Dream Machines: Physical AI, Robotics, Being Human
00:16:51 · Evan Helda
[00:16:51] S1: There's so many, so many things. Open the bottle of wine. Yeah, seriously, we should have done this more during a happy hour. It's too early for this level of depth, but no, this is great. There's so many things I want to unpack. So I guess the first thing that's interesting is this idea of, is it good or bad that technology is challenging us and making us ask the question of what it means to be human? Because on one hand, if we're building it right, it wouldn't Beg the question, it would just make it obvious and it would enhance humanity and we would just be on a merry way and everything would be glorious. And on the other hand, thank goodness it's doing that because it's forcing a reckoning. And how do we get on that path? I think the most simple exhibit A would be the Everything that's happening happened with social media and all the cases of Meta and what it's doing children and it's the idea, okay, we didn't build social media for connection, which is a human element. We built it for attention, which is a commercial element. And so, yeah, it could be boiled down to simply that. And then in terms of what you said around Dissecting the human experience and trying to find it. I think all those things you mentioned are definitely the right things. But perhaps the most important thing that's so hard to grasp onto is sort of the things we can't really define. The things that we just feel and intuitively know, but we don't understand. The feeling that there's something more, even if you're not religious. If you're not religious, it's still hard to not see moments of serendipity or manifest something and not be like, that's weird.
00:18:46 · Lara Sophie Bothur, Evan Helda
[00:18:46] S0: But even that we say like, well, that is, um, you know, we, this is something AI can't do because AI can't give things a context, for example, or even intuition. What is intuition? You know, the set of data points, but I think it's so, so bad. [00:19:05] S1: Is intuition a set of data points? [00:19:08] S0: I mean, it can be. It's like, yeah. [00:19:11] S1: I guess it is things that your mind subconsciously is connecting. [00:19:14] S0: It's experience, it's gut feeling, but then gut feeling is a data point that is, how do you define gut feeling? But gut feeling is also a mixture. And yeah, maybe gut feeling and intuition is also very close, but it's also partly it's experience, right? Yeah. I mean, you can't define like feel so hard to grasp. [00:19:41] S1: Intuitions like this is the integration of heart, mind, and body. I think one way I think about it, like the body being the gut, your mind has its own rumblings and you feel something in your heart and soul a little bit about What's right and what's wrong in many ways, or not what's right, what's wrong. It's probably more of a gut thing. I think in the heart, it's more about just some magnetism towards the thing that you can't really explain. [00:20:08] S0: Yeah. There's a physical reaction, same with falling in love. It's like those butterflies you have in your belly. It's like, how can you rebuild that? But I think maybe at some point, And maybe, you know, doctors will rebuild that or like, or they can rest that biologically. Take a [00:20:34] S1: pill for love.
00:20:34 · Evan Helda, Lara Sophie Bothur
[00:20:34] S1: pill for love. [00:20:36] S0: Well, no, but also add that to a humanoid, you know, like that a humanoid can truly feel this feeling, but then like, why should a humanoid feel that? Like who's behind that humanoid is that there's no soul, right? It's like, is that Elon Musk then being in love with everyone? Okay, now it's getting super weird, but yeah. [00:21:02] S1: Well, I think that's where you have to define what a soul is. And I'd love to share with you a couple essays that I wrote because they, interestingly enough, intersect on this conversation right now. First is the AI as a mirror idea. [00:21:19] S0: And the second is
00:21:19 · Lara Sophie Bothur, Evan Helda
[00:21:19] S0: And the second is [00:21:27] S1: The notion of a soul, which could also be defined as like the feeling of, of self. And something about what's happening now has sent me on this journey to study what the self is and what it isn't. And what I've basically determined and what a lot of amazing thinkers think is that there is no self, that the self is a self's an illusion. The self is this evolutionary thing that our Body and mind invented to like orient itself in physical reality and to survive. Um, but everything that's feeling of subjective experience, but it basically says realizing you have no self is a good thing. Cause it just, it just separates you from yeah. Having no self. These are a classic old Buddhist ideas, but, um, having realizing you have no self is a good way to just separate yourself from things like bias. And I think there's a world where we can all do better at harnessing the flame themselves. It might lead to better design of technology. Now that concept sounds wild and we'll have to maybe have a second episode to unpack that. So it's earmarked that. Well, we'll follow up on that, but that's a hypothesis that I just invented right here, right now. [00:22:45] S0: Are you okay for the video? So we can, you know, we'll just... [00:22:47] S1: Yeah, in terms of the AI and the mirror idea, there's the exact same thesis.
00:22:47 · Evan Helda, Lara Sophie Bothur
[00:22:47] S1: Yeah, in terms of the AI and the mirror idea, there's the exact same thesis. [00:22:52] S0: I like that. I like that. But is the self the ego? Could that be the word for the self you try to describe? The ego? Because then when you're a child, you feel more of, you know, are we still here? We talk about AI and then Wi-Fi and JAWS. But so when you're a child, you don't think so much, you feel everything. And then at some point, a child just says, my word is not so colorful. And this shows it is maybe depressive. And then an adult says, Well, I'm not so happy, but just because, you know, I do work a lot, you know, my wife has a lot to do, my children are busy, so I don't sleep that well. So an adult tries to explain why, and the child feels, and that is when the ego starts. And this is the, I don't know if that is the self you described, but I think that makes us very rational and less emotional, which is not always good because we have explanation for everything we feel and we stop feeling, which is also, I think, a big problem in today's world. Totally. Yeah. And then what is also interesting, is that the self you were talking about or is that something else?
00:24:18 · Evan Helda
[00:24:18] S1: Yeah. I'm bringing my own answer. I need to go back and reread this because it's so heady that it doesn't always stick. But let me just read from this. Give me a second. Okay. So let me just read this and see where it takes us. Okay. So understanding the self. For most of us, the self is the main character of our story. It's the feeling of me at the center of experience. A fixed entity who thinks, feels, decides, and acts. It's the pilot living in your head, with a personality, wants, dreams, and desires. This feeling is so intuitive, it's so innate, that questioning it almost feels absurd. Of course, you are you, and I am me. And well, that's just that, end of story. But modern neuroscience offers a different story. According to cognitive scientist Dan Dennett, our sense of self is just a useful fiction. A mere narrative we tell ourselves about ourselves, and to be fair is very useful indeed. I need to think of myself as a father, a husband, a business partner, if only to make it through the week, much less excel at each. As such, it's important to clarify this is not the sense of self worth challenging. What we're targeting is far more fundamental and subtle. It's also the greatest source of suffering. It's the feeling of being a subject internal to our bodies, a mini you behind your eyes. This version of self An ego, to your point, an ego both produced by and identified with thought is where the burden lies. Fortunately, it's also not a solid concrete thing. It's a simulation. Or rather, to draw an eerie parallel to our new AI friends, it's a generative model. Philosopher Thomas Metzinger calls it the phenomenal self-model. A kind of internal avatar your brain assembles to unify experience and track itself in the world, and it works beautifully, stitching sounds, colors, smells, sensations into a coherent tapestry of subject-object, instead of a random chaos of disconnected inputs. Neuroscientists call this sensory integration, and I'm almost done. Let me finish this up here. But here's the uncomfortable part. This model doesn't reflect reality directly. It constructs it. Take color. This part's fun. Take color. There's no green out there in the world. Only light waves bouncing around.