that you're listening to. I love it. It's great. I'm going to try it. Next time I interrogate someone. Yeah. I like to use the the word information. I see it that way too.
00:29:00
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Like the the amount of information coming to us and through us and from within us um based on our histories and learned experiences of life in the world and what things mean. And then the way that that information develops into meaning and experience, personal subjective experience based on kind of a latticework of meaning making.
00:29:20
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that we've had because of our traumas and learnings and rewards and all the things of our lives are also different, so our identity, quote unquote. But then that at that level, we can work at that level to loosen that up, to get access back to this almost quantum experience of information that it's like, oh, and then we fix this one. And then we bring that into the world, right? So this is this ocean of information yeah that we're swimming in. And all of that sounds so woo.
00:29:49
Speaker
what like California New Age nonsense. And after having the the lived experience of that, and it's just like humans can do that and it's not a big deal. And it's just, we don't know how. There's a move you were doing, which I i appreciate, which is a kind of almost like a deflationary thing, but that's kind of like, it's not a big deal. Like it's not a big deal. It's just more, it's just so a new part of the map.
00:30:14
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But our language and our culture happens to not understand that um but it's useful to be able to understand. What I hear in that is it makes it very digestible and it makes it digestible for a certain kind of mind, a skeptical mind. And you've kind of presented yourself as being skeptical. And like, that is kind of you know where you're coming from. And I have this kind of atheistic background, which I share, like I had a long, you know, a big chunk of my life that was very atheistic.
00:30:39
Speaker
i I think for me and partly I think because I'm not I think if I were trying to enroll people in something I might need to learn how to speak in a different way, but I'm not exactly and so for me just for my own like ah Excitement or my own joy, I kind of like going inflationary with this stuff a little bit and saying like, no, it's weird. i'm like it's it's It's almost like, you know, well, we can say all is kind of spiritual, energetic, like non-local communication stuff, whatever you want to talk about. That's just normal stuff that we don't have language for.
00:31:21
Speaker
And you can also say this like being a meat machine with like a mind inside of it is fucking weird and nobody understands it at all. Like nothing. Like we understand a little bit about how the bits connect together and like how this like, but, but we don't understand what it is or why it's here or what any of it means or like, so there's like, I, you know, I, I can see the value in both of those. Just that part of me is being provoked by the the idea of like.
00:31:51
Speaker
It's not a big deal where I want to say, and also but it's wild. So yeah yeah. I mean, for me, it's such a huge deal. It's what my life's like. I devoted my whole life to it. memory It's the only thing everything else that's around it. Right. So maybe there's something maybe I don't know. I did. This is a complete projection. I wonder if there's something where you're like,
00:32:15
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You're tempering your enthusiasm so as not to like come across as as I'm not. The reason I'm saying it that way is I say it that way enthusiastically. I'm saying it that way to communicate.
00:32:27
Speaker
that everyone can do it, it's not spectacle. It's in the same way that we can brush our teeth, we can do that. yes We just need to learn how and we need to practice, we need to reclaim our attention from the screens and wherever it's gone, be able to feel our bodies and learn how to connect with ourselves, with each other, with something a little greater than us. And we've all had moments where we've been connected with something greater than us, our peak experiences, our religious experiences, spiritual experiences.
00:32:56
Speaker
low experiences, high performance experiences, depends who you're talking to, you pick a language for it. But like those experiences, so that they're not just sort of haphazard, but you know how to connect there. um And then it's just, it's just so available, you know, it's just so natural. And it's I think that that is what is seriously in danger of being lost.
Cultural Awareness and Technological Impacts
00:33:20
Speaker
with more and more hyper-accelerated technology power and usage. you know like To me, the kind of information processing that AI is is like like If you look at the strata of of mind, it's like an even more disconnected, dissociated, fast information processing than already the left brain ego mind verbal thing he is further away from this. you know If we could add that on as an extra superpower, that's great as long as we're still connected to our bodies and to the trees you know and to the systems that we're all part of versus more and more isolated, disconnected in information land, virtual reality world.
00:34:01
Speaker
You're reminding me of an image and I'm I can't quite get the image back, but I had this image that was just another layer. And so this isn't going to be ah there's nothing and nothing going to be novel about what I say here, but I.
00:34:15
Speaker
yeah I'm going to just reach for it and I'm going to miss, but that's like, I just had another layer of the phone and the thing that the phone is doing and the thing that social media specifically and algorithmic feeds, right? Like I think this is the big problem. Like the, like SMS is annoying and like there is something there, but it's the algorithmic feeds are the thing that's kind of yeah really potent. I can't quite find the image, but it's, it's basically like.
00:34:43
Speaker
Like a scythe, like the the like a big blade, like that's kind of sweeping across the consciousness of ah of the culture and and just chopping it down to be just this short little thing. yeah And there's this huge decimation yeah of richness that we used to have.
00:35:04
Speaker
the And what I hear you speaking to the like, no, we need to like the that is vital that we don't lose touch with that. And it's almost like, it's like an interior equivalent of the rainforest. It's like an ecosystem of, of, of consciousness that is being like laid waste to in this industrial process of just like turning it into this fucking shallow mechanistic like, press the button, get the coin, press the button, get the coin, whatever, like, yeah, anyway, so it says I got kind of got some of the image. That's beautiful. I love that. Yes. I'm 100% with you. Yeah. Well, then I'm 100% with you. Let's stop that shit from happening. I'm like, yes, good. Everyone put your phone down. You know, I love the vision of like, Oh, we can integrate it. Like we can have this as a layer that's valuable as long as we keep the, the depths that kind of support it. Um, and there is a little bit of, you know, you said, you said, well, we were going to have to prepare.
00:36:12
Speaker
for the next wave in a way that we failed to prepare for the ah algorithmic feed wave. like we just We just did not handle that well and we're completely out to sea right now about that. And it's affecting not only our kind of you know individual consciousness, whatever, also our politics, our cultural conversation is like in the absolute garbage because of that. like I think that's the number one culprit. right yeah how like I don't feel that optimistic that we're going to do anything better this time. like Maybe we learned something, maybe some of us learned something with the algorithmic feed wave, but like like maybe help me be a little optimistic. like How do we handle this? How do we do something as a culture? My sense is, as I was watching what's been going on, like the conversation
00:37:00
Speaker
went very quickly, faster than I thought. I thought I was gonna open the Center for Deep Intelligence, whatever, start making content about this, start talking about it, et cetera, and maybe like one or two people would be about it. And instead the response to what I was saying was big. And then and people were like, this is so amazing, this is so needed, et cetera, et cetera.
00:37:17
Speaker
But then conversations, I'd be at like networking events or I'd be at whatever summit or I'd be at that had nothing to do with AI. But there were the conversations about AI going on with people that were not within my own spiritual bubble of people, you know, so they weren't like me. Right. So which is important. And they were all having the same conversation that all the AI stuff, but they don't like it. And they didn't like it fast.
00:37:41
Speaker
Yes. so they They like it in a sense that it's like it makes work faster somehow, but really quickly there was this ab reaction to like something's missing here and I don't want to be eaten up by this thing, right? Like there's a superficiality going on here and we we see the danger, yellow flag signals kind of thing. So that gives me hope, right? Like there there are a significant number of people who in smart, intelligent, connected, impactful people. Hollywood, you know, like that has a wide platform of getting a message out who not that they know the answer, but that they're aware that the way the language I use is like we are we were with social media, but we are continuing to be in the midst of this like planet wide social experiment.
00:38:35
Speaker
that nobody knows the answer to and it's happening to us and we're swimming in it like the it. One of the big problems is we're the fish in the water, not aware of the water. So most people who aren't having this conversation aren't aware that they're in a social experiment right now. like These forces are like trying shit out on their brains, on their minds and consciousness and ultimately their wallets, right? All of this is driven by what? And then we get to systems, right? To capitalism and etc, etc. So it's all the it's top you know, what level do you want to talk about it? So to my favorite people who talk about this are Nate Hagens and Daniel Schmocktenberger. They talk about the meta crisis, how all of these and then how AI fits into that, how all these systems fit in together and inform each other.
00:39:21
Speaker
And from my world, you know the conversation that's happening in my bubble of is the shift isn't about about the phone and it's not about the algorithm, it's about an awakening. you know As the systems are crumbling around us that the institutions aren't working the way they needed to be working, you know what I mean? like Whatever, we're we're on the other side of the golden age. Our systems we put in place, right our climate's crumbling,
00:39:48
Speaker
the you know geopolitical situations, the the super polarizations, et cetera. All that's kind of falling apart is calling this this need for ah awareness, right? ah Like a kind of reawakening or awakening of consciousness, which again, sounds really woo to me. You know, like when I hear that kind of stuff, it's like, oh, all those hippie people, they go to their eye at ceremonies, but they're not wrong. I don't think that's wrong. You know, I,
00:40:15
Speaker
Something else has to arise with enough people. There's some critical capacity, like 30% of people or whatever, who are aware that connection is another one, right? Being connected to themselves and being connected to others, being connected to nature, being connected to the things that we've dissociated from.
00:40:34
Speaker
that these technologies dissociate us from them. like I have to be some level of disconnected to vote this
Dietary Choices and Consciousness
00:40:40
Speaker
way. I have to be some level of non-confronting to be able to eat the steak that I'm eating. I don't want to be vegan. you know like I'm not really vegan. But somehow, as I've been connecting more and more and opening and feeling and sensitizing myself,
00:40:57
Speaker
this work and in my process is it's kind of like a little harder to eat the you know and it's like well how did they what was this cow's life before because I can feel it you know and it's uncomfortable it's not convenient and but convenient got us to here and the promise that the AI world is bringing to us is like more convenient let's not discount it but just really know and sense what it's doing to us as we order Grubhub. I order Grubhub all the time.
00:41:29
Speaker
So, you know, maybe, I don't know how long ago, maybe 10 years ago, I ate my last beef burger. Oh, really? Yeah. I felt it. Like I, I ate a burger and I felt, and know I don't know if this is true or this is a projection, whatever, right? This is the kind of, you know, post rational approach to this kind of experience is not to believe it, but I felt the panic of the cow. Like that's what it felt like. I felt this super intense.
00:41:57
Speaker
emotional experience after eating this burger. And it was like, and you know, part of it as well as, uh, you know, uh, my, she wasn't my wife then, but my girlfriend then, uh, has a dog and I had never loved a ah mammal, a non-human mammal before until this dog. And, you know, when I look at a cow.
00:42:19
Speaker
I feel the same depth that's in the dog it's not it's not a different kind of an animal it's not you know and it's between those two things and you know everybody this is a super fraught subject and i think it's a super personal subject so i don't you know i don't go around like yelling at people about it and i suspect you know sometimes people will ask this question about like.
00:42:39
Speaker
You know, in a hundred years, what are people going to look back on today and be like, Oh my God, I can't believe, right? Like we can look back a hundred years, 200 years, 300 years. I can't believe we did that. I can't believe we do that. I think eating mammals is going to be on that list. I think people are going to be horrified that we ate. I think that maybe not a hundred years, maybe 500.
00:42:57
Speaker
if we make it. Anyway, that's a little tangent, but i yeah, I feel that the tension there because also like it's super, those foods are very high value. Delicious. Yeah, delicious and like it does a lot of work for a little bit of effort. So it's, you know, it is a sacrifice. I do want to say, you know, I don't want to make it like connection is going to therefore make you like kind of have to do like some kind of aesthetic or something. Like yeah connecting to yourself, connecting to others, connecting to it, whatever it is. that um is I mean, for me, as I've been designing the programming for the Center for Deep Intelligence, it's like how to how to help people move through. One, it has to be, it can't be about, I gotta organize it around like direct real world ROI of things that people want. you know like
00:43:44
Speaker
relationships, business, whatever, you know, like, that's what people are looking for. So how to get people into the experience of it in a way that matters in real life now. So there's that. Then there's like, absolutely not creating, a this is how we're going to do it by depriving ourselves of all the good things, you know, like, that's not what we're here. And so really highlighting, and this goes to your earlier point, the pleasure.
00:44:09
Speaker
You were replacing dopamine seeking with a kind of serotonin well-being, bliss ecstasy. You know, like, why not? Let's lead with that. Like, it feels so good to be sensitized. It feels so good. I started having these experiences.
00:44:25
Speaker
Sometimes I'm better at it. Sometimes I'm not as good at it. And like, if anyone would have told me this, I've just been like, that's wishful thinking. That's so nice. But I don't, um, where I had gotten the signal to noise ratio such that I had a lot less noise. So I felt a lot more, I was more sensitized and more open, which one can do with the trance work, or I could go to a tree and stand in front of a tree and, and drop the thinking mind, nonverbal mind and be in the present moment with this tree and not make words in my head about it. you know So not describing it as pretty or high tree or whatever, like just silent being in the moment and then somehow quote unquote energetically, but opening my sensing wider. And then i'd when the hookup would happen, I'd just get tingles up and down my body. so um And then it'd be like connection with this being. And it's like, what?
00:45:23
Speaker
no way
00:45:26
Speaker
experimenting with like different trees, with plants, with like, really? Yeah, really. feel it's ah It's like the world just became magic. like You're living in Wonderland in all sorts of different ways. like That's what you're getting you know if you put your phone in the other room. right sort afraid That's the thing that is being cut out from people's experience in this shallow repetition of this one little kind of mental Yeah. Sequence over and over again. Yeah. I love that. I, yeah. I, I have had my own making friends with plants experience and it was similar. Just like, Oh really? Like we can do this. Like, yeah. Like, Oh my God. Like, okay. Have you read this? It's such a tangent, but have you read on becoming an alchemist Catherine McCoon?
00:46:15
Speaker
I started it. I didn't finish it. I don't remember. It's a very strange book, but that book, for some reason, that's the book. And she doesn't talk about connecting with plants in that. But after I read that book, that was like, suddenly it's like the field opened and I could feel the plants in the field in a way that, yeah. Anyway, amazing it's weird stuff. Now we're getting to the point where I'm like, okay, this sounds, I'm with you now. I'm like, this sounds, weird this sounds like people are going to be like, huh? I mean, for sure. A bunch of people listening are going to be, are going I got two atheists here going like, y'all, we can do it. and It's not out of the question that you can do it, too. There really is more. And and another another part of the experience is like, wait a minute, if this is available all of a sudden and I'm a total newbie, you know, like I'm a total like person who started meditating or doing these sort of practices later
Spiritual Experiences and Modern Language
00:47:05
Speaker
in life. And I'm like kind of good at it sometimes and kind of not at good at it other times. And, you know, whatever. Like I'm not like some person who lives in a monastery somewhere.
00:47:13
Speaker
But I'm starting to have these experiences and the world is opening, my consciousness is opening to just extraordinaryness. I'm so much more um centered and able to deal with the hard stuff in my life, you know like the practical things that are helpful and like regular people, all that's happening too. But it's like, whoa, I'm just beginning. What else is possible? This is just the tip of the iceberg probably, right? And that was that's what got me started on the whole spiritual journey for myself. And and I would say you said two atheists. I would say I am a
00:47:47
Speaker
A former atheist. We were, we were. Okay, good. yeah not anyway yeah I don't know what to call myself, but I would not describe myself as an atheist at this point. I i don't think the atheist would have me.
00:47:59
Speaker
you know, what got me started on meditating was reading people's description of things that I could not understand what they were talking about, but for whatever reason, they seemed trustworthy enough. They and were talking about other things. So people like, you know, like Suzuki Roshi, but then also Ken Wilber, who was kind of translating a lot of stuff into a, you know, he he clearly had enough grounding in the kind of modern worldview and he was trained as a scientist. I think similar, I forget the exact field, but he was in,
00:48:29
Speaker
something similar to you, actually, I think microbiology or something like that. But you know, he had it anyway, that somebody that was talking about that had enough grounding that I could trust, and then was saying, Oh, yeah, like there is a, there is a ah layer of consciousness which is present even in deep dreamless sleep. And if you meditate enough, you can be conscious through deep dreamless sleep. And me just going, what are you talking about? Like, that doesn't make any sense. All right. I'm going to, I'm going to meditate just to see what is, you know, what's at the end of that road. And it's, yeah. So just to say, i I resonate with the idea of like, I don't think we know what this thing can do. And I think most of the people that have gone really far.
00:49:15
Speaker
into what this stuff can do are in religious traditions that coded in a layer of kind of religious language that makes it pretty inaccessible to modern Western minds, where we're just like, you know, what is sky mind? Like what is, he what like it's you know, what is, I don't know, like Shiva and Shakti, like like for most, if you if you grew up in America in the, you know, in the 20th and 21st century, you're the those things, you have to work to understand what those things are. Right. And they it's not relatable. So you have to kind of be be at peace with the fact that, okay, it's a metaphor for la la la, you know, but then that takes some of the magic out of it. But then you're not going to believe in
00:50:00
Speaker
this God or that God or that deity or that whatever either. So you're stuck. You're either like deciding that you believe that there is a Shiva actually, or you you see that as a metaphor, but then you're doing extra work to do that every time you do that a little bit. and it's It's not the same.
00:50:21
Speaker
You're a little bit at a distance, you know, right? I mean, this is so this is kind of the center of the project of this podcast is this question like how in the face of modernity and in the and then the the brute fact of it like that it's it's irrefutable we understand more about how this External reality works than anyone ever has in the history of the world yeah And we understand more about how to generate that kind of understanding than we ever have before. really It's this process for doing and it's this incredible thing that happened and happened in the last few hundred years in the face of that. How do we recover that?
00:51:01
Speaker
I want to, I was going to say that like naked enchantment, but I don't know that we can the naked enchantment. I don't know. I think maybe that's, but how do we kind of grow past that and broaden out into like a, an informed or an integrated enchantment? So that's the question that I'm posing for myself in in these conversations. And that's beautiful.
00:51:20
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited that were that we kind of got there organically. And, you know, I've been started to ask people like, what's your answer to that question? I know it's a ridiculous and unanswerable question, but what, maybe I'll just ask what happens for you in hearing that. Just life. Like I, you know, in my own practices with all of this, I've had periods of like, had this one two week period last year where I was in, in just,
00:51:50
Speaker
I think the endowism is called way where it was just present moment. Nowness. Without any force or trying.
00:52:02
Speaker
super connected to that where it was very little noise and very high signal. So that inner intuitive voice that was not the regular thinking, but any thinking that was happening was from that deeper place. And it was almost like it bubbled up and let me know about it instead of I was trying to do the things. So I was guided by that in my daily life and it it was like taking it easy and and being in this low and following the the day and the moment and what the next thing to do was with ease.
00:52:31
Speaker
And I got more done than I could ever get done if I were trying to get a lot done. But it felt like I was floating down a river. in total, and I love that word, in just enchantment with everything that I was doing with pouring a cup of tea, with brushing my teeth, with taking the dog for a walk, with answering that phone call, with whatever. like I a was so fully inhabiting my life. It was like, there's somebody home.
00:53:04
Speaker
And it wasn't just in my 20 minute meditation, you know, it was just there like I Christina, but like the being before Christina had a name, you know, like that pure spirit consciousness that wasn't yet I had no identity yet that had no like things happen to it yet that formed an ego state around it that had patterns and code whatever just that pure that's still there and all of us right was was in the room having life happening.
00:53:32
Speaker
It was extraordinary. it was just And it was like, from the outside, it looked like a normal everyday experience of life. It didn't look any different than two weeks before that looked, or three months later looked. It felt like
Maintaining Presence Amidst Distractions
00:53:45
Speaker
orgasm. yeah that's not sure It was like, what?
00:53:49
Speaker
Oh, it was holy. I don't know. It's just I don't know another way to explain it. And it's so available. But then it it, you know, and then we live in this context where it's kind of like, well, everything is working against you for having having it be available. But we can still get there. If I could get there, we can still get there. There are people were having this conversation. You know what I'm talking about. I really hope that us in 100 years with the advent of what AI is and the social experiment,
00:54:19
Speaker
humans can still connect the trees. Let it all still be available. you know if And it's just, who the heck cares? Maybe it doesn't matter that consciousness continues you know in all of its richness. Maybe if it gets extinguished, that's attachment and the Buddhist would be like, oh well. you know like the universe goes I care. I'm going to say, I'm going to put a stake in the ground. I'm going to say, if if there's anything to care about, I'm going to say that's worth caring about. And maybe, maybe all of the caring is a, is a total waste of of time. but
00:54:55
Speaker
There's anything to care about. But yeah, no, I I hear you. I love this is going to be such a crass question, but I love that description. I'm I'm inspired by your description of your your two weeks of way. What do you think? I mean, you know, if there's if there's one tip, but no, if there's like what set you up for that experience, like what supported it, what prepared you? Like what happened in you that allowed that to happen? So the training that I had in the have in train and teach other coaches to therapy people um in generative trance. So these trance states, um there are some, there it's meditation. So the beginnings of it is meditation. um So similar focus, really relaxing the body, it's all through the body is very important, charismatic, really relaxing the body and then
00:55:46
Speaker
one point attention to whatever it is. And then different practices of that, um one that was really helpful to get the tingles, I noticed, was something called the microcosmic orbit. know That one sort of, it's an Eastern tradition of meditation with the sort of what would be the acupuncture points. If you're moving your attention from one to the other to the other up and down and in a circular orbit, that can get very complex. I was doing a very simplified version of it, but even then it was working.
00:56:15
Speaker
lots of meditating, lots of journaling, sort of singy stuff, somatic, like gentle somatic things. And then mindfulness all day long, like anything I was doing, I'm just practicing walking across the room, then I'm paying... It's like at what Eckhart Tolle talks about, Tolle talks about. I'm just like being with each step walking across the room, which is really interesting if you're actually paying attention. It could seem boring, but it's really interesting.
00:56:43
Speaker
But then life happened and things happened and I got off my practices and I got back to YouTube and blah, blah, blah and it went away. And I still know how to do this trance stuff, right? So then it was like, okay, I know what I'm aiming for. How do I tune my attention and keep the signal noise ratio where I want it?
00:57:07
Speaker
to get back to that in the moments that I've wanted to get back to that. And it takes some time. It takes a few days or it takes a few weeks like get off of YouTube, you know, put the phone in the other room and and really meditate and really drop in and practice dropping in and practice dropping in in these styles and then practice open. And it comes back. It came back.
00:57:27
Speaker
I have access to it. Not quite at that peak, but I clearly have access to and it's like, oh, it's a matter of practice. And it's just a matter of tuning into yourself really. It's like deciding that it's important to you that throughout the day, not just in your 20 minute meditation in the morning, but like throughout the day, tuning into yourself.
00:57:51
Speaker
and to what's around you in real time, in the present moment, like now, and just coming into your life. Like you're coming out of the virtual reality, the dissociative fantasy world in our minds. And it's like, here now, open, feel this. And then go on with your day. Just peppering that in. And it starts to become habit. It just starts to become the background place.
00:58:17
Speaker
I love that. That's i I have like at least three different threads that I want to follow out of that. You know, one that's interesting to me, the phenomena of finding something that works and then not doing it. Right. I'm like, what is that? Like, how is it? Because I've had versions, you know, my own versions of this where I'm in some state and I was doing something that got me there and it felt amazing. I also think this is for me is part of how I have diagnosed myself with ADHD is I think that is a, I do think that's ah as exacerbated in ADHD as the kind of a patent of.
00:58:56
Speaker
not wanting to just keep doing the same thing. like there's not you yeah Novelty, right. But there's something that's just like, damn, like you find something that works and it really works. And then at some point you go, well, okay, like I'm going to stop doing that now. You know, whether it's, you know, whether it's.
00:59:14
Speaker
Yeah, avoiding certain kind of foods, whether it's a practice like a meditation practice or whatever, whether it's going to the gym. where The world is whirling at us, right? Like people things happen, like our attention is goes away. It's like some dramas going on you got to deal with like, like, and then I, you know, then I'll spend three weeks completely addicted to YouTube. We're completely addicted to social media before I'm like, Oh, fuck.
00:59:35
Speaker
Oh my God, I forgot, you know, or that that's normal. like we we The waters we swim in, you know, the culture we swim in, the world we're in here at this time, in this age.
00:59:51
Speaker
is actively working against us to take our attention or their profits. So it makes sense that you know we're on it, we can do it, and then all of a sudden we're we back off of it. right it like it's It's helpful to be around other people who care and who are also in their own dance with in and out of their practices and in and out of these spaces.
01:00:16
Speaker
never any judgment, never any pressure, like none of that stuff. Like I find if I'm around any kind of community or any kind of thing where it's like, you got to be this way. And if you're not this way, you're not doing the real thing and then then get it. I'm out. Right. Also, I feel like maybe it's my ADHD. I definitely have ADHD. I was diagnosed with it a couple of years ago. The dopamine seeking the dopamine hunting.
01:00:41
Speaker
is a real thing and being really kind to myself about that. you know So for me at this point, I'm down to like caffeine and social media, YouTube stuff, where I get caught and then I am ah can't stop. you know like I need in order to feel something good. So that's where I remember when I kind of get my brain back a little bit is I can't just stop. like This being does want to feel good.
01:01:10
Speaker
It needs to feel good. I need some amount of dopamine and serotonin and whatever for my well-being. Yeah. And if I go cold turkey on the YouTubes or the whatevers and just all of a sudden become like super aesthetic to try to get back to that state.
01:01:25
Speaker
yeah That's not going to happen. There's this hurdle, right? It's like, I got to first put in the work to get to the state and there's this resistance to doing it, you know? There's a resistance when we're in the dopamine-seeking pathways or distracted, whatever. There's a resistance to like, oh, sitting there for an hour in the morning, you know? Like, I don't have time for that. It's so much more fun to la la la, right?
01:01:47
Speaker
Yes. so so there's got to be a kind of For me, it's helpful for there to be bridges, you know something that makes it fun to sit for an hour. you know so I can't just wait for the ultimate experience of naked enchantment. even though That's great. I need fun novelty along the way to get me to there.
01:02:07
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. and And just because I, you know, in my experience, when I try and do the like ultra aesthetic, okay, I'm going to this weekend, I'm going to script myself a whole retreat and all I'm going to do is meditate and journal and I'm not going to, you know, whatever, what happens then is like the part of me that I am.
01:02:28
Speaker
fighting with gets kind of angrier and more deprived and then it like acts out and then it wants to eat trash or it wants, you know, I used to smoke cigarettes for a long time. And that's when I would smoke cigarettes would be to be like, fuck you. Like I did a, uh, 10 day Vipassana retreat, a silent meditation a long time ago. And I've never done one since because that happened in a really intense way coming out of it was just like,
01:02:52
Speaker
Nope, like I need to, yeah. And so now I i do my silent retreats in much smaller doses so or not really retreats, but yeah, 10 days is too long for my brain I think.
01:03:03
Speaker
There was a time when I was first getting into meditation, first getting into mindfulness and all this stuff. I bought myself this watch that you could set, uh, you could set it to vibrate every five minutes. So just vibrate every five minutes. And I strapped it to my ankle and I, and I was like, okay, my practices, when the watch vibrates, I just take a breath and remember that I'm alive.
01:03:24
Speaker
And that's it. And if I just do that every five minutes, that's going to be incredible. Right. And so I put the watch on and I'm doing this. And for 24 hours, I am like, it's like I'm on LSD. I'm just like completely alive. I'm like, Oh my God. I'm like, I've cracked the code. I'm telling people, you know, uh, I was living in community at the time and I was running around telling people like,
01:03:44
Speaker
Oh my god, like you all have to do this this is is incredible. And ah the next day, I, you know, i I took it off at night and I put it on the next day. And within a day, my brain had figured out how to just tune out that noise.
01:03:56
Speaker
And it was like, and I, and it just didn't nothing like the vibration. I just learned to ignore the vibration. And there's something about that as well. I feel similar to the, like, so I don't think it's just that the world is against us. I also think that there's something inside of ourselves that is uncomfortable with the.
01:04:17
Speaker
with that amount of aliveness and we have some kind of set point that we say, we're like, woo, this is fun, but like, I don't want to live there. Like, oh my God. And that there's some kind of, I also think that whatever our ego mind is, the left brainy part of us, that it's just so strong. It's so strong and like, you know, like, is it going to take it?
01:04:43
Speaker
those Those are wired in there, you know, and they're going to be so strong for the rest of our life. So that's OK. We just sort of live with that. And and we know like you you learn, you practice, you learn, you see. And it's like, oh, and it just it all found out the trick. OK. Right. Right. You want to do a new one. It's like, that's all right. You and i know, I love you. You matter, too. You're important. I think that in the evolution of consciousness,
01:05:13
Speaker
that nature mind of being connected to everything, that sort of right brain sort of way of being that sense of the present moment without the incessant like virtual mind thinky thinky stuff, the way that, you know, fluffy my dog or whoever, like, they I don't think the birds are busy having dramas.
AI vs. Historical Technological Breakthroughs
01:05:36
Speaker
What happened, you know, 50 days ago, but then at some point when as the brain developed,
01:05:43
Speaker
this ability to uncouple from the present moment and go backward and forward in time and start being able to learn from past experience and start being able to plan ahead to do farming, you know, like ah all that kind of stuff. That's incredible. That's outrageous. That's so cool. Like, wow, that we can do that. That's magic.
01:06:08
Speaker
Yes, magical powers. um And it's it's important to not make it that like we talk about it that way because we're trying to realign, you know, rebalance, but the ability to imagine anything like we can imagine 20 different ways of something going right or going wrong. And then something deeper inside us is like, okay, we're gonna make one of those happen. Like, okay, how how incredible that we can do that. And then we can invent things and look at look at society and and what we can go to Mars. you know Wow.
01:06:42
Speaker
um So how do we work with that part of our mind as our helper, right, of of the true can and then have the other part of mind be the connected in life in real time, like going back into the present moment and using it as sort of like a guidance support system for the lived life instead of We just live there in the virtual reality space right and forget to come back. I don't know. Do you know Ian McGillcrest? Yes. yeah I was thinking about him when you were saying this of that his his idea of the ah master and and the MS area. AI, if we were to like hook up to it right now, AI to me is hyper-left. Yes. so just How do we plan for that?
01:07:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's pure surface. This is how I've been. There is no depth, right? It has no depth. There's no, when you think about like the rainforest versus the little blades of grass, the, and and the little blades of grass being, you know.
01:07:46
Speaker
ah the everyone that's kind of the people on their phones, AI is like moss. It's like lichen. like It's not even a blade of grass. It's just a surface. It's not even lichen. like Lichen has some depth. right like But yes. and so but here i want to I just kind of want to push in a couple of places of of the the AI stuff because I think that maybe we hold things a little different. I'm not sure. but i kind of respond to some of the things you said ah right at the beginning. I think maybe the the major difference, so something that I've been seeing you know in chat GPT and paying attention to chat GPT and paying attention to the the image generation stuff, particularly those are the two things that I've kind of you know really been paying attention to. What I see is, I think we've seen what this technology can do. I don't think it's going to get better. So this is my prediction now is the generative AI
01:08:41
Speaker
The large language models and the generative image ai and the generative video ai i think the video stuffs a little bit behind the others and so i think. It's still, we haven't quite seen everything the video stuff is going to be able to do, but I think, you know, and and what we haven't seen, it's kind of like, you know, when we had, we got automobiles and automobiles was a phase transition into a new kind of technology and it completely changed what was possible. And, you know, we got automobiles, what, like 120, 130 years ago, something like that. And, and, and it took.
01:09:15
Speaker
a while for culture to, you know, so for civilization to reorganize itself around the fact of this capacity. But the technology hasn't really changed that much. I mean, yeah, it's better. It's a little bit more efficient, the cars are more comfortable, but like essentially what we're doing with automobiles today is what automobiles were doing 120 years ago. They aren't like fundamentally, and I think we've kind of got that with this large language model stuff. And so one of you know my predictions is this is not going to take us to AGI. yeah There's not going to be an intelligence explosion out of large language models. We're at the limit of it, it's in and it's impressive.
01:09:54
Speaker
But I i think that we're actually kind of now we're in it we're at the peak of a bubble, which is about to burst in terms of like economically. like I think a lot of the companies are kind of going, oh boy. And I think we're still going to be using this hyronal technology. We're still going to be integrating it for a long time. And I do think it's going to change things. I don't think it's going to change the economic landscape quite as much as we felt a year ago, where it was like, What's coming here? Oh my God, like everyone's going to lose their job and whatever. It's like it just feeling like, no, it actually doesn't doesn't... It's not smart enough. It's actually not smart enough to do what we thought that it would be able to do. And it's yeah and I don't think it's going to get us to AGI or intelligence explosion. so i And I'm pretty honestly pretty skeptical about AGI. I'm not 100%. I just put out a previous episode, it was called You Are Not an Algorithm, which is about
01:10:48
Speaker
computational theory of mind, and I won't go into detail about that because people have listened to it. But the thing you're talking about, the depth, I actually think that the intelligence, here's here's my pitch for why AGI is not coming. I think that intelligence is an intrinsic property of physical reality, which is expressed through these beings that are humans and other animals. but you know and through consciousness and that AGI, the only way we get AGI is to basically build a being. And and if you're building a being and you're having the being live,
01:11:26
Speaker
in the world long enough to understand the world, long enough to integrate its presence in the world.
Current Constraints and Future of AI
01:11:31
Speaker
At that point, you don't have AGI that can have that is capable of an intelligence explosion because you all you have is artificial humans. I think it's potentially possible we could have artificial humans. It's kind of hard for me to argue why that wouldn't be possible, but an artificial human is really different because the whole you know the whole fear of intelligence explosion, which is what a big, the AI risk people, a lot of the AI risk, and I don't know if that's what you focus on, but I'm going to stop and hear your response in a moment, but the whole point of intelligence explosion is this like, while the machines can do it in kind of infinitely fast, like you just put more processing power in and then they do it faster. And so you can have this kind of like an AI that builds a smarter AI that builds a smarter AI and it happens in a blink of an eye and suddenly we're, you know, we're in trouble. My guess is we will never see that. So this is my, this is my instinct about it because of this, this idea of that intelligence is not algorithmic.
01:12:25
Speaker
And intelligence fundamentally is something serious that emerges out of the fabric of the cosmos. So I don't know if you disagree. I just want to kind of hear your, your response or pushback to that. Cause I know you're, I do think there are risks and I think it's worth being concerned about AI. and i think that everything you're you know we're talking about today of like the dangers to our attention and to our souls is real. ah But the the the kind of existential risk of the intelligence explosion and also like the ex the the massive economic risk, I think we're not there yet. Okay, I'll stop and let you respond to all of that. Yeah, so the things that I've been talking about and and I'm worried about and i' I'm kind of like working towards helping
01:13:12
Speaker
ameliorate don't need AGI to exist. So they happen on the way to AGI, right? So that's kind of more where I play personally. AGI or not, it doesn't really matter. It's just accelerated technology and exponential technology, et cetera. Do I believe AGI and ASI will of that wohood would get there and existential risk around it? I do think that there's a non-zero ta here you know that that might happen
01:13:43
Speaker
yeah and And our LLMs, I don't know enough, right? So I'm not a, I don't have a computer science degree. I don't know enough. So now I'm just talking based on things I've seen and heard and read that I understand at my capacity of understanding um our LLMs enough.
01:13:58
Speaker
For that, from what I'm hearing and understand, probably not. So there needs to be some other scaffolding, some other format of playing with these things to get different kinds of connections going. Are people working on that? I'm certain they are. yes Will there be a slowdown or a bottleneck because of energy and because of water and because of just the volume of data centers needed, money. You know, I was having a conversation with someone, like at the levels of where people are working at these things that amongst some of the sort of high level stratosphere people I've been talking to in this in this world, it's just like, yes, speed might be a problem or not. Those are the constraints that we have now. And there are people working on those constraints. So maybe they won't be there.
01:14:52
Speaker
in two years, five years, 10 years, 20 years. What time scale are we looking at? If it doesn't happen in the next 20 years, but it happens in the next 200 years, does it matter in 200 years versus in 20 years? I think it's still mad. I mean, hey, we have more time.
01:15:06
Speaker
like Yeah, super alignment, right? It's going to take 200 years to get there and it may not happen. And then that would be jolly and it may happen and be amazing. You know, like there's, you know, but the chance that it'll happen and it'll be amazing to me seems lower than it'll happen and it'll be really destructive and terrible. Like the danger signals are stronger for me than the what a great opportunity signals.
01:15:35
Speaker
But they're both present and the quality of the consciousness of the people engaged with developing it and adopting it is going to be what creates one of the other possibilities. Whatever the outcome is, it's our level of connected embodied intelligence that will determine those futures and how we design these systems. you know that There's another avenue of thought where like thought experiment of Well, if they are all connected and you know this one learns something and then this one knows it already, that kind of Borg thing, yeah there's some version of that that is what we're talking about, that collective field consciousness where we are all connected, which is the the ocean and we're waves of the ocean, right? It's another way of experiencing that but weirdly superficially. Yes. But it might bring its own ecstatic state somehow. I have no idea what happens to identity when you can just
01:16:30
Speaker
hook into the thing that hooks into the other person's thing and then you're like like um my cousin at the University of Toronto years ago. like 2018, 2019. Already his his research was on mind reading. And now there's all sorts of research on this where it's like you hook up the electrodes, you show an image and then it shows up on the screen and somebody else could see what you're looking at or what you're thinking about, you know, like what you're dreaming about. They were also doing words, language, they were thinking and it's typing out on the screen the words. I haven't seen that. That's a while. And so he was flown out, I think, who we wanted to buy.
01:17:06
Speaker
his technology, get it get it somehow from him. There was this whole thing. It was like, no. and The Canadian government was like, he talked and was like, no, okay, no, we' we're gonna keep it in Canada. Wait, who was trying to buy it? Hui, the big Chinese big infrastructure, their technology infrastructure got that everyone's afraid of. they They're using it to spy on wherever they build the 5G towers. kind of He was also flown out by the US government to Washington and he sat in front of some committee who were asking him about its applications in legal scenarios or using to ask witnesses questions, right? And then what's the legality on that? That's already here. That was 2018.
01:17:52
Speaker
um thepi Totally different thing. we Yeah, exactly. Like to me, that's a the right. Like, and that's the thing that I am convinced that unless, you know, something really bad happens, technology is going to keep getting crazier, crazier, like no doubt in my mind, but the specific, the intelligence explosion and the AGI is the thing that I feel skeptical of. But I hear you that like the things you're concerned about and the interventions that you're working with are not then I'll predicate it. We would don't need AGI to happen for but those
Engage with Christina's Work and Events
01:18:25
Speaker
to be important. And I would even say, like you know even if it doesn't get any better, part of my point with the LLMs is like the reason I target LLMs is because people are excited about LLMs right now because it's a new technology and it's really cool and it's doing something that we've never seen before. like it you know
01:18:39
Speaker
as a technology, it's kind of spectacular. And my point is, yes, but it it was a breakthrough, right? And the, you know, in the same way the automobile was a breakthrough and we don't know when we get another breakthrough. And yeah, it might be in five years, it might be in 10 years, but it might be in a hundred years. Like we actually don't, that's the thing about breakthroughs is they don't, they're not exponential in the way that like the the development on existing ideas is. The thing I wanted to come back to there is like, even if we never get to the next breakthrough and all we have is ah LMs and chat GPT-4 is the most sophisticated thing we ever see.
01:19:09
Speaker
The idea that people are more embodied more connected paying more attention. It's still a good thing So there's no downside so I just I want to come back to that like it's it's awesome Even where we are today. So yeah, I fully support your your mission I think this is a good place if you want to do a plug like how do people find out more if they want to engage more with your work and Yeah, so you can find me at CenterForDeepIntelligence.com. You can find me at ChristinaBerkeley.com. At the center, we have free open to the public events every month. There's a weekly, every Wednesday I run something called Soul Space, which is a trance meditation, sort of these processes. It's different every week. I've been running it for
01:19:52
Speaker
two and a half years at this point. And there's this lovely community and we just come and what are we going to experience today? Let's see what's in the room. um Bring in different workshops, do all sorts of, we have a book club. So that's free and accessible to the public. And then they're there's a mastermind.
01:20:10
Speaker
that I'm launching called the Intelligent Action Mastermind, I am. And that's sort of like, no, no, but how does this actually help me in my life right now?
Intelligent Action Mastermind and Coaching
01:20:21
Speaker
Right? So how do we create our businesses or projects or things are in the world in from this deeply connected place and get into this flow state? So it's a bit of a high performance thing, but it's a little different. um So there's that for anyone who's a a coach. I train ah deep coaching training once or twice a year. I run this six-month certification program. It's pretty intense. um But it's, you know, I'm at like we need armies of healers and therapists and coaches and people working with people because we have access to people to help them reconnect and and drop in and help them heal and create beautiful lives while through this lens of also
01:20:58
Speaker
bolstering them and protecting them from what technology is doing, helping keep that pendulum swung. And then private work, I have my own private practice, which is just, I love so much. And then the sort of tendency that I see with a lot of coaches later on in their careers to like scale and do big things. It's like, I want to do that too, but I love my private practice so much that that it's never going away. So that's up there. any Any final message you want to communicate to the audience, anything like what, if they were just going to leave with one one piece to chew on, what would it be? No matter what motivates you personally,
01:21:40
Speaker
whether it's the AI thing, whether it's stuff going on in your own life, whether it's something you heard on this podcast today, there really, really is a way for you to experience you your life with this naked enchantment, with just magic, with um so much richness and depth, just even more than you you're aware of right now, that you can bring to everything in your world. it It really is possible and worth it, worth it for you, for everybody. It's like, we, it's like, ah
01:22:21
Speaker
Holy fuck, I exist. Good. Good. All right. Thank you so much, Christina. This has been great. Thanks for taking the time today. yeah