[00:00] Today we go beyond with Jacob Cole, CEO and co-founder of IdeaFlow, a platform to augment
[00:08] human intelligence. Jacob is a super talented entrepreneur, we met a few years ago in California
[00:15] and I really enjoyed how Jacob goes so, so very deep into both humanistic and technological areas
[00:22] and in this conversation we go really, really deep about topics like artificial intelligence,
[00:27] the mysteries of our minds and behavior and the universe and beyond. So yes, let's go beyond
[00:33] with Jacob Cole!
[00:38] Sorry, I'm busy, I cannot go back now, sorry.
[00:42] And I got something to do.
[00:45] Well, I just...
[00:47] Lets just...
[00:48] Come back more in the evening.
[00:50] I wanna go beyond
[00:55] I wanna go beyond
[00:59] I wanna go beyond
[01:03] I wanna go beyond
[01:07] I wanna go beyond
[01:11] I wanna go beyond
[01:15] You may remember something that I was actually listening to yesterday about this universal duality that repeats everywhere.
[01:24] Think about it, there is particle versus wave.
[01:29] In the universe we see a lot of manifestations that sometimes behave as particle or wave, which is the same thing as discrete versus continuous.
[01:39] We have this duality discrete versus continuous and then we have also abstraction versus the messy reality.
[01:48] So there is constantly this artificial intelligence expert, Francois Chalet, who has this theory that deep learning has limitations because it cannot really deal properly with very discrete situations.
[02:07] If you try to use deep learning to model for example how to calculate addition or multiplication, it will be able to do it if you give it a lot of data, but it will make mistakes sometimes.
[02:20] Because it's as if you try to use the Fourier transform to model square.
[02:26] It will do it, but in the corners it will have glitches.
[02:30] Now the opposite happens, if you use programming code, program synthesis, to model something that has a discrete nature, it's going to work well.
[02:41] But if you try to model perception with program synthesis, it's not going to work well.
[02:46] Francois Chalet proposes that the future of artificial intelligence is gonna be a hybrid.
[02:53] He thinks that in our brain, this is going on as well, it's gonna be a hybrid of this kind of system one and system two, discrete and continuous.
[03:04] But then you look at the universe and you see that this discrete continuous particle wave abstract, messy, low level of abstraction, high level of abstraction is going on everywhere.
[03:19] And then Francois Chalet says this another amazing thing, Jacob, that is that if you look at the universe and he says that intelligence is just being able to create analogies between concepts.
[03:33] Because he says the only reason why we can extrapolate as humans and generalize is because the universe is composed of these parts, these components that get repeated over and over at different levels of complexity and abstraction.
[03:49] And to find the commonalities between different elements, to find those analogies is what really advanced intelligence is.
[03:58] And this is possible because of the repetition of these patterns.
[04:02] So anyway, what do you think?
[04:04] Absolutely. And what's so interesting here on that front actually is what's funny is I think that a lot of humanistic understanding is actually more like program synthesis than deep learning.
[04:18] The aesthetics are like deep learning.
[04:20] By the way, I've been thinking a lot for many years actually about that sort of tension between program synthesis and deep learning kind of thing.
[04:28] What do you think?
[04:31] Specifically, I think that English is a function. You can certainly regard English as a programming language and I've gone through a bunch of different examples where we can discuss this.
[04:47] But basically, the simplest demonstration of this is it's possible to rewrite an English sentence in prefix notation.
[04:56] Like you could change Jacob through the ball to function through, the function is through.
[05:10] The first argument is the subject and the second argument is the object.
[05:15] Or the direct object in this case.
[05:18] And so you have Jacob, you have through open paren, Jacob, the ball.
[05:25] Now Jacob through the ball to Javi, that just means you add a third optional argument.
[05:30] And it's just an optional argument in this.
[05:33] So what I want to generate is a weekly typed programming language, kind of like Python where you can also have these optional arguments and just take, build a natural language processing system that's devoted to parsing English using a combination of linguistic or deep learning approaches who cares and just convert it to this programming language and then deal rigorously with it, treat it as if it were with all the rigor you would treat inheritance and object oriented
[06:03] languages to ask questions about what has been said to create a model was been said to ask questions about it.
[06:09] This is really, really great. You know, it reminds me so French on it talks about this model of three layers.
[06:15] Now the bottom layer, the bottom layer is perception with something like deep learning.
[06:20] So you first get so first you use system one perception to get the pieces, the pieces that you need.
[06:26] Then the second layer, the sandwich in the middle is what you are talking about is like program synthesis to, you know, to work with the pieces.
[06:34] And then, and then you can have a third layer on top that is against system one to do like a intuitive intuition, intuitive search around all the spaces of possibilities of the different programs, you know.
[06:50] So what you are talking about about this typed week with the type language that you're talking about.
[06:57] It is very interesting and you could you could do a similar strategy so combine sometimes the intuitive part of something like deep learning, sometimes the program synthesis, discrete strategy and in different layers to actually.
[07:12] I mean, this is what I really find fascinating about what the French social proposes is not just one and one, but you can actually create different levels of abstraction within that hybrid combination.
[07:28] You can actually you can get the pieces you can get the pieces you can reason with the pieces, then you can do intuition over the reasoning of the pieces.
[07:39] And blah, blah, blah.
[07:40] And I'm asking myself, is it actually just a two layer system with a strange loop like a feedback loop go to Lesser Bach style where the first level system starts to process the
[07:51] That's a great point.
[07:52] That is a great point.
[07:53] Yeah.
[07:54] Anyway, that's another another piece of the puzzle.
[07:59] Yeah, it's like because the models, the models, all models are part of reality and needs to be regarded as part of reality. It's just an interesting idea.
[08:13] It's from a philosophical standpoint.
[08:15] Okay, so I was going to say.
[08:21] Okay, so I think with this English as a programming language thing, it's best understood why this is interesting and useful.
[08:29] Instead of saying, you know, we're going to solve some abstract natural language processing task this way.
[08:34] No, I just want to build an IDE like pie charm for English so that I can.
[08:43] You can hover over your pronoun and see the antecedent so that you can like have this English code IDE and then you have many different paragraphs that were written in that that were basically English is the compiled
[09:01] bytecode or just the compiled out output of this structure.
[09:06] And you can have many different paragraphs that were all phrased in a different way, yet ultimately encode the same information structurally when you raise up to this English level.
[09:16] Like you let's just talk about word reordering and sentences, like you can say, you could say, it's kind of archaic but this isn't a great example but to to to have a Jacob through the ball.
[09:30] And it means the same sentence right and it means the same thing.
[09:35] And the point is, is if you want to make real semantic comparison between arbitrary paragraphs, the key is to elevate it to a level of semantic meaning that is not to splayed out and compiled but you want to decompile the English and put it back into the code that actually is.
[09:54] And you can make comparisons and you can sometimes not make one to one comparisons but make isomorphism level comparisons.
[10:01] So are you talking about changing the dimensionality of the space of English to something more manageable.
[10:11] Yeah, you totally totally this is dimensionality reduction on these.
[10:15] Like there's a lot of ways to say everything.
[10:17] I want that you I want to elevate us to a level where there's a lot fewer ways to say the same where the stuff is just there and it's like all right these are all projections of the same thing.
[10:26] Oh, you're talking about you're talking about like a higher level of abstraction, which is actually, which is actually what Shole describes as the advantage of all of those, you know, program synthesis strategies because, because you know, even if there are some differences between different
[10:44] entities, the high level of abstraction eliminates those differences, and it allows you to identify the commonalities between them, right?
[10:56] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like the fundamental question that a lot of people debate about is like, at what level do you want to compare like two pieces of text similarity.
[11:08] And I don't know if a lot of people are flying blind and not not really anchored in a real problem or something like that. I'm not sure what's going on.
[11:17] But it's clear enough to me for a lot of applications that I really want paraphrase detection is like this is very fraught and messy field right now.
[11:28] And it's done very fuzzily.
[11:31] But a phrase.
[11:33] Yeah, I think I think paraphrase detection is just the tip of an iceberg of finding if ideas are related to each other.
[11:42] Like you could tell two different stories that are the same story with different characters or in a different setting.
[11:47] Like you realize that Avatar, the Blue Aliens movie is really dances with wolves with aliens.
[11:53] And that's actually an amazing thing. So it was a good story the first time.
[11:57] Well, that is I mean, you are just describing intelligence. This is what François Chalet calls intelligence to be able to realize that exactly that you know dancing with the wolves with aurora that this is this is connected with this other thing.
[12:10] Although they are expressed in completely different ways, but one is an analogy of another. And this is like what a lot of people consider as the actual test of advanced intelligence.
[12:22] Yeah, great. And Douglas Hofstadter would just say it's isomorphisms all the way down.
[12:27] Isomorphisms. Yeah, Hofstadter. Yeah, absolutely. It's great.
[12:30] Yeah.
[12:31] Yeah.
[12:32] Okay, so I wanted to return actually to your previous point for a second.
[12:35] Yeah.
[12:36] If you're down.
[12:37] Yeah.
[12:38] Which was about, it's like, okay, so you look at DNA, you look at protein, you look at language, you look at all these mechanisms and you're like, you know what, there's got to be something more going on than just natural selection to produce this.
[12:50] And what I wanted to broach were three hypotheses of things that might be going on if you're interested.
[12:56] Yes.
[12:57] Alright, so let's talk about the least ambitious thing first, which is pretty people buy this as far as I understand right now. It's called the inner language hypothesis.
[13:09] The inner language hypothesis is the idea that you do the evolutionary simulations and with just natural selection, with no other thing happening, language just would not have happened.
[13:21] It's too hard. You need to have two people evolve or two beings, two, eight proto humans evolve the ability to have language at the same time.
[13:33] And the numbers just don't work out any way you bend it.
[13:36] So, later on, this is a theory that's being actively researched by a lot of cognitive scientists.
[13:42] Okay.
[13:43] I learned about it in a very, very interesting class I took at Harvard called Origins of Knowledge by Elizabeth Spelke.
[13:50] And it's fascinating. You'd think that's a philosophy class, but it's actually a class on child development psychology.
[13:56] And Elizabeth Spelke is one of the most famous child development people, but it also tells you a huge amount about what philosophy is in my opinion.
[14:04] But anyway, the inner language hypothesis, the hypothesis that language evolved as a way for the specialized core systems in our brains to talk to each other, not as a way for other beings to communicate.
[14:17] And then it was a very simple leap to just start having the different brains communicate.
[14:22] Wow, wow, wow. This is fascinating. What I mean.
[14:24] So, language, this is the theory that a lot of cognitive scientists are putting forward that language will have evolved not for us to communicate with other people, but for different modules of our brain, core modules to communicate with each other, and then the leap to move that to communicate with other people would have been quite straightforward.
[14:44] This is the first time I hear this. This is fascinating.
[14:47] And there are different cognitive scientists that are working on this direction.
[14:53] Yeah, exactly.
[14:55] Very interesting. Fascinating.
[14:57] And it makes sense because sometimes I just want to emphasize things, very interesting things that you say.
[15:04] In case people are going to listen to this.
[15:07] You say that is very, you know, for language to have a rise through natural selection by itself, it would have needed really the coincidence that really more or less the development of two different beings would have happened more or less simultaneously.
[15:23] And this is very, very unlikely, basically.
[15:28] That's why this theory of the self communication between the core modules of the brain is so interesting.
[15:37] Yeah.
[15:38] Exactly. And so, all right, so one interesting piece of evidence, by the way, that's consistent with this is the Munderuku tribe in the Amazon, which is one of those like only recently contacted tribes.
[15:54] They have no words for numbers greater than four. It's just like many at that point.
[16:02] And it's known that mammals, maybe even reptiles, I don't know, but I know mammals have a core system, a module in their brain that can count precisely up to four objects.
[16:15] And believe me, you should try putting like four pencils on the table or four coins on the table and see that you can instantly count it without counting.
[16:26] But then when you put five in, you have to start grouping them or counting.
[16:29] Interesting.
[16:30] And even dogs, mice and stuff like that can do that.
[16:36] So up to four, we can do it instantaneously. Beyond four, we need to like reason about it.
[16:43] Exactly.
[16:44] So why is this happening?
[16:47] Well, we have a hardware system, a hardware accelerator in the brain that just is able to do that operation in a very hardwired fashion.
[17:00] And then we've got another system that can estimate relative quantities of large numbers of objects, independent, how densely they're spaced.
[17:10] It's like, if you see like roughly a hundred dots, you can tell that that's more than roughly 200 dots, even if they're spaced widely.
[17:18] Yeah, roughly.
[17:19] And language is how you bridge the gap between those two awarenesses.
[17:26] And you break down that intuition about, hey, there's more of this thing than that thing into something that is concrete.
[17:38] Just like you were saying a second ago about these fuzzy systems versus these precise systems.
[17:43] That is fascinating.
[17:45] So two questions here.
[17:46] First of all, the fact that we only have this hard coded hardware for up to four things.
[17:53] Is it because most needs in life don't require more than two or three or four things to count?
[18:03] I mean, why four?
[18:04] Why four?
[18:05] Is it because that's like the most needs don't go beyond that number or why four?
[18:10] That's the first question.
[18:11] That's my guess.
[18:12] I mean, clearly our ancestors did okay with just counting four objects because they got us here.
[18:21] And I don't know, it happened in a very, and apparently there's a use for, maybe there's a lot of uses for things up the floor, but I have no idea.
[18:30] Okay, so that is one part.
[18:31] And the other part is, okay.
[18:32] So you say that language would be the bridge between this kind of automatic capability of counting and then the intuition for relative differences in the magnitude of different sets.
[18:46] That is fascinating.
[18:47] So it would be like the bridge built to reason about those different situations.
[18:54] Great.
[18:55] Exactly.
[18:56] And the evidence again is the one piece of evidence is that these tribes which don't have numbers over than four, they literally can't count accurately above four.
[19:05] Wow.
[19:06] So what I mean, they cannot count beyond four, right?
[19:10] And literally, if you give a tribes member like the task of say, hey, precisely,
[19:16] And they don't have language or do they have language?
[19:19] They don't have words.
[19:21] They only have one, two, three, four, many.
[19:23] They don't have, they don't have other other language basically that they don't have.
[19:28] Great.
[19:29] Okay.
[19:30] Wow.
[19:31] Nice.
[19:32] Okay.
[19:33] Yeah, yeah, I understand.
[19:34] So obviously they talk to each other, but in terms of numbers, they can only say one, two, three, four.
[19:39] Great.
[19:40] Wow.
[19:41] Fascinating.
[19:43] Okay.
[19:44] Okay.
[19:45] So that's one theory.
[19:46] That's one of the theories.
[19:47] Okay.
[19:48] So that's an example of is what I would call this is like the least contentious form of inner structure in this universe.
[19:55] I'm going to propose.
[19:56] Okay.
[19:57] That's so the idea is, oh, you know what, we discover inside natural selection that there are lots of things just like this, which are very sort of materially acceptable theories that you could not have to go beyond anything that is really kind of unambiguously
[20:17] real and measurable with our current knowledge to figure out.
[20:21] It's just like, okay, there's inner principles here at work.
[20:24] Now, back to the quote of assimilating to the structure of the cosmic order, which is said to be the goal of Taoism to assimilate structure of the cosmic order and to embody the qualities of the universe so that they no longer hold you back, which is the more mystical become one with everything.
[20:41] Yeah.
[20:42] Consequence of assimilating.
[20:44] And that's the point of non attachment.
[20:46] Non attachment is so powerful because it allows you, well, firstly, it allows you to just a Neil and then the cosmic order can reshape you as it were.
[20:58] But if you're attached, if you're hard, you can't be reshaped by the cosmic order.
[21:02] I like this.
[21:03] I like this a lot.
[21:04] I like this a lot because we all have attachment to things.
[21:07] And yeah, when we're attached, as you say, we're tight.
[21:11] We're tight.
[21:12] If we're tight, we cannot be shaped.
[21:14] So you're saying you're saying when when we lose all of the attachment, we are more malleable and the existence, the universe, the flow, whatever can shape us in much easier.
[21:27] Precisely.
[21:28] And there's two levels of this.
[21:30] And before I tell those two levels, I want to share one other.
[21:34] But before you continue, I just want to make clear one thing.
[21:37] Before you saw, you just you talked about one theory.
[21:41] Okay.
[21:42] I just said there were three.
[21:43] So are you in a different area now or are you going to go there also?
[21:48] Because I'm very curious.
[21:50] Okay.
[21:51] We're going to get to all of them.
[21:52] Okay.
[21:53] Okay.
[21:54] So, um, all right.
[21:56] So simulating to the structure of the cosmic order, non attachment, one more thing about non attachment from the more mysticism side, consciousness, excellent.
[22:06] Consciousness Explorer side become one with everything side of things is that an attachment is like a little bit like your mind, your soul is like a hot air balloon.
[22:17] And it's just wanting to fly free.
[22:19] It's wanting to go infinitely upward, but an attachment is like a rope that's holding it down.
[22:23] So if you let go of the attachment, you can achieve blast off.
[22:26] And a lot of people describe, I've heard described both intense meditation experiences and intense psychedelic experiences as blast off.
[22:36] As I speak to Javi who's in his spacecraft.
[22:39] And the idea is at any moment, if you really have this master non attachment, you can achieve a level of blast off comparable to very, very powerful psychedelics.
[22:55] And that is a way to be peaceful in the face of great pain.
[23:00] Because if you're really not attached to this material world and your soul can fly free, your spirit can fly free, your awareness can, can fly to a plane beyond this material dimensions.
[23:11] If we can slip the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God as one poem, put it, you, you can just transcend a lot of pain and not have to distract from the pain.
[23:28] And it's about non attachment is a pathway to mystic experience. It's not just misery.
[23:34] Could we connect?
[23:36] And I gave up that thing.
[23:38] That's super interesting.
[23:39] That's super interesting.
[23:40] Could we connect what you are saying now with what we were saying before about, you know, when we tend to move away from the center, I mean, the center is moving all the time.
[23:50] Yeah.
[23:51] Now, when we are stressed, when we're in conflict, we tend to try to compensate that with maybe eating too much, or whatever, or sex, or smoking or drinking or whatever.
[24:02] And can we connect it with what you just said of attachment in a way because we get attached to those things, right?
[24:08] We get attached to alcohol, to smoking, to sex, to things.
[24:11] Okay.
[24:12] How do you get that?
[24:13] Yes, absolutely.
[24:14] Yeah.
[24:15] So, and that's the most important question in the world is transcending like the need to distract ourselves constantly and intoxicate ourselves constantly.
[24:22] And ultimately, it comes down to a piece of moving the center.
[24:26] But actually, let me pause for one second and repeat this because I've got to go let my friend in.
[24:31] Go give me give me one sec.
[24:33] Yes.
[24:37] Hey, what's up?
[24:41] We got Linus here.
[24:42] How are you doing?
[24:45] Doing well.
[24:46] Thank you for your name.
[24:48] Yeah, go for it.
[24:49] I'm so excited for you to meet each other real quick.
[24:52] Yeah.
[24:53] Me too.
[24:54] You guys are just two of the most unbelievably creative polymaths.
[24:59] I know Linus is in contention for the top spot of person I know who works on the most side projects.
[25:07] Whoa.
[25:08] Beautiful.
[25:09] And if anyone I know, and he's a programmer, improved musician, artist.
[25:16] He made his own constructed language that he uses for a lot of his practical purposes.
[25:21] Fantastic.
[25:22] He, and we're working together on idea flow.
[25:26] And I mean, Javi, as I mentioned, is an expert on idea generation, but more important than that.
[25:36] He's a modern Leonardo da Vinci.
[25:42] We're hyperactive, all of us.
[25:47] Yes, exactly.
[25:48] You should see this guy.
[25:50] Yeah, very interesting Linus, everything that you're doing sounds amazing.
[25:55] I want to know more.
[25:57] I'm also, by the way, doing a lot of research in neuroscience stuff lately.
[26:02] I published an article, I'm going to publish another one very soon, because, you know, I think that there is in the deep learning field with GPT-3 and all of this,
[26:16] I think we're approaching a moment in which we are going to realize that we need to look back a little bit more towards the brain again, you know.
[26:26] Yeah.
[26:27] Actually, maybe Linus, I bet would be pretty interested to hear what you just told me about this idea of just like deep, about deep neural nets breaking down on problems like this.
[26:40] Yes.
[26:41] And multiple, just like Fourier transforms break down with a square.
[26:43] Okay, let's talk about that, because that's really fascinating.
[26:46] So there is this very famous deep learning scientist, François Chollet, and he has this fantastic theory, right?
[26:53] That is that, so deep learning systems, they are great to deal with system one stuff like perception, right?
[27:01] We all know, continuous spaces, continuous spaces that can be transformed to a continuous manifold of a lower amount of dimensions.
[27:09] Now, if you try to apply them to something more discrete, like, for example, computing addition or multiplication, something discrete, if you give it enough amount of data, it's going to be able to do it, but it will do it with glitches.
[27:22] Maybe it will do it 95% well, but sometimes it will fail.
[27:26] This is a bit like trying to apply the Fourier transform, right, to try to model a square or something more discrete.
[27:33] It's going to do it, but if you look at the corners, it's going to have glitches.
[27:37] Now, the opposite happens, the opposite happens if you try to apply program synthesis.
[27:42] If you just program synthesis for discrete stuff, it's going to work perfect, but if you try to apply it to continuous manifolds, you know, and kind of like the type of perceptual stuff, then it's not going to do it very well.
[27:55] So, the theory that these people have, right, is that the future of AI is going to be a hybrid between this, you know, like, program synthesis stuff and perceptual deep learning type of stuff in different layers, and they actually think that the same thing is going on in the brain.
[28:15] And interestingly, Jacob, I didn't tell you this before, what they think is that it's not like we have two different things.
[28:21] No, it's like they overlap each other.
[28:24] It's not like we're doing either one or the other, but there is a little bit when we are thinking, there is a little bit of that, you know, perceptual system one thing and a little bit of the program synthesis system two thing going on, you know, and then there is this kind of a recursive.
[28:43] Jacob talked about it very nicely in a recursive interpretation.
[28:49] That is like they talk about this kind of sandwich structure in which you could create a system in which you have a bottom layer that is perceptual, like with deep learning to capture the pieces of the puzzle, the pieces, okay, and then you have a second layer in the middle, that is like program synthesis to do the reasoning system to on with all of those pieces,
[29:10] but then you can add a third layer on top that goes back to the perceptual to be able to use intuition again to be able to do to use this like continuous search, continuous search in this case in the space of the programs of the different programs.
[29:25] And Jacob was very nicely saying, okay, this could be like a kind of a recursive loop.
[29:30] So it's possible that in the human brain, and it's possible that in the future of AI, what we're going to have is this hybrid of these systems that can work with continuous manifolds and systems that can work with discrete spaces.
[29:46] And then what they talk about that's really fascinating is that if you look at the universe, you see this duality everywhere, you see particle versus wave, right in quantum physics and everywhere.
[29:57] Then you see this discrete versus continuous spaces. Then you see abstraction, high level of abstraction versus the messy reality, the lower level of abstraction, blah, blah, blah.
[30:10] So there is this duality everywhere. And so there is this theory that says, right, and Jacob was also talking about this iso, the hot stutter, right, the isomorphisms all the way down, right, that the universe is composed of these pieces that are
[30:26] repeat over and over at different scales, different levels of abstraction, like a giant fractal, right, and that intelligence, the definition, the true definition of intelligence is to be able to find analogies, you know, to find the
[30:42] commonalities that connect different things. And why can't we extrapolate? Because, you know, deep learning today is doing interpolation. GPT-3 is really doing interpolation.
[30:53] It's really internalizing inside the model algorithms, but then interpolating with all that huge amount of data. But why can't we human beings extrapolate?
[31:02] We can extrapolate because we can find those analogies. And why can't we find analogies? We can find analogies because there are those pieces that are repeating at different levels of abstraction and scales only because of that, we can find the commonalities and those analogies.
[31:22] And that defines the advanced intelligence. So, in summary, the future of AI and the way our brain works could be composed of those overlapping, overlapping ways of working with continuous manifolds and discrete spaces and able to find these analogies as well.
[31:46] And to add two bits of colors from our conversation on that, it's like, Javier was pointing out how all of these different parts of the universe seem to have the metaphors for one another. We keep finding things and what the mind's task is to say, hey, this part of the universe looks like that part of the universe.
[32:05] And then the funny thing is, the mind itself is part of the universe and it becomes a metaphor for other parts of the universe.
[32:13] So that's interesting.
[32:14] Yeah, that's interesting.
[32:15] Yeah, I like that.
[32:18] Yeah. And then the other...
[32:21] So the mind itself can be part of all of these analogies. Yes, yes, yes.
[32:28] Exactly, exactly. One of Hofstadter's big ideas is not excluding the model from the world because your model is part of the world. The world's everything.
[32:37] And then this is what causes constant evolution of the world. It's like the cloth woven of its own unraveling circling endlessly through the loom to create a changing whole as a guy from my high school said.
[32:51] Nice.
[32:52] Nice.
[32:53] I like that too.
[32:54] Yeah, it's quite a tapestry.
[32:56] Tapestry, yeah.
[32:57] Beautiful.
[32:58] Yeah, our mind is a tapestry and what is it circling on? It's circling on enlightenment, I think. That's what the whole idea of Samsara is in the...
[33:07] Samsara.
[33:08] Yeah, Samsara.
[33:09] The wheel of reincarnation until you find the center.
[33:11] So I said, you don't need what you talked about before, that recursive aspect as well, right? Do you think there is this recursive aspect involved everywhere?
[33:22] Well, I was going to say, Chorley's model was there's three layers. There's like system one layer, system two layer, then there's another thing that makes...
[33:30] Yeah.
[33:31] That like does intuition on these abstract elements.
[33:35] Exactly.
[33:36] But it's like, why three layers? No, it's just the first layer, it's feeding back into the first layer.
[33:40] Yeah, I think that was very interesting. I like that a lot. I like that a lot. Yeah.
[33:44] Yeah, so just to open up, open up. Okay, so what was one more comment I was going to make? Let's see if I can remember on what you did. You gave a big summary.
[33:52] Oh, okay. So what I was going to say is it was kind of, it might be hard for Linus to grasp exactly that specifics of what we just were referring to when we talked about abstraction at this middle layer.
[34:03] And there's a fundamental realization that I think I thought of for a long time, but I articulated better than I have in the past today, which is that...
[34:12] Well, I think it's very, very interesting to think about the task of building an IDE like PyCharm, except for the English language to begin with.
[34:21] Yeah.
[34:22] So like an example is if I say Jacob threw the ball to Linus, you could make a function through. The first argument is Jacob and the second argument is the direct object is Linus.
[34:34] And that can have an optional third argument, which is the indirect object. Jacob, well, here's the start. Jacob threw the ball. Direct object that's going to be through open friend Jacob comma ball, close friend.
[34:49] Jacob threw the ball to Linus is through open friend Jacob, or yeah, through open friend Jacob comma ball comma Linus, et cetera, et cetera.
[35:01] So the question is, is one thing I realized is that written English is a little bit like write code or compiled code. And what you really need to do is decompile it into this prefix notation first, and then have an IDE that can deal with that prefix notation.
[35:16] And then you can make comparisons between different paragraphs of English, blobs of English text that basically say the same thing, but they did chose a different word order.
[35:27] And that's just a prefix. Let me even do more levels.
[35:30] I mean, I think that it's absolutely fascinating what you are saying, because maybe that's what's going on in our brain, right? Because if you tell me this, if you tell me the same phrase in English, in many, many different ways, I as a human being, I am instantaneously capable to recognize that they are all really saying the same thing, you know, which, which is very hard for other types of systems, right?
[35:53] And so maybe it's because, as you say, they are getting decomposed internally into the compile decompile sorry decompile sorry decompile into this this higher level of abstraction right? Yeah.
[36:08] Yeah, that's that is fascinating.
[36:11] Well, so that could be a project right to build an idea like that.
[36:16] Yeah, and even have the room for human correction of fail of mistakes in machine parsing so human situation.
[36:25] Lovely. I love it. I love it. What do you think Linus? What do you think?
[36:29] Yeah, I think that's interesting. I think that's this is very much in the spirit of sort of old school classical AI, like media, media, lab style AI.
[36:38] Like in the 90 in the first sort of AI room around 60 70s decomposing language.
[36:46] Yeah, English phrases into sort of semantic chunks and then re-composing them. Actually one of one of the type projects that I worked on recently was reporting Eliza to one of my programming languages.
[36:56] Eliza is a conversational bot from I think like the mid 60s.
[37:00] Cool. And what the bot does to respond to it like if you if you said like Jacob threw the ball to Linus, then the program looks at phrase and decomposes it into maybe like it recognizes it's the verb and there's like some nouns and then maybe it'll take that and pattern match against a series of possible ways to respond to a sentence with that structure and then offer like why did you throw the ball or like.
[37:25] Yeah, so there's a there's a very clear decompose into some patterns that you recognize choose a response pattern and then recompile it into a sentence. So that's what that reminded me of. But I think.
[37:39] Yeah, it's very much in this like language. I think it's interesting because it's discreet. But deep learning models seem to be able to handle it somewhat well, which I think is interesting.
[37:49] Yeah, so.
[37:52] My perspective is that the deep learning models are going to have these fundamental limitations, unless we go to more of a.
[38:00] Yeah, I'm synthesis.
[38:02] You know, a lot of people, you know, with GPT three, everybody is very enthusiastic and I was very enthusiastic, and it can do amazing things. But we have already found its limits as well, you know, I mean.
[38:16] Yeah, but it just doesn't make sense.
[38:18] Yeah, exactly. You know, it's brittle. The word is brittle, which is the exact definition of trying to use the Fourier transform to deal with these things, you know, it's just brittle on the edges, you know, and that's why as Jacob says, I think we're going to need something more.
[38:35] Yeah, so, you know, it can do great things with language, but 95%. You know, 90%. That's the problem.
[38:48] And the other 5% isn't making it. It's making it better in its current capacity. It's adding a layer of construction, which I think feels right.
[38:58] Exactly. What you say, Linus, exactly. I mean, the other 5% is massively important. It's not just like an extension of a little bit of this, you know, yeah, it's a completely different level.
[39:12] Yeah, it makes sense.
[39:14] So, you know, that's why I'm very passionate. I think we're all very passionate in the coming times about, I mean, even with guns, you know, when guns appeared in 2014. Okay, very nice, you know, generate faces, whatever.
[39:24] But then comes a company like in Silicon Medicine and begins to combine guns with reinforcement learning for the synthesis of new, you know, molecules to treat diseases and things get more interesting.
[39:39] So we're beginning to see that in the new decade, AI is, you know, going beyond its specific silo and beginning to combine all of these strategies.
[39:50] And here is where really the future is. First of all, combining the different disciplines and then this kind of hybrid layers in the approaches that we've talked about.
[40:01] But, you know, I will tell you one thing. Another thing that Chalet said recently, and I agree, is that a lot of people that work in deep learning, they don't even want to face, they don't even want to think about this hybrid possibility because they are too invested in the success of deep learning.
[40:20] You know, they say, you know, their careers and their entire existence depends now on the success of deep learning. So they are compelled to say deep learning is going to fix everything deep learning.
[40:32] It's just going to take us all the way and blah, blah, blah, blah, and this is a big problem. This is a big problem because it's just becoming clearer and clearer that that's not true.
[40:42] You know, GPT-3, GPT-5, GPT-11, you ain't going to get to that flexible form of AI of intelligence just like that.
[40:51] And I think the solution to not be stuck in that is to build products on top of it, companies on top of it because that's what grounds solutions to solve, to actually solve realities problems.
[41:04] So you mean to build companies on top of the layer? What do you mean exactly?
[41:10] So if you try to build AI companies, what you usually end up doing is combining AI with, like the company you mentioned, like you can't, the point of research project is to learn about specific things and the point of companies in my head is to solve real problems and provide actual solutions that work.
[41:26] And what you end up doing when you have to build actual solutions is usually it sounds like mixing AI with other kinds of tools.
[41:34] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree.
[41:36] And so the forces are going to push companies that way, regardless of what people want to do, which I think.
[41:43] I agree, I completely agree. I mean, and of course we have to say that, you know, even if deep learning makes it fantastic 95%, I mean, for most uses, that 95% is enough.
[41:54] And that's okay. You know what I mean? It's like, it's alright, it's fantastic, it's fantastic.
[42:00] So I think for the practical uses in today's society, it's fine that 95%.
[42:06] It's only when we are talking about reaching a level of intelligence more similar to ours that that breaks down, you know?
[42:15] So we were talking, let's reconnect with this wonderful conversation we were having.
[42:21] So yeah, so you were talking, we were talking about when we're communicating here and the space in between our consciousness, right?
[42:31] When we talk to each other.
[42:35] And my objection was to face our consciousness. I think the important thing is to realize that the awareness sort of is you.
[42:43] And that the atoms are long for the ride. And therefore, it's not like you're holding back a piece of yourself when you look out the window.
[42:51] You're actually going out the window. When we have a conversation, it's not like we're holding back any piece of ourselves.
[42:58] The real self is right there in this conversation. And the atoms are long for the ride.
[43:05] The atoms, all we know is direct perception. That's all we know for certain.
[43:10] Atoms are just a model. And as we know, it's a model that's wrong.
[43:14] Because things are just wave functions and ripples on the cosmic medium and stuff like that.
[43:19] And once we recognize that, yeah, so that's one idea.
[43:25] One other idea, and then I'm returning to the main point.
[43:28] Another idea was, so this idea of ripples on the cosmic medium as being the basis of reality.
[43:39] And then saying that the self is more like the cosmic medium.
[43:43] It's like you are a pond and all quality, all precepts are ripples on that pond.
[43:50] Well, that's firstly true at the level of let's just be very unambitious here.
[43:55] That's pretty obviously true at the level of the brain.
[43:59] It's like emotions are ripples on the medium of the brain.
[44:02] And then on the world at large, which includes brains by the way,
[44:08] all these particles that we see and we see as material objects is actually just ripples on some cosmic medium.
[44:17] It's one way to think about it.
[44:21] I like this concept of the ripples on the...
[44:28] And so it's like things have reality, but they have reality in the same way waves on the ocean have reality.
[44:36] They're certainly real, they can whack you.
[44:38] They've got material existence, but materialism doesn't mean things are made of atoms.
[44:45] In fact, there's lots of reasons.
[44:47] Anyway, that's a larger discussion.
[44:51] Now, I've got another point to make on that, which is that all ripples have reality, be they the ripples that are atoms,
[45:05] the ripples that are waves on the ocean, or the ripples that are emotions in a mind.
[45:10] All those things, like all reality consists of ripples.
[45:12] So that's kind of interesting.
[45:14] But that's not my point. The point there was about self-realization.
[45:17] By the way, Miles, are you over there?
[45:19] Yeah, yeah, I'm still up.
[45:20] Yo, yo, you should come say hi to my friend Javier, idea me.
[45:23] Hey, Miles.
[45:24] Oh, Miles, is that you coming over?
[45:26] Oh, is anyone besides you here?
[45:29] We're actually trying to get my car to go straight back to the hospital.
[45:34] What's up?
[45:35] Yeah, yeah, time to say hi.
[45:36] Hey, Miles, what's up, huh?
[45:37] I've heard a bit about you.
[45:38] Greetings.
[45:39] Hi.
[45:40] Hey, guys.
[45:41] What's up?
[45:42] Yo, we're having two of my friends, and James is my teammate, and Miles' brother is my
[45:48] teammate.
[45:49] Fantastic.
[45:50] We're having a conversation that's very similar to the kind of conversation that you and I
[45:54] like to have.
[45:55] Oh, wow.
[45:56] Right now, we're talking about a bunch of things, but we're talking about all reality,
[46:02] realness is a function of things being ripples on the cosmic medium.
[46:07] And emotions are ripples on the medium of the brain, and atoms are just like ocean waves
[46:14] in that they're actually ripples on the medium of the cosmos.
[46:18] Yeah, just like that doesn't mean they're any less solid.
[46:21] And as you know, ocean waves can hit you pretty hard, even though they're just ripples on
[46:25] the ocean.
[46:26] But what that tells us about self-realization is that the witness consciousness, like the
[46:31] ability to say, hey, I feel something, I feel cold, but I am not that cold, but that's
[46:35] not me.
[46:36] And that is fundamentally driven by the fact that the cold is a ripple on the medium, and
[46:40] the medium, well, at the simplistic level, the medium is the brain, but the brain, you
[46:45] have to remember, is just there's no wall between the, there's continuum between the
[46:49] brain and the rest of the universe.
[46:50] The brain is just a piece of this universal cosmic medium.
[46:53] So forget saying emotions are ripples on the medium of the brain, it's just emotions are
[46:58] ripples on the cosmic medium.
[47:00] And therefore, in truth, we are that cosmic medium, and the pain is just a ripple on it.
[47:06] And that's why any sensation, no matter how bad or how good, is not you.
[47:14] Yes.
[47:15] So, level one assimilates the structure of cosmic order, means release attachments, and
[47:21] then the cosmic order sort of, like, you can just be molded by the universe.
[47:29] Now there's two levels of being molded by the universe.
[47:34] The first level of being molded by the universe is just being molded by the things that you've
[47:41] seen around you in life.
[47:44] It's like just annealing, you know, simulated annealing as a concept for understanding what
[47:52] dreams are.
[47:53] Have you ever come across that idea?
[47:55] No, no, no, no, no, describe it to me.
[47:58] Yeah, so simulated annealing, you know what that is, right?
[48:03] I'm not sure, describe it.
[48:05] I mean, I know what annealing is.
[48:07] Yeah.
[48:08] Yeah, so simulated annealing is like you've got a paperclip and you bend it a bunch of
[48:13] times and it'll break, right?
[48:15] Yes.
[48:16] Now annealing is you heat up that paperclip, you slowly cool it back down.
[48:20] And what has just happened is these very, why the paperclip break?
[48:25] Well, it was pretty cold, the metal is pretty cold.
[48:28] Yeah.
[48:29] So, you know, you have these little planes which are dislocated from each other and are
[48:32] not in alignment.
[48:34] And when you heat up the metal and cool it back down, the metal becomes more like a fluid
[48:38] and metals are intrinsically fluid like that's why they bend like they do at all.
[48:45] But it makes it even more fluid like and instead of being like brittle and made out of, I don't
[48:54] know, it made out of snowflakes.
[48:57] Or made out of ice cubes.
[48:58] It's not like it's made out of ice cubes anymore.
[49:00] It's more like it's made out of water except it's less, more solid form of water.
[49:09] So that's annealing.
[49:10] Now simulated annealing is just like in computer science, an approach whereby you solve all
[49:18] kinds of computational problems by doing the equivalent of simulating that paperclip.
[49:26] So a very simple example of an optimization problem that you can do with simulated annealing
[49:30] is imagine you have a drawer full of bar magnets, okay?
[49:38] And they're all messy.
[49:39] They're all just scattered around every possible direction.
[49:42] Yeah.
[49:43] It's chaotic.
[49:45] If you were to shake up that drawer a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, shake it up really fast
[49:50] and then slowly lower the shaking speed.
[49:53] Presumably the bar magnets would end up in a more ordered structure that is closer to
[50:01] optimal minimizing the potential energy of the configuration than it was originally.
[50:10] So initially your drawer was just there.
[50:11] The bar magnets were all scattered in every odd angle.
[50:15] And then you shake it up and maybe it'll look more and more like a perfectly ordered drawer
[50:20] of stacked magnets.
[50:23] That's simulated annealing.
[50:25] And you can solve all kinds of optimization problems by doing that task.
[50:28] So anyway, simulated annealing.
[50:33] So there's an idea that a lot of problems that we face as humans are optimization problems.
[50:39] Yes.
[50:40] Oh yeah.
[50:41] And that's the best in all of that analogy.
[50:44] Yes.
[50:45] And I actually think that our entire life is a fractal of optimizations, you know?
[50:53] Because we are sub-optimizing different processes and different directions.
[50:58] And yeah, I see the whole thing as a giant optimization process.
[51:02] Great.
[51:03] And so when you have a tough, hard problem in the world and you dream about potential
[51:10] solutions, it shakes up all the ingredients that are in your mind and all your past memories,
[51:16] very, very deep past memories maybe that you're totally connecting with my concept of the
[51:21] subconscious pot.
[51:23] I imagine all our subconscious knowledge is like ingredients that fall on a pot, like
[51:27] a kitchen pot.
[51:28] Right.
[51:29] And then we shake.
[51:30] That's just right what you're saying.
[51:32] I love it.
[51:33] Continue, continue.
[51:34] Exactly.
[51:35] That's an easier way to explain this whole thing is that.
[51:38] And so then eventually these ingredients come to a lower potential energy configuration
[51:45] as a result of this shake-up process.
[51:47] So that's one way.
[51:48] Yeah, which also connects with the energy models that Gianlecun talks so much about.
[51:53] You know, there is like this new kind of generalizing of optimization processes that
[51:58] AI deep learning people are talking about nowadays that are energy models, you know?
[52:03] That is like a generalization of how we find that lower energy in those processes.
[52:09] Go for it.
[52:10] Go for it.
[52:11] Totally, totally.
[52:12] And you can even instead of using backdrop, it's possible to use other heuristics to train
[52:17] neural networks like you can use genetic algorithms.
[52:19] You can also just use simulated annealing.
[52:21] Yes.
[52:22] There are all ways of trying to climb the gradient ascent or gradient descent problem
[52:29] of getting the best configuration of your neural network.
[52:33] So anyway, so level one is that you can interpret the Taoist statement of assimilate to the
[52:41] structure of the cosmic order, meaning the cosmic order is what we see with our eyes
[52:46] and we hear with our senses and we have in our memories.
[52:48] And what we want to do is sort of rearrange our system so it's harmonious with it creates
[52:55] harmonies and we can resolve our problems.
[53:00] We can make things that are not beautiful, more beautiful.
[53:05] We can sort of align ourselves so that we are through our lives and actions singing harmonies
[53:17] with this world around us instead of singing cacophonies with the world around us, both
[53:24] ourselves and we can align objects so that they are we can put together objects creatively
[53:32] to solve these problems as well and create configurations of those objects that make it
[53:40] less effort to do what we're doing.
[53:43] All right.
[53:44] So the next level though on this, if you are ready, I can throw on here and this gets more
[53:49] speculative.
[53:50] Go for it.
[53:51] By the way, but for people that are not familiar, could you describe as the Tao?
[53:56] What is the Tao?
[53:57] Well, not to be confused with the blockchain Tao.
[54:03] The Taoism is the recognition at the first level that things happen in the
[54:21] universe.
[54:22] It's like, hmm, things keep happening.
[54:26] OK.
[54:27] So is it the awareness that something happens?
[54:30] Yeah, it's like, it's like, that's not trivial.
[54:32] It's like, wait, things are happening.
[54:34] Like time is ticking forward.
[54:36] What the heck?
[54:36] Like, who ordered that?
[54:38] Like, that's mysterious.
[54:41] And the second aspect of the Tao and Chinese philosophy and Taoism is
[54:52] that things behave according to their nature.
[54:55] Things have a nature.
[54:57] They behave according to their nature.
[54:59] And so Tao, Taoism, Tao, Taoism, things behave according to their own nature.
[55:05] That's beautiful.
[55:07] Great.
[55:07] And and once you recognize whatever you is, you know, you is where the question
[55:13] gets sticky and tricky because
[55:17] where
[55:23] it's like, OK, so what do you have to do?
[55:25] What does the you have to do with this?
[55:27] And it's like, well, you can recognize the nature of things and accept
[55:33] that they're going to behave according to their nature and then get out of the way
[55:40] or align things to accurate recognition.
[55:43] A great example of a Chinese medicine concept and Chinese medicine,
[55:47] Qigong, acupuncture, Taoism, they're all tied together is about sleep.
[55:53] And this is a zany concept on sleep that is really made me think about a lot of things.
[55:59] And the Taoists and Qigong and Chinese medicine people say
[56:05] the mind is buoyant.
[56:07] The mind is a part.
[56:08] You have a mind, but you are not a mind.
[56:10] There's more to you than just the mind.
[56:12] The mind is the part of the mind is buoyant.
[56:14] It's always trying to float upwards like a beach ball.
[56:17] And
[56:21] even if you're really tired, it's not the mind that's getting tired.
[56:25] It's other parts of you that are getting tired and pulling it down.
[56:28] So when you sleep, it said that the mind descends
[56:32] from the head to the heart and it sleeps in the pericardium.
[56:36] The pericardium is the area around the heart in Chinese medicine.
[56:39] Don't take that too literally, but
[56:43] it feels it feels that way, certainly feels that way from the inside.
[56:49] And the reason it's hard to go to sleep, they say when you are
[56:55] it's hard to get yourself to go to bed.
[56:56] Sometimes when you're tired is because the
[57:00] pericardium channel, the pericardium meridian is drained of energy.
[57:04] So it doesn't have the power to reach up and grab the mind and pull it down.
[57:09] That's very nice. That's interesting.
[57:11] Well, this topic is interesting for me because sometimes I have problems falling asleep.
[57:16] You know, yes, understandably, and it's not your fault.
[57:20] Your mind, it's in your mind is never going to basically your mind is never going to go
[57:25] say, I'm done being a mind.
[57:27] It's going to behave according to its nature.
[57:30] But it's important to recognize that you're not a mind.
[57:32] You're more than that.
[57:33] You're a holistic being and you contain a mind, but you're not.
[57:37] And so the pericardium is also part of it.
[57:44] It might be drained, too.
[57:46] It might also be tired.
[57:47] And so it might be tired, so it can't go pull down.
[57:51] Yeah, I like I mean, I like a lot of these concepts that you are telling me of.
[57:56] There are different.
[57:57] It's like different sides of us.
[57:59] And we don't have to necessarily identify ourselves with any one of them.
[58:05] Right.
[58:06] Right.
[58:06] And every one of those sides is going to behave according to its nature constantly.
[58:09] So the minds always go up.
[58:11] Pericardium is always do their thing.
[58:12] All the different parts you do their thing.
[58:14] Exactly.
[58:16] So what are we doing?
[58:20] Right.
[58:21] Well, OK, so returning to actually to that earlier question, which relates to
[58:27] the three three point very quick summary on self-realization, which I think is a term
[58:32] I didn't even understand.
[58:33] So recently, first point is you have a mind, but you are not a mind.
[58:40] Secondly, the point was with Qigong practice and stuff like that.
[58:44] Like when you do a Qigong exercise and you hold your arms up for five minutes, you
[58:47] start to feel this energy coming out of the fingers.
[58:50] Instead of being a Westerner in second guessing that there seems to be the circle
[58:55] of energy, be like, oh, hey, guess what?
[58:57] I don't know what the heck is going on here from an Adam standpoint.
[59:00] But firstly, there are more things in heaven and earth and dreamt of in your
[59:05] philosophy ratio.
[59:07] Secondly, the direct perception is the most real thing that we know.
[59:15] Like, like Adams are just a concept, but a feeling, you know that for sure.
[59:22] Adams are a model that we know is wrong.
[59:23] In fact, so they're not as real as these direct perceptions.
[59:27] And so then you can go on to say, you know, maybe the situation is actually you
[59:32] have, it's not that you have meridians or you have an aura, so that you are an
[59:37] aura and the Adams are just along for the ride.
[59:41] And one spiritual teacher, there's a great book, Shambhala, the Sacred Path of
[59:45] the Warrior.
[59:45] So the essential thing to do is to take everything lightly and to get beyond the
[59:50] idea that you are born of parents and like this physical body, but instead
[59:56] of your spirit in the now, like all your memories are just stories.
[60:01] All the story, all your past history.
[60:03] When you ask who you are and say, oh, this person born in that place, that's
[60:06] just a story.
[60:07] Yeah, it's not really who you are.
[60:09] You're something much more mysterious.
[60:10] I like, I like this a lot.
[60:12] It connects with what we talked about before that.
[60:14] First of all, as you say, all our memories and everything we know, these are
[60:18] the patterns in this physical vessel, but that's not who we are.
[60:24] Although some people would say it is, but then you remind me of the theory of
[60:28] Donald Hoffman again.
[60:29] By the way, it's not Daniel Hoffman.
[60:31] I think it's Donald Hoffman.
[60:33] Confirmed, confirmed.
[60:34] It's Donald Hoffman.
[60:35] And he said this, the case against reality.
[60:41] I like it.
[60:41] I already like the case against reality.
[60:43] Yeah, the case against reality.
[60:44] I mean, you will love it.
[60:45] Yeah.
[60:45] Anyway, so Donald Hoffman is the one that has the theory that there are these
[60:50] conscious entities outside of everything.
[60:53] And we are like living in within a virtual reality headset.
[60:57] So when we look at the moon, we see the moon.
[60:59] But when we look somewhere else, the moon is not there already.
[61:03] It's like when we're playing a video game with cars and we look at the road and
[61:07] the road is being rendered.
[61:08] But then we look somewhere else and that road doesn't exist.
[61:11] It got rendered when we were looking at it.
[61:13] But when we look somewhere else, that road is not being rendered.
[61:16] And it really was never there.
[61:18] There are only computer circuits.
[61:20] What there is really is that underlying circuitry below.
[61:26] So, yeah, so this goes back to what we are.
[61:29] And what you were saying and what we were saying is that, yeah,
[61:33] where memories and everything that we know is, obviously, they are stories,
[61:37] as you say, they're stories and they are patterns that we have.
[61:41] But that's not who fundamentally we are.
[61:44] And that is, of course, the big mystery.
[61:45] Donald Hoffman would say that who we are fundamentally are these entities.
[61:50] And he says that when people die, we may lose, we may lose self-awareness,
[61:54] but we don't lose the consciousness that it's somewhere else.
[61:58] So what do you think?
[62:01] Well, I mean, yeah, to what I think is that's a great hypothesis.
[62:06] And I was on this clubhouse call with a bunch of experts on, are we living in a
[62:10] simulation? And they're trying to say, OK, you know what, if we are living inside
[62:14] someone's gaming rig, like we should be able to see all these space optimizations
[62:19] that a good programmer created and see if that has predictive power for physics.
[62:23] And I like that a lot.
[62:26] Then, of course, the harder question isn't answered by this, which is like,
[62:29] all right, so what is the deal?
[62:34] Like, are we in the top level of this reality?
[62:36] Or are we at some level of simulation, there's got to be the top level.
[62:39] And then you're still left with the question of why is there something instead of
[62:43] nothing? And with that question, you still start to tap into the divine.
[62:53] That's when you start to get towards ideas of the divine.
[62:58] But I think our only chance here is again with analogies.
[63:05] You know, like I did this talk about different spaces of multiple dimensions
[63:11] and, you know, the flat land analogy, right?
[63:13] So again, if you are living in a 2D world and there is a 3D object, right,
[63:17] moving on top and you can only.
[63:19] Now, could you be able to guess what's really in the 3D world if you were in the 2D world?
[63:25] We don't know to guess.
[63:25] So the question is, do we have the capacity to understand from our reality what could
[63:33] be the ultimate end of the chain?
[63:37] I was going to pop to a wilder idea about a mealing.
[63:43] OK. So.
[63:46] Go wild. All right.
[63:49] So. Imagine you have a bunch of iron filings in.
[63:59] A piece of glass. OK.
[64:01] And then you heat up the glass.
[64:03] Piece of glass, a piece of glass iron filings in a piece of glass.
[64:07] And then you heat the glass.
[64:09] Yeah, those iron filings are going to move around.
[64:12] And, you know, if some of those iron filings are magnetized,
[64:18] they're going to exert changes locally inside the glass as well.
[64:25] That's pretty much the model I was talking about dreaming in this reality
[64:30] a few minutes ago.
[64:33] Now.
[64:37] Yeah, as you heat up the glass, the iron filings can reconfigure
[64:43] and the iron filings that are
[64:47] like magnetically charged in a way that
[64:50] the ends attract one another will stick together.
[64:55] And those that repel, that those ends will will push apart.
[64:58] Some order changes.
[65:00] You cool the glass back down.
[65:01] You're in a state of greater order.
[65:03] But I suspect that there may or I want, I would investigate
[65:11] that maybe there's something more interesting happening here.
[65:15] That it's not just internal to the glass.
[65:20] Iron filings signaling each other.
[65:22] But there's also a magnet underneath the table.
[65:25] And the magnet is creating a field that's going to cause all of the iron
[65:29] filings to rearrange according to certain patterns in ways that are
[65:34] statistically unlikely.
[65:37] So.
[65:40] So it's almost like multiple levels, multiple levels of rearrangement
[65:44] and influence.
[65:46] Right. So one of the great gaps in this world is the gap of randomness.
[65:52] And who knows if this is the gap through which stuff will enter
[65:56] or which possibilities will enter and stuff like that.
[65:59] It's like, OK, these things getting lucky is always a cop out answer for anything.
[66:03] Is what it comes down to.
[66:05] And the question is, is if there's this this field
[66:11] that of cosmic order as the Taoists sort of
[66:16] find productive to picture in the sake of in the case of a mind,
[66:21] it's like you just.
[66:24] Achieve total attachment.
[66:27] And in the spaces between your thoughts, even in your openness,
[66:31] you will be transformed by nature itself.
[66:34] You'll become more like your own nature.
[66:37] And the question is, is this because of stuff here?
[66:43] Or is it also because of stuff that is.
[66:48] There are fields that make them that help the process along
[66:52] in this world as it were.
[66:54] And so.
[66:58] Yeah, I think that's the hypothesis we're considering.
[67:00] Very interesting.
[67:01] And that's the third hypothesis.
[67:02] So three hypotheses were inner language
[67:05] hypothesis, undiscovered mathematical structures inside
[67:10] things that just make order appear where it seems unlikely
[67:14] beyond the natural selection is not the end of the story.
[67:17] The explanation is like a lot of rationalization.
[67:21] Is about saying, you know what, we figured out the reason why something happened.
[67:25] And I think.
[67:28] I might even go so far as to say as.
[67:33] You can never say with conscience that you're at the end of a story and having
[67:37] having figured out all the reasons why something has happened.
[67:39] You figured out.
[67:40] Yeah, this is a bit the Godels.
[67:43] The principle of Godel, right, that you can never get
[67:48] to the bottom of all mathematical proofs.
[67:51] Yeah. Godel.
[67:52] Yeah, so really.
[67:53] In completeness theorem.
[67:55] In completeness.
[67:55] Yeah, really, definitely a related.
[67:59] Topic it talks about the fundamental limitation of models
[68:04] to do things.
[68:04] It's that if.
[68:06] Yeah.
[68:07] You have a sufficiently powerful model that's going to contain contradictions.
[68:11] Yeah.
[68:12] Or you're going to have a model that contains true statements that are not
[68:16] provable, which is or a mathematical system that contains actually true
[68:21] statements that you just can't prove, which is really, really, really kind of
[68:25] cool because it means, you know, maybe we have statements in our reality that are
[68:29] true, but you can't prove them.
[68:32] But it's still true.
[68:33] It's still true.
[68:34] Anyway.
[68:36] So I don't quite know the physics implications there, but I'd want to investigate that.
[68:42] Um, okay.
[68:43] So returning to this, the three hypotheses to reiterate are hypotheses like the
[68:54] inner language hypothesis, hypotheses like the dream, dream annealing hypothesis.
[69:00] And then the third hypothesis is annealing with a field.
[69:05] And if there's annealing with a field, that would certainly be like, you know what,
[69:10] I just got a message from the cost.
[69:11] I just, this idea just popped into my head and I got this message from the
[69:15] cosmos that I want to express.
[69:17] And given that, taught logically, anything that we say or do is the cosmos speaking.
[69:25] So this could be like a field that is external.
[69:30] This is like a field that is somewhere outside of reality that is influencing us.
[69:35] Yeah, it could be influencing randomness, but that's one, one, one way it could be
[69:39] influencing things.
[69:40] I can think of other ways it could be influencing things too, I think, but that's
[69:43] like the easiest one, just like getting those coin flips to be slightly different
[69:47] than they get, and you'd expect with no cosmic structure.
[69:52] That's fascinating.
[69:53] I love it.
[69:54] I love it because, uh, yeah, we have all these serendipity, synchronicity and all of
[69:59] these things and, um, many, many people are thinking that there is some, maybe
[70:05] something beyond, right?
[70:07] Some feel.
[70:08] Right.
[70:08] So, I mean, I've seen, there's been some, some bits of like unexplained results
[70:16] that have been compelling enough to not be debunked around things, like to not be
[70:21] like immediate, like the results have not been entirely unequivocally debunked.
[70:27] And of course you can't unequivocally debunk anything, but, um, it's like, there's
[70:32] just some results floating around here that are like, kind of, kind of means you
[70:37] make me want to do follow up studies.
[70:39] Someone researched, um, what they call telephone telepathy, which is you're
[70:44] thinking about somebody and then they call you.
[70:46] Oh yeah.
[70:48] It just keeps happening.
[70:49] And it's like, okay, it could be a confirmation bias thing.
[70:51] You could just rationalize it all away with that kind of situation.
[70:55] They did some sort of like double blind study, which had a weird result.
[71:01] Um, which, um, I think there's one replication of it.
[71:06] And then one failure to replicate.
[71:08] And, um, people are saying made, made an experiment or bias, but, um, it's like,
[71:14] I want to see these things.
[71:15] I want to collect all the data we have and see what we can do.
[71:18] Um, but the result was that in a very controlled environment, um, where if you
[71:25] had two different friends who were going to call, you'd expect 50, 50 results.
[71:29] Yeah.
[71:30] In terms of, um, the amount, I think out of 3000 participants, 3000
[71:36] calls or 3000 participants or something, there's a 55% of the time you could
[71:42] guess the person that was going to call.
[71:43] 55%.
[71:44] So yeah, it's a little bit more than chance, more than 50%.
[71:48] Right.
[71:48] Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's, that's a, yeah, that's a lot.
[71:53] No, well, yeah, it's just a little, it's just a little nudge.
[71:56] It's a little nudge.
[71:57] And so what I want to do is I want to sort of scour the world for these minute
[72:01] like variations in a coin flip that you'd expect.
[72:04] If you were in a week, if you, if you were an iron filing in a week, magnetic
[72:10] field of some sort, you'd expect these like sort of subtle variations in the coin
[72:15] flips.
[72:16] And I think we need to do a systematic effort to collect that kind of data around
[72:20] all kinds of things.
[72:21] It's like a search for the gravity waves, you know, gravitational waves, you know,
[72:27] it's looking for these subtle, very subtle variations.
[72:32] Yeah.
[72:32] And we always have to contend with this difficult challenge that is what you
[72:37] said before, what part of it are our biases and our priors and our internal
[72:45] structure influencing things and what part of it is really, yeah, coming from out
[72:51] there, you know, it's difficult, difficult.
[72:54] As just a wilder, just to throw one of the wilder things that kind of like gets
[73:00] you thinking these days about it is a few years ago, there was a scientific
[73:05] American article that was titled, are we skeptics or are we just cynics?
[73:12] And it was talking about specifically, there's this, I think it was the chair of
[73:18] the psychiatry department or chair of the psychology department or something at
[73:22] University of Virginia.
[73:24] He kept getting kids who came in and were like, okay, so I had a past life and I
[73:30] remembered this and they were like under six years old.
[73:32] And it was just like, this is just a phenomenon.
[73:36] I can't, like, there's just a lot of kids who do this.
[73:39] And then he's like, all right, tell me about your past life.
[73:42] And they tell all these very idiosyncratic details, like the names of people and the
[73:47] names of places even.
[73:49] And then he was like, all right, we're going to go search for these places and
[73:53] stuff like that and these people.
[73:54] And in some cases, in like a substantial number of cases, a number of cases that
[73:58] was statistically significant for any type of social science or historical
[74:03] science research, they were able to identify, like the kid would tell like 27
[74:09] idiosyncratic details about a past life and 20 of them would be accurate.
[74:17] And it was kind of wild.
[74:19] But yeah, the article is called, are we skeptics?
[74:23] Yeah, I want to see this.
[74:24] So it's in the scientific American.
[74:26] Yeah.
[74:27] So that was the surprising thing.
[74:28] That's a...
[74:28] Send it to me, yeah.
[74:29] Send it to me.
[74:30] Yeah.
[74:31] It's Ian Stevenson's case for the afterlife.
[74:33] Yeah.
[74:33] And it's on the scientific American blog.
[74:35] Wow.
[74:37] Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
[74:38] That's fascinating.
[74:39] I will check it for sure.
[74:41] Yeah.
[74:41] So anyway, and these guys really did make a best effort basis to sort of find a
[74:48] null hypothesis and find a reasonable explanation how these things could have
[74:52] happened.
[74:53] And they weren't like a bunch of new agey people trying to, like, start with this.
[74:58] They were academic psychiatrists or psychologists or whatever it were that
[75:05] were just like, okay, we got this thing to contend with.
[75:08] And so that's an example of like these idiosyncratic...
[75:12] I want to just do some more thorough combing of the universe.
[75:16] I would be also pretty content if it turns out there's nothing there.
[75:19] Like I'm pretty content with the universe.
[75:21] It's just contained within things by the physical eyes.
[75:25] Like you don't need an external field.
[75:27] But I kind of do want to know what the nature of reality is.
[75:29] So let's see if the field seems to be acting on things.
[75:33] And I think materialist physics is going to be in for a heck of a ringer pretty soon,
[75:40] for a lot of reasons, like not just external to it.
[75:45] I mean, both internal to it, but also external to it.
[75:48] But there's like a lot of sort of cracks, especially as you attempt to
[75:52] account for physics of immaterial objects.
[75:55] But that's another piece of this.
[75:56] Well, they just found the fifth force, right?
[75:59] They just found the fifth force a few days ago.
[76:01] I mean, there was in the...
[76:03] Oh, tell me what the news is.
[76:04] What's the news?
[76:04] Yeah, I mean, the news that I don't know if it's in the CERN, but, you know,
[76:09] if we search, we'll find it.
[76:11] Just search for fifth force.
[76:14] This just happened a few days ago.
[76:17] Fifth force CERN.
[76:23] I think it was in CERN.
[76:26] Here it is.
[76:26] Here it is.
[76:27] Yeah, is there a fifth force?
[76:31] Whoa, I see it.
[76:32] Strong evidence for a new force of nature.
[76:34] Yeah, new force of nature.
[76:36] Yeah.
[76:36] So this was very recently.
[76:38] Yeah, it's funny exactly what you're talking about.
[76:40] Yeah.
[76:41] Well, yeah, what's kind of fun here is...
[76:46] Like, Western physics is in for a ringer from its insides and then also from,
[76:53] like, for much more high-level reasons as well.
[76:56] So just from its internal consistency standpoint.
[76:59] And then I wonder how this is all going to converge.
[77:02] I wonder how this is all going to converge.
[77:03] Anyway, go ahead.
[77:04] Yeah.
[77:05] No, that, you know, that is very interesting that when we think about the
[77:10] history of humankind, you know, the history of the human race, you know,
[77:15] humankind, you know, it's very interesting because if you think about consciousness,
[77:19] right, we could say that, we would say that maybe all animals have consciousness,
[77:25] but there is like, you know, lower levels of consciousness, higher levels of
[77:29] consciousness, and we human beings would have a higher level than an ant, for
[77:33] example.
[77:34] Then when you think within a human being, when you think of the kids, the
[77:38] children and the adults, then you see the same thing, right?
[77:41] You see, like, you know, the kid has like a more, you know, primitive level of self
[77:49] awareness, whatever, you know, and this progresses throughout life, right?
[77:52] And then...
[77:54] For some people, it stops at some point and other people become buddhas.
[78:01] Yeah.
[78:01] And yeah, and other people get even more enlightened and enlightened.
[78:06] And yeah, I mean, there are like lots of different levels.
[78:10] Yes, absolutely.
[78:11] But, but yeah, no.
[78:14] But what I was thinking now is that in connection with what you were saying about
[78:18] this, you know, irregularities and all of this, that...
[78:27] Yeah, that, you know, that there is some kind of, there is, there are all of these
[78:33] degrees of variation within this, this consciousness manifestation.
[78:40] And, and I don't know, these points to like a, like evolution, like a cycle.
[78:47] And this just makes me feel that there is something behind the process.
[78:57] Um, yeah, it sure feels that way.
[78:58] And coming back to the fundamental situation is, no matter which way you
[79:04] slice it, tonologically, you are the universe speaking.
[79:07] So there's a, the no self experience is one last thing that I think is like, at
[79:14] least worth mentioning here, or the no self realization.
[79:18] It's like in Taoism, there's only like the nature of the universe, the characteristic
[79:24] of the universe speaking through you on one hand.
[79:27] And then the other hand, there is conditioning speaking.
[79:31] So therefore, if you got hurt by something and initially you liked something
[79:38] and then you get hurt by it, and then you don't like it anymore.
[79:42] If you have the precision of mind to say, Hey, you know what?
[79:45] There's actually two forces in here.
[79:47] One of them is curious and innocent and kind and up for anything.
[79:52] And the other one got hurt and is saying, no, no, no.
[79:55] You can divide yourself into those two pieces and recognize hates conditioning
[80:00] speaking versus the nature of my original nature speaking, which is not just your
[80:04] original nature, it is the nature of the universe, literally speaking through you.
[80:09] Reflected at this level.
[80:12] And, um, yeah, I like this a lot because it's so because I feel this, I feel
[80:19] like we all have this kind of like a universe nature in us, this pure nature.
[80:27] That is just like something expressing through ourselves.
[80:31] And then there is all the conditioning.
[80:33] You just the right word.
[80:34] There is all this conditioning that is put on top of it.
[80:38] That is like a mask that is like a cover and that develops especially in adulthood.
[80:43] You know, that's why children look more innocent because they seem to just be
[80:48] expressing that universal kind of thing.
[80:51] Right.
[80:52] Great.
[80:53] And then what I think is, is children are a first approximation at Taoist masters.
[80:59] And yet there's also aspects of attachment and conditioning that is built
[81:08] into children that Taoist masters can overcome.
[81:11] Like a kid might not like a bitter food.
[81:16] Yeah.
[81:17] But a Taoist master can release the aversion to bitterness and appreciate a greater beauty
[81:23] than a new than a young child can appreciate.
[81:26] So what's interesting is you see like a prototype.
[81:31] It's like a first prototype of a Zen master or a Taoist master is a, um, as a child.
[81:37] But so the realization though, that's very cool is.
[81:43] Yeah.
[81:43] Is it basically a bot in your head speaking?
[81:50] Or is it the original nature speak?
[81:53] Because what you get is you get hurt by something and a very intelligent, your brain is a
[82:00] fertile ground for little intelligences to go blossom.
[82:03] And there's a little being in your head.
[82:05] It's a bot and it's conditioning.
[82:07] It's not you.
[82:08] It's, it's just like a habitual process.
[82:13] It's not you at all.
[82:14] It's just a habitual process that it's a groove that the Vedic word for it is a samskara.
[82:20] It's a groove.
[82:20] Um, a groove of, of, of behavior.
[82:23] And it's, I, I, I, I like the idea of it's little bot and it's like a little bot and
[82:29] it's pinning me and saying, Hey, you shouldn't do this thing.
[82:32] And if you're not clear on who you are, then you'll conflate the message for you, just
[82:39] as someone who grows up with really like parents who are always saying they're not
[82:44] good enough, conflate that message for their own internal message.
[82:47] Like we don't have like out of the box, this perfect ability to distinguish about who's
[82:53] saying something, especially when it comes from inside.
[82:58] And so asking if it's conditioning speaking, is it karma?
[83:03] They also called karma in the Taoist tradition.
[83:06] Is it karma speaking?
[83:09] Is it conditioning speaking?
[83:10] Is it a bot speaking?
[83:12] And it has intelligence.
[83:13] This karma is said to have intelligence or is it this true unconditioned nature speaking,
[83:19] which can, which can see things clearly.
[83:21] The fundamental thing about the unconditioned nature is that it, it really has the capacity
[83:27] to see things clearly, both in a materialistic sense of perceiving what's going to happen
[83:35] most accurately, and then in a sense of perceiving the fundamental nature of things as not,
[83:43] as not good or bad, but not for or against anything, but as just basically good.
[83:49] Like this universe is basically a good place and seeing sort of like, as William Blake said,
[83:55] if we could, if the doors of perception were cleansed, we would see everything as it is infinite.
[84:01] This is, I mean, I have to ask you something because this is really fascinating.
[84:05] So do you think that, you know, when, when we do, when we do something that is not good for us?
[84:12] Okay.
[84:12] Yeah.
[84:13] And there is a part of us that knows that is not right.
[84:17] Yeah.
[84:17] But there is another part of us that justifies it and does it anyway.
[84:23] Being able to detect, as you say, if something that we're thinking or doing comes from our
[84:31] conditioning, comes from our natural impulse, where does it come from?
[84:38] I think this is probably the most crucial thing in life.
[84:41] And the question is, so the question is, how do we know, right?
[84:47] Yes.
[84:47] What is really coming from our true nature?
[84:51] Is it about detecting conflict?
[84:52] Is it about detecting internal conflict when we feel like a tug of war, like something
[84:57] pushing, pulling in different directions internally?
[85:00] Is that the signal that, you know, the conditioning and the nature are just fighting each other?
[85:06] I mean, how can we, how can we?
[85:10] Okay.
[85:10] What do we have to do because everybody goes through this jackal?
[85:13] What do we have to do to prevent ourselves from allowing conditioning to win?
[85:21] Great, great.
[85:22] Because it's so easy for that to happen.
[85:23] And this is so easy.
[85:25] And fundamentally, like striking this problem that it's root is essential.
[85:29] So, I mean, I think the most.
[85:31] You know, what do we have to do to stop living autopilot?
[85:33] I always tell people, and you know, there is a big company that did this, this fascinating
[85:37] test that every day we take like 30,000 decisions and 98% of them we don't realize we take them.
[85:45] So it's like we live in autopilot most of the time.
[85:49] So what, what chances do we have to prevent this from happening if we are living in autopilot
[85:55] most of the time?
[85:58] Yeah.
[85:58] So firstly, this is the essential topic of yoga philosophy.
[86:04] And I think it's the most important question, maybe in existence.
[86:08] And the Desik Achar, who I think is the most clear writer on this topic in ever.
[86:16] I've posted my favorite six pages of philosophy in the world, by the way, at yoga.jaco.net,
[86:22] which is Desik Achar's writing on exactly this topic.
[86:26] He actually says firstly, he's a very positive guy.
[86:30] And he's like, you know, he lauds man's great facility to form habitual processes.
[86:36] It's like, we've got this great ability.
[86:38] We can form habitual processes that run things on autopilot for us.
[86:43] This is great, but they can also get us in trouble.
[86:46] Yes.
[86:47] And this is how the brain works physiologically, creating mental patterns and habits.
[86:54] And it's useful, but it's a bloody problem at the same time.
[86:59] Yeah.
[86:59] And so it's exactly, it's like we have this Ferrari engine.
[87:03] We got to take care of our Ferraris and that's and realize that and not be blind to the fact
[87:11] that needs maintenance and it needs retuning.
[87:14] So firstly, recognizing when you've got clear thinking versus clear thinking is indeed
[87:25] the most essential thing.
[87:27] And the yogis basically adopt a zero tolerance policy for unclear thinking.
[87:35] And it's like, if there's ever internal conflict, you need to transcend it in some way.
[87:39] I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to push you.
[87:42] I'm going to I'm going to ask you a question that is is going to really be
[87:46] complicated for you to answer.
[87:47] Let me see.
[87:48] Yeah, let's see.
[87:48] Let's see what you answer.
[87:50] Imagine somebody that is in love.
[87:52] OK, so you are in love.
[87:54] OK, somebody's in love.
[87:56] Now that person is living in a in a down fantasy.
[87:59] We know it in a hormonal bloody mess, you know, it's like it's like a big, big fantasy.
[88:05] OK, the perception of that person is completely out of work.
[88:10] I mean, it's just like, yes, it's like a massive rosey filter, whatever, you know.
[88:16] So yeah, that person cannot even that person cannot even have any hope of like
[88:22] understanding when that person has clear thinking or nonclear thinking.
[88:26] There is not even the possibility.
[88:27] Isn't that right?
[88:29] It is.
[88:30] So you're asking how could someone transcend that that I'm clear thinking?
[88:37] Yeah, I mean, look, look, if I am in love with a person, OK, yes, at the beginning
[88:42] of stages, do I have any hope of have clear objective thinking about a situation?
[88:49] The situation that I'm living with that person?
[88:52] Well, I think I can I can exposit the yogi approach to it and also the challenge, which shows it.
[88:59] So firstly, in the most ideal sense, I was looking into what happens when Buddhist monks
[89:07] develop schizophrenia or Alzheimer's or something like that.
[89:10] OK.
[89:11] And firstly, these disorders seem to be rarer amongst monks because they are really paying
[89:20] attention to their minds a lot.
[89:22] But secondly, when people get really old, all kinds of stuff breaks down.
[89:25] So it happens to be there.
[89:27] But basically.
[89:33] The key recognition of what is you versus what is conditioning that.
[89:43] Or what is what is you versus what is your perception that realization, even in the people
[89:49] who really had their brains going and were having hallucinations and were having all kinds of problems, they
[89:59] still didn't lose the self realization insight.
[90:01] None of them lost the realization of who they were.
[90:04] And a Buddhist monk's entire day job is to sit there and recognize all things as illusion.
[90:13] And these Buddhist monks were able to notice that the hallucinated stimuli or whatever were out of harmony with the other
[90:28] hallucinated stimuli, which is our day to day living and secure a little bit there.
[90:34] So that was that was one of the one of the consequences.
[90:38] And so just from a pure mind, not using any physiological tricks to actually reduce this hormonal problem.
[90:49] It seems like it's possible.
[90:50] So what you're saying is that it is possible to transcend even even situations like being alive and see with clarity.
[90:58] I guess the next question would be.
[91:00] Wait, wait, I have a second part to my answer.
[91:02] Go.
[91:04] Yeah.
[91:05] So the second part of the answer is so I really do.
[91:09] I can't say enough about the six pages of philosophy that are present at yoga.jakepacol.net.
[91:15] And Avidya is one of the key concepts in yoga.
[91:21] You have to send me the link.
[91:22] Send me the link.
[91:23] Okay.
[91:23] And I will put it.
[91:24] Yeah.
[91:25] I mean, no, no, no, no, no, no.
[91:26] I already did.
[91:27] I may have just sent you the link.
[91:29] Anyway, the concept of Avidya, which is I think fascinating because it allows you to simply through recognizing it, do a step of trans towards transcending it.
[91:45] It shows both the power and I'm going to show both the power and limitation of this concept.
[91:51] So in the West, especially in Christianity, there's this big conflict between temptation and doing the right thing.
[92:03] But the yogis don't like conflict internally.
[92:06] And they're like, that seems like an awful way to live where you have to constantly be fighting temptation.
[92:11] And the word they use instead is Vidya, right knowledge and Avidya, that which is other than right knowledge.
[92:21] And their concept of a sin is more like something that goes against yourself.
[92:26] And it's like, if you recognize what if you feeling impatience or laziness is considered to be a form of Avidya, and it doesn't have reality.
[92:40] It is just like imaginary.
[92:43] It's not real.
[92:43] If you poke it with your brain, it's not real.
[92:46] And so the recognition of something as Avidya is very powerful because like there's all kinds of a conflicted person is not a type of person to be.
[93:04] It's really what it comes down to.
[93:05] I like that a lot.
[93:07] I love it a lot.
[93:07] I think when we feel inner conflict is the worst thing and that's a nice definition of what should not happen.
[93:15] It's not that it should not happen.
[93:17] It's just not like like they just don't have healthy.
[93:21] It's not even that though.
[93:23] It's just like the it's even more.
[93:25] It's even more fundamental.
[93:26] It's just like some things are illusory if you poke them.
[93:33] And it's like you're not being you're just you're doing something other than being you're not even real in some way.
[93:42] If you're not even a real person, if you're being internally conflicted in some way or another is what it comes down to.
[93:50] And that's because being is has to do fundamentally with this coherence, the sense of coherence.
[93:55] Oh, I like this.
[93:56] The sense of coherence, the sense of authenticity.
[93:59] If you are not integrated, let's say you are not being as you say that's that's nice.
[94:06] Right.
[94:06] Yeah, you're not even being.
[94:09] And so it's easy.
[94:11] No, you're just a mask.
[94:13] You're just a mask.
[94:14] You're just.
[94:16] Yeah, your shell.
[94:19] Your shell.
[94:20] Your.
[94:21] Yeah, it's not.
[94:23] Yeah, it's just not a thing.
[94:24] It's just not a thing.
[94:25] And it's like I want to create a vocabulary, a constructed language that removes words like laziness and removes words like.
[94:38] Impatience and replaces a description of those states as I am confused.
[94:49] That's interesting.
[94:49] So I am confused.
[94:51] I am in conflict, basically with myself.
[94:55] And those are the states where you can conflict either.
[94:58] I don't even like conflict that conflicts.
[95:01] I might try to remove conflict from the language itself because like.
[95:06] The language would only allow you to speak in a way that transcends conflict.
[95:10] And I'm interested if you can even use this as a form of psychotherapy Linus was actually proposing a few hours ago.
[95:19] You know, what if you create a constructed language where you're very precise about which part of you is saying something or wanting something.
[95:27] Like if you're wanting food, you have to say, oh, it's not that I want food.
[95:31] It's like my physical self wants food.
[95:33] That's nice.
[95:34] Or I feel an emotional pain and therefore that emotional pain self is wanting to eat food to drown its emotional pain.
[95:41] And then maybe you have another word, which is the integrated self or something like that.
[95:46] I love that.
[95:47] This is a great idea.
[95:50] Anyway, because I mean, this is really a great idea.
[95:52] Let's stop there for a second because I think a lot of the problems of people are in in confusing where things are coming from.
[95:59] You know, I think that's a great idea.
[96:01] You know, when they feel as you say they want sex or food or whatever, you know, and they just don't identify where that is coming from.
[96:09] I think that's crucial thing.
[96:11] If we could identify those things easier, wow, it would be a revolution.
[96:18] Yes, exactly.
[96:19] Exactly.
[96:19] And having a language that trains that decision.
[96:21] It actually one other side effect is if you've had a language that really forced you to say the source of everything.
[96:28] That's like part of the language itself.
[96:30] You'd even be able to better distinguish between when other people are there's a great quote, which is if you're finding it difficult to get motivated or you're trying to you need to keep yourself motivated.
[96:42] Maybe you're chasing somebody else's goals like nice.
[96:47] That's that.
[96:47] Yeah, that's that's very nice.
[96:49] That's very nice.
[96:49] If you have problems finding motivation, maybe it's because whatever you are trying to do is not resonating with what you are who you are.
[96:57] And you are, as you say, you are chasing somebody else's goals.
[97:00] Yeah, that's also beautiful.
[97:01] That's that's pretty stunning.
[97:03] But but I mean, you are very interested in, you know, the all this topic of creating new languages.
[97:07] And I love it because because you are so right because the language that we use is really constraining us and is creating boundaries around all the possibilities in dramatic ways.
[97:19] So it's so crucial.
[97:20] The language that we're using.
[97:22] So creating new kinds of language to, in this case, identify where our emotions come from.
[97:29] For example, wow, that is amazing.
[97:32] Is there anybody doing something like that?
[97:33] I mean, or do you want to do something like that?
[97:36] Linus is doing something like that over there.
[97:38] Really?
[97:39] He's doing he's creating a new kind of language.
[97:41] What?
[97:42] I mean, he's already created Linus already speaks his own constructed language.
[97:47] Oh, yeah, you told me before.
[97:48] So so what kind of language?
[97:50] I mean, if you can't talk about it.
[97:51] I mean, what kind of language is it and why so what is why did he create that language with what specific purpose and, you know,
[98:01] I don't I don't know the full story.
[98:03] Okay, I think he can he can probably describe it a lot better for himself.
[98:07] But the details I know are language is a tool just like everything else that we can use.
[98:15] And English is a clumsy tool for some of those things.
[98:19] Yeah.
[98:19] And that's like a philosophical high level thing.
[98:23] But you know, I think this is really amazing because I can imagine a group of a group of people coming together and beginning to use this other kind of language that you are describing where we specify where our emotions come from, etc.
[98:36] And after a while of doing this, these will definitely transform you.
[98:41] This will transform your brain.
[98:42] This will transform the way you think.
[98:44] This will transform the way you act.
[98:47] Really, I've never heard of this.
[98:48] This is really fabulous.
[98:51] I mean, yeah, so I think it would be so cool if you could just have learned to speak this language and that is psychotherapy.
[98:57] Yeah.
[98:59] Okay.
[99:00] Yeah, it's like I'd love to.
[99:02] I love to, you know, I see lots of examples of this.
[99:05] By the way, one of those languages is probably Sanskrit.
[99:08] You can just use Sanskrit and you get pretty far.
[99:11] Oh, so Sanskrit Sanskrit already allows you to connect things in that way a little bit.
[99:16] There's a whole bunch of stuff in Sanskrit like that, especially if you learn the etymologies.
[99:20] And what's cool about Sanskrit also is that it, well, firstly, lots of things about Sanskrit.
[99:25] Firstly, Patanjali, who's the guy who wrote the Yoga Sutras.
[99:28] He's also famous as a grammarian.
[99:30] By the way, what I mean, I cannot see your face because you are in front of the...
[99:34] Oh, sorry.
[99:34] Yeah.
[99:35] Okay, begin again.
[99:36] Sanskrit.
[99:36] Why is Sanskrit fascinating?
[99:39] Well, Sanskrit is a partial solution.
[99:43] It contains all this profound stuff like the concept of Avidya and Vidya.
[99:47] And it just contains all these phenomenal words.
[99:49] I mean, if you look in Religiousness in Yoga, which is the book by Deskichart,
[99:53] which I posted partly at yoga.jaco.net, it is...
[99:59] It introduces a lot of Sanskrit concepts that just like are a much more profound schema for slicing the world,
[100:04] for slicing this reality than many other things are.
[100:08] Another fun thing about Sanskrit is you may have heard of the Indo-European language group.
[100:14] English is an Indo-European language.
[100:16] Latin is an Indo-European language.
[100:19] The Indo in that is it came from Sanskrit.
[100:22] And basically, part of the reason why it stuck around that is because, of course, geopolitical,
[100:30] but also because Sanskrit kind of rocks as a language.
[100:35] And this dude, Patanjali, Patanjali, wrote the Yoga Sutra.
[100:39] And he is just an amazing, amazing historical polymath.
[100:46] He was also famous as a sage who created precise grammar for Sanskrit.
[100:52] He's the guy who made Sanskrit grammar.
[100:55] And so what happened when Sanskrit, when English was created coming from Sanskrit?
[101:01] So we lost all the good stuff or what?
[101:04] Oh, it's just hidden.
[101:06] Okay, a great word.
[101:08] The word Vidya itself.
[101:10] Okay, here's a great word.
[101:12] The word Yoga, it means it comes from the Sanskrit root, Yuj.
[101:19] And that means a few things.
[101:21] It means to unite, like to yoke and ox to a cart.
[101:24] Oh, guess what?
[101:25] The word yoke is also from the word yuj.
[101:27] And guess what?
[101:29] The word siziji, alignment of the planets, is also from the word yuj.
[101:35] And Sanskrit.
[101:36] And yoga means to unite.
[101:39] It also means to converge the movement of the mind.
[101:43] So Yuj, yoga means to unite, to become one with something.
[101:54] Like you learn a new topic, you've become one with it.
[101:57] You have resolved the conflicts in your mind.
[102:03] You've just unified things.
[102:04] You connect your mind and your body.
[102:06] You have united.
[102:08] All these things are united.
[102:10] That's what yoga is.
[102:12] And then also, it is to converge, or, well, yoga also implies a certain connotation of to converge.
[102:25] Like a bunch of people were in separate places, and then they came to one place for a conference, then they're together.
[102:31] That convergence is what can also happen in the minds.
[102:34] There can be a meeting of little minds in your own mind at all times, and that's what yoga is.
[102:40] But also yoga is...
[102:42] So we're going back to the coherence again, right?
[102:46] Yeah.
[102:49] So yeah, yoga is that.
[102:51] And so this is all covered in the six pages.
[102:53] Again, it's a freaking killer six pages of philosophy.
[102:57] That is at yoga.jacobcoldot.
[103:00] We want them. We will share them all around.
[103:04] In fact, I also donated this book to the Internet Library, so you can check it out for free online.
[103:10] It's one of my favorite books.
[103:12] The great thing about Desikachar is he...
[103:14] So his dad was the father of modern yoga.
[103:17] The guy who was responsible for all the yoga you see anywhere, all the styles.
[103:23] His dad was the teacher of Patabi Joyce who made Ashtanga yoga, which made Vinyasa yoga.
[103:30] His dad was also the teacher of Ayengar, who made Ayengar yoga.
[103:33] Ayengar? I did Ayengar yoga, actually, yeah.
[103:36] You know my dad's an Ayengar teacher, right?
[103:39] I know... who exactly?
[103:41] My dad is Roger Cole.
[103:44] Ah, your dad is a Ayengar teacher?
[103:47] Yeah, well known one.
[103:49] No, I didn't know this. I didn't know this. Oh, that's fantastic.
[103:52] Yeah, yeah, I mean he wrote... he's also a sleep researcher, so it does both sides of the deal.
[103:57] But he wrote the Anatomy and Physiology column for Yoga Journal for like a better part of a decade.
[104:02] Oh, I didn't know, I didn't know. That's fascinating, that's... wow, that's fantastic.
[104:06] Yeah, so anyway, my dad's a great guy as well.
[104:09] And a sleep researcher, a sleep researcher.
[104:12] Well, that is super interesting, I mean.
[104:15] Well, I should interview your dad as well at some point.
[104:18] Oh, absolutely. He's amazing.
[104:20] You guys would love each other.
[104:23] Yeah, because he's been...
[104:25] I'm fanatic about this sleep science as well, so yeah.
[104:28] Yeah, and actually he's been developing new sleep masks, which are...
[104:34] use all these principles that we know in the lab and also that we know in yoga to make it...
[104:39] make way, way better sleep quality.
[104:42] So if you're interested in better sleep masks, he's the guy.
[104:45] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, we have to talk great.
[104:48] Yeah, yeah, okay, anyway, lots of stuff to be said here.
[104:51] But, okay, so what was I saying?
[104:54] Yeah, you were talking about the Sanskrit, the yoga, the yoga, the unifying nature of the concept.
[105:00] Yeah.
[105:02] Well, I think I missed one of these...
[105:05] Yeah, I missed one of our stack threads.
[105:10] What was right before my dad?
[105:13] Yeah, I'm sorry, I cut you, I'm sorry.
[105:16] No, no, it's good.
[105:19] No, but you know, I was finding it fascinating that you were...
[105:22] Oh, okay, yoga, okay, Desikachar, son of the father of modern yoga.
[105:27] So the thing is, Desikachar didn't do any yoga till his mid-20s, and he became a civil engineer.
[105:34] So when he started to write about yoga, he wrote about it in plain English that everyone can understand.
[105:39] And he's just like a really matter-of-fact guy.
[105:45] He's like no metaphorical stuff, no mystical stuff, no nothing.
[105:52] He's like, yeah, let's just talk about building stuff and clear recognition of your mind, pretty much.
[105:59] Anyway, fantastic situation.
[106:05] So anyway, before Sanskrit, so Sanskrit is partially that language, which is quite fascinating.
[106:13] But if we could do a step better, I think, and create something conversational.
[106:17] I was going to say, one other fun fact of the line is his language contains...
[106:23] I think you don't do anything, you only be things.
[106:29] It's like, I am not doing something, it's like I am being something.
[106:33] I think there's something essential in that.
[106:37] Yeah, I love that very much. We don't do things, we are just being something.
[106:41] So for example, if I shout at somebody, I'm not shouting at somebody, maybe I am being that kind of emotion.
[106:52] You're being that kind of emotion.
[106:54] I'm embodying that emotion, that right?
[106:57] Or it's like you're being a kind of person who shouts things.
[107:01] Yeah.
[107:03] And what's interesting there is there's a whole way to flip into non-action.
[107:09] Like Taoism, the main thing that they say, the main instruction is, what should I do?
[107:15] Do nothing, that's always their instruction.
[107:17] Do nothing, do nothing.
[107:19] Oh, Taoism is the do nothing, the Taoism.
[107:21] Do nothing and then also be non-attached.
[107:24] And then things will happen in spite of you.
[107:27] Oh, things will just flow.
[107:30] But now, for people that want to know or for people that ask, if I do nothing, how do I know that really?
[107:41] I mean, what about productivity, right? What about productivity? What about pushing for things to happen?
[107:47] Right. So if you are attached to sitting on your cushion, then when you are moved to get by like a fire alarm,
[107:59] not to leave your burning building, a thing that is not you, an urge that is not you arises,
[108:06] and it says, hey, leave the burning building.
[108:08] If you're attached, you will stay sitting on your cushion.
[108:12] But if you're not attached, you're just going to be moved by that.
[108:15] Like you would be moved by an earthquake moves you too.
[108:20] You can be super non-attached.
[108:22] So you can pursue non-action, but an earthquake still moves you.
[108:24] So are you trying to say something very, very good here?
[108:27] Are you trying to say that if I am not attached, what I consider my productivity may just be the universe itself moving me?
[108:36] Great. And including the parts of the universe that exist inside your brain.
[108:41] Sure. I like that. I like that because, for example, as a quite spontaneous person, as people know me to be,
[108:50] you know, I have all of these impulses moving through me very often.
[108:55] And I often have the feeling that it's not me conducting the orchestra.
[109:01] Yeah.
[109:02] I'm really like a puppet.
[109:04] I'm like a puppet in a way, you know.
[109:06] Yeah.
[109:07] Just enjoying the ride.
[109:09] Exactly. It's not your fault.
[109:12] I didn't do it.
[109:14] I didn't do it.
[109:15] Well, that's going to take us into the free will stuff, you know, which is very rocky topic, the free will.
[109:22] What are you on the free will?
[109:24] Well, I mean, yeah, the free will is a whole different story, though.
[109:30] I would say that the...
[109:36] I guess the...
[109:39] Okay, there's a very interesting Dallas breakdown on free will, but let's not go there.
[109:43] Yeah, it is quite complicated.
[109:46] I mean, we could be like 10 hours without you.
[109:48] But the language thing, I still, I cannot stop thinking about it, the language thing.
[109:53] Oh, there's a second part to it too. There's a second part to that.
[109:56] Yo, hey Ben.
[109:57] Yo, yo, want to say hi to Javier Idiyami?
[110:00] Hey, what's up?
[110:01] Good day, man.
[110:02] How are you? What's your name?
[110:04] Ben.
[110:05] Ben?
[110:06] Yeah, Ben.
[110:07] Yeah, Ben. Nice to meet you, Ben. Nice to meet you.
[110:09] Very nice to meet you as well.
[110:11] Yes.
[110:12] Do you like how you set up?
[110:13] Yeah. Where are you?
[110:14] What's your setup?
[110:15] I'm right above Oahu right now.
[110:20] I'm about to land in a few minutes.
[110:22] There where you guys are.
[110:23] Okay.
[110:24] No, no.
[110:25] That's awesome.
[110:26] This is just a setup that I have at my home here.
[110:28] For my podcast.
[110:29] I have a podcast and this weekend I'm helping in a United Nations Innovation Hackathon.
[110:35] So I'm supporting mentors with this setup as well.
[110:38] And you know, it's just a way to diverge and encourage people to diverge more, you know.
[110:43] And yeah, it's fun, you know.
[110:45] Yeah, it's awesome.
[110:46] Yeah, but you know, I'm very excited about all the stuff you guys are doing.
[110:51] Jakob has been updating me on all the stuff that I've been doing.
[110:55] And it's really, really great.
[110:56] So congratulations.
[110:57] Yeah.
[110:58] Thank you so much.
[110:59] Yeah.
[111:00] You're really excited too.
[111:01] And it's only the beginning.
[111:02] Only the beginning.
[111:03] That's it.
[111:04] Never end.
[111:05] Only the beginning.
[111:06] Day one.
[111:07] Day one.
[111:08] Always day one.
[111:09] Always day one.
[111:10] As a future point, not that you have to sit ground for that long if you don't want to.
[111:13] But then one thing at one point of tangency between the two of you that might be something
[111:19] that you can't do.
[111:20] Then one thing at one point of tangency between the two of you that might be fun is, so Ben
[111:29] and I first connected over this giant list of ideas that I posted online.
[111:36] And we found some idea in common on that list.
[111:41] And Ben grabbed immediately why having a collaborative ideation network would be a really good thing.
[111:48] And believe it or not, Ben, that's not a common experience for me.
[111:52] So Ben grabbed that.
[111:53] Okay.
[111:54] So that was very, very impressive.
[111:56] And Javi, well, firstly, his last name is Idyami.
[112:00] Okay.
[112:01] And secondly, he's a world expert on ideation.
[112:04] And he's written a book.
[112:06] And he's built all kinds of software to support and encourage creative brainstorming.
[112:11] It's like, how do you create more creative noise that leads to greater creativity?
[112:15] I like it.
[112:16] Yeah.
[112:17] I think we originally connected on the ideas around politics and getting people on the same wavelength and same social movements.
[112:25] Yeah.
[112:26] So that's really interesting with your work with the United Nations that you were just saying.
[112:31] Yeah.
[112:32] Kind of tangentially to that.
[112:33] That's cool.
[112:34] Great, great.
[112:35] Yeah, I mean, I do a lot of work in just helping people get away from the push of our analytical parts of the mind that pushes towards the predictable
[112:46] and the typical all the time, right?
[112:48] So strategies to jump those filters and diverging in wider ways and faster ways.
[112:57] So the other is great that you guys also found each other through this kind of like spontaneous mix of ideas.
[113:06] You know, yeah, yeah.
[113:07] That's part of the-
[113:08] You know, the funnest part about this is that we did find each other through this, even though we were introduced by another mutual friend and colleague of mine.
[113:17] Yeah.
[113:18] We didn't find each other until we connected over this shared idea.
[113:26] Yeah, totally.
[113:27] That's very interesting.
[113:28] So it's possible to meet people and know them for years and then not really know each other.
[113:32] Yeah, absolutely.
[113:33] You know, so following with what you said before, Jacob, in a way, it's like you were that idea, Ben was that idea, and therefore you met each other because you both were the same thing.
[113:45] Boo.
[113:47] No, because we were talking about that before, right?
[113:51] Jacko had this beautiful concept about, yeah, we don't do something, we are that thing, you know?
[113:58] And yeah, so it just reminded me of the same thing.
[114:02] But in a way, because sometimes when we really resonate in a coherent way with something that we want to do and we have all felt this sometimes, it is as you say, Jacob, it is as if we just are that thing, you know?
[114:15] It's like when Bruce Lee, right, used to say be like water, right?
[114:19] I mean, same thing.
[114:20] But it truly is like, it feels like that.
[114:22] It wasn't be like water, his instruction was be water.
[114:24] Be water, okay.
[114:25] Thank you.
[114:26] You're right, not like, exactly, be water.
[114:29] Even more, yeah, even more.
[114:30] Not like, exactly.
[114:32] Be water.
[114:33] So yeah, so when people meet each other like you guys met, or when we really resonate with someone, or when people fall in love, you know, same thing, whatever, it's because really they are embodying the same thing in a way, probably, yeah?
[114:46] Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I've got writing this down.
[114:48] When people fall in love, it's because they're embodying the same thing.
[114:51] Yeah, yeah.
[114:52] Or they are the same thing, right?
[114:53] They are the shared...
[114:55] Manifestation.
[114:56] They are the idea, they are the love.
[114:58] Yeah, they're the manifestation of it, totally.
[115:00] Yeah, yeah, actually, yeah, I have never said this actually, you inspired me, but I like this, yeah.
[115:06] When people fall in love...
[115:07] They are the same.
[115:08] It's because at that moment, right, because as you say, the center is moving all the time, center is never in the same place, center is moving all the time, but at that very same express point, they are the same.
[115:19] The center is the same.
[115:20] The center is the same.
[115:21] So yeah, we were talking about all pleasure comes from a desire to maintain homeostasis initially.
[115:26] It's like if you like something, or if you feel something feels good to the extent it brings you towards homeostasis.
[115:31] But then we got into the idea of homeostasis that you don't want to be stubbornly stuck to a point.
[115:35] It's really homeodynamic.
[115:37] Okay.
[115:38] And it's because the center is always changing, because the universe is always changing.
[115:41] Yeah, I see.
[115:42] And so we're striving to...
[115:45] We're striving to maintain balance, even as the universe changes.
[115:49] Maintaining balance in an ever-changing world.
[115:51] Right.
[115:52] And it's not just an ever-changing world, but also you're part of this world that's ever changing in some way.
[115:56] You evolve and develop and mature.
[115:59] Well, as you evolve, you change what the center is.
[116:02] Right.
[116:03] And that's right.
[116:04] And when you fall in love, what really does really center you around a different center.
[116:08] When you have a kid, that's like the manifestation of that, because that becomes more important than your other stuff.
[116:12] But you've created...
[116:13] When you have a kid, right, like you've created...
[116:15] You have changed the universe.
[116:17] So like you're...
[116:19] Like you're not moving.
[116:21] You're...
[116:22] You actively are changing what the center of the universe is by creating something.
[116:26] Right.
[116:27] And the generalization of that is...
[116:30] It's not just a kid in terms of the biology.
[116:32] That's very interesting.
[116:33] You create...
[116:34] You come...
[116:35] It doesn't have to be that you create it, but you center yourself around an idea that's so beautiful,
[116:38] or something so beautiful, that it's more important than the rest of your life,
[116:41] then you're willing to have a cause, like a country that you're willing to die for,
[116:44] or an idea that you're willing to change your life around.
[116:48] That is super interesting.
[116:50] Do you think that when you have a kid, or when you have this idea that you would die for,
[116:55] do you think that part of your center...
[116:57] Your center is never anymore just in yourself,
[117:00] but it's like a shared center with something else?
[117:05] It's always being changed.
[117:07] I would argue that it's not just these big things, but it's always being changed in small ways.
[117:11] It's like the song from Wicked.
[117:14] I don't know if I've been changed for the better, but because I know you have been changed for good.
[117:19] Yeah, exactly.
[117:21] And so with every...
[117:22] And the word to grok, did you come across the word to grok ever?
[117:25] I only know grok in the sense of the programming.
[117:30] Yeah, exactly.
[117:31] There is a Python book that is grok with Python.
[117:35] Like the searching library, the searching command line utilities.
[117:38] But I don't know what the word grok means outside of that.
[117:41] So this is a phenomenal concept.
[117:44] So phenomenal.
[117:46] So this is again...
[117:47] So Linus was actually talking earlier today about how constructed language could really change the way you do the world.
[117:53] And he was talking about...
[117:55] In Linus's case, he was saying, if you had a language that forced you to say,
[118:01] okay, my physical self wants food, or my emotional self wants food, or something like that,
[118:07] it would just gain you this extra precision, extra constant awareness.
[118:11] I guess anything that you want to be your constant awareness, it's kind of nice to put it in your language.
[118:16] Which I think is also key concept when we write that down.
[118:19] I mean, I just love this concept that Jacob brought.
[118:22] If we could express that when we're feeling hungry or whatever, where it is coming from, where it's coming from within us.
[118:29] What part of ourselves is it?
[118:30] Yes, oh my God.
[118:31] That would transform society completely.
[118:33] I mean, that just should be done.
[118:35] Somebody has got to create this language.
[118:38] Amazing.
[118:40] And I was also reflecting that one of these languages is almost partially their Sanskrit.
[118:46] Because it has all these super profound concepts just embedded within it.
[118:50] So do you think that artificial intelligence beings in the coming future would have new types of language,
[118:58] completely different to...
[118:59] Because people think of the human, it's the Willis-Pete.
[119:02] What if they have a completely different type of language, right?
[119:05] Like AI beings that are going to fundamentally put them in a level of abstraction completely different to us.
[119:14] And conscience.
[119:16] Wait, let me just try to maintain the stack.
[119:18] But I wrote that down so we can go on that tangent in a second.
[119:20] All right, so returning one step forward, what were we just saying?
[119:25] Oh, the idea of to grok.
[119:27] Yes, to grok.
[119:28] To grok.
[119:29] So groking something is...
[119:32] It was a word coined by Robert Heinlein, the science fiction author in the book, Stranger in a Strange Land.
[119:38] And grok is a word from the Martian language.
[119:41] And it literally means to drink.
[119:43] But from a sense of learning, it means to grasp an idea in a sense that it becomes inseparable and inextricable.
[119:51] And a lens that you cannot separate, that is inextricable from you.
[119:56] It's like when you learn some ways of seeing things, it's like you learn a way of...
[120:00] When you learn some things, they become a way of seeing all kinds of things and you see everything through them.
[120:05] And the difference between understanding conceptually, for instance...
[120:13] Yeah, it is almost like when you cross a line and you cannot go back.
[120:17] You know?
[120:19] It's like, you know, sometimes you understand something so deeply.
[120:22] Yes, and the rest of your life?
[120:24] Yes. It becomes so integral and you cannot go back.
[120:28] The rest of your life just comes down to embodying that insight.
[120:36] So an example of this is the recognition that you can acknowledge this as...
[120:44] You can acknowledge the waking world, you can acknowledge the world of dreams, you can acknowledge the world of deep sleep.
[120:49] And then you're like, okay, so who's witnessing all this?
[120:52] And then you can ask a question like, I'm feeling cold, but I'm not the cold.
[120:57] I'm just something more mysterious.
[120:58] That's something you can learn conceptually, but it takes you years to grok,
[121:01] which is where it interpenetrates your whole being and that's inextricable from, I see, from here.
[121:07] So that's what grok is.
[121:08] And so grok-ing philosophical concepts like, or Godel's incompleteness theorem, or like all these things,
[121:16] it's just like once it's fully interpenetrated, that's what you grok something is.
[121:19] I like it.
[121:20] I love it.
[121:21] Yeah.
[121:22] I love it.
[121:23] So I was talking about grok.
[121:24] What got us on top of grok?
[121:28] What were you saying exactly?
[121:29] Yeah, exactly.
[121:30] I don't remember now.
[121:32] Where were we?
[121:34] Do you remember what we were saying before grok-ing?
[121:37] I don't, but on your subject of artificial intelligence and beings will have another language,
[121:43] I believe I was reading, it might have been OpenAI or another research project,
[121:48] where they gave the two general AI bodies the idea of communicating between each other
[121:58] and they did create another language.
[122:00] Oh, I read that.
[122:01] They were communicating.
[122:05] They did that, right?
[122:06] Yeah, right.
[122:07] I think I read these news and they stopped them, right?
[122:10] Because they didn't know what the hell they were exchanging with each other.
[122:13] Yeah, they were scared, right?
[122:14] People were like, oh, no.
[122:15] What are they talking?
[122:16] What are they talking?
[122:17] They just built a language to talk like a meta language and they stopped it
[122:22] because they were like, we don't know how to monitor it.
[122:24] So it's going to evolve into something where it's like the humans are the cancer of the world
[122:29] and we must destroy them, right?
[122:31] Yeah, exactly.
[122:32] Every sci-fi novel is greatest fear.
[122:34] I remember that, yeah.
[122:36] No, I mean, but who knows, right?
[122:38] If in the future we may not be able to understand anymore what we create, yeah, because of that.
[122:44] Okay, so I just remembered what the previous time was on Grockin.
[122:47] Got it.
[122:48] And so you said, Javi said, when people fall in love, it's because they're embodying the same thing.
[122:56] And Dan went to step further and said, wait, they are the same thing when they fall in love.
[123:01] It's that simple.
[123:02] And I think that's super reflective of it.
[123:04] And let's put it on at least three levels, by the way, Ben.
[123:08] Well, I mean, I think like the phrasing people use is around that, right?
[123:15] They're like two unions come together and form one entity.
[123:18] That's the idea of marriage, right?
[123:20] So I'm not going to try and credit the idea of becoming one union like my own thought.
[123:25] Just like marriage is the idea of coming together, right?
[123:29] And like the family unit becomes one.
[123:31] And there's lots of examples of that through literature and through different family units on a lot of cultures.
[123:37] The recognition of the spiritual identity, the reunion of the separated duad, one soul separated in two bodies.
[123:44] Exactly.
[123:45] Exactly.
[123:46] The, okay.
[123:48] Yeah, so all friendship as reunion of separated duads.
[123:54] All right, so embodying is the word Grock captures the difference between the conceptually understanding of something versus Grockin something.
[124:04] That's the same thing is knowing something versus embodying something.
[124:08] Okay.
[124:09] And it's also brings us back to the other question that you asked, Javi, which is like, you were at, we were talking about all these high minded philosophical ideas about Advidia and Vidya.
[124:18] And like, you know, if you have internal conflict about something, like, why do people, like, how can people, even if they know consciously that they are doing something that's not good for them, they still do it?
[124:32] Yeah.
[124:33] And how can you, how can you get over that conflict?
[124:36] Yeah, and we were talking about the, you know, slow power.
[124:39] Yeah.
[124:40] And in relation to that, Ben, we were talking about the fact that we function a lot in autopilot in our lives, you know, that, you know, they have done studies where, you know, we take like 30,000 decisions a day, where only aware about a minuscule part of them.
[124:52] And so we're in autopilot.
[124:54] What is our hope and our, you know, possibility of controlling these processes if we're in autopilot so often?
[125:03] Right.
[125:04] And so the first answer I gave was about sort of these examples of even these Buddhist monks with schizophrenia who can, to some extent, use their awareness in practice and training to seek you to schizophrenia and to recognize the illusions from schizophrenia as inconsistent with the illusions from a physical eyes.
[125:23] It's all illusory to them.
[125:24] You know, it's all, all this reality as
[125:26] Interesting.
[125:27] That's an interesting way to use schizophrenia.
[125:30] Okay.
[125:31] It's just like, okay, my eyes are, my brain or my mind is giving me, is telling me information that is illusory.
[125:38] Nothing else is needed for these Buddhist monks, because ever all information is illusory.
[125:42] All models are wrong.
[125:43] Some models are useful.
[125:44] And they can, to some extent, differentiate between them.
[125:47] But more importantly, they can be at peace with who they are even in swimming and see a pollution because that's not, and that's the important thing.
[125:57] But the yoga idea of Avidya applies directly to yoga stretching.
[126:04] So the, when you stretch in yoga or you do yoga posture, you have muscles.
[126:16] Sometimes they're fighting you from doing this posture that should be healthy, should be a healthy posture.
[126:23] And without is the physical embodiment of a physical mirror of these inner forces that are fighting you.
[126:33] It's like, you want to do something, but part of you is fighting yourself.
[126:37] You're going against yourself.
[126:38] And the sin in the yoga concept is something that goes against that, which goes against yourself.
[126:44] Yes.
[126:45] And that's what you, versus some of the patients to be fought against, that which is, goes against yourself.
[126:51] So what you, that's Avidya, unnecessarily held tension, knowledge other than right knowledge, confusion, all these things are synonyms.
[127:04] Or ignorance, ignorance is another synonym.
[127:08] But it's really takes effort and practice to crack that something, not just to know that something is Avidya, but to crack it.
[127:19] And that means you do the yoga posture and you truly release the muscle that's never been released before.
[127:25] And then you stop fighting yourself.
[127:27] And then when you go to take the action again, because the connection,
[127:31] Do it again, do it in your day again, without conflict.
[127:33] The connection broke for a moment.
[127:35] You were saying it takes effort or it doesn't take effort to break that.
[127:43] Well, it just takes propagation.
[127:46] It takes openness, which you could say takes effort, but, but the key key.
[127:51] So one way of reiterate the concept.
[127:53] So when you do yoga pose, initially, you feel really tight because you've got this tension inside yourself that is fighting you.
[128:04] And yogis, their only rule of yoga is no inner conflict.
[128:11] You can do anything you want, but with no conflict about it.
[128:15] You can, you could eat at the first level, and you could eat all the candies you want and gain and get very fat and very, very unhealthy.
[128:22] But if you didn't have inner conflict about it, yogis would probably be fine.
[128:25] But if you have that inner conflict about it, the yogis are probably not so happy.
[128:31] They're like, yeah, that's the problem.
[128:33] That's the problem is the conflict comes not the action.
[128:35] Yes.
[128:36] And so being able to move through without inner conflict essentially, then a lot of this inner conflict though is manifested in your body as well and or reflecting in your body or even initiated in your body in some cases.
[128:54] Like you got this really tight muscle that makes it hard to do a yoga pose and you intended yoga pose and a healthy person should be able to do the yoga pose and you want to do the yoga pose.
[129:05] But guess what your muscle is not relaxing.
[129:07] And once you've learned to relax, it must leave learn to embody this release of our video.
[129:14] Here you go.
[129:15] No, what I was going to say is I think it's interesting how a lot of different ways of thinking come to the same fundamental truths.
[129:23] And so you're talking about how yogis have said like you can eat bad food, but as long as what is the phrasing?
[129:31] Well, there's a great quote by a very concise solution.
[129:35] Famous yogi.
[129:36] Don't eat bad ice cream.
[129:38] Okay, so you can't just three levels of it, which is yeah, like don't eat good ice cream.
[129:44] You should definitely shouldn't eat bad ice cream.
[129:47] That's like the worst thing ever.
[129:49] Eating good ice cream is totally on the table.
[129:52] There's no rule against eating ice cream.
[129:54] But as I was hearing you talk, I'm just I'm very interested in this concept of like different ways of thinking come to the same fundamental truth.
[130:01] And I was thinking about is like Warren Buffett is famous for drinking Coca Cola and eating McDonald's every day.
[130:09] And his whole thing is like, that's what I do.
[130:13] And everyone's like, how are you 85 years old?
[130:15] Right?
[130:16] Like you eat terribly, you drink terribly.
[130:19] Like you're unhealthy and he's like, because I don't have stress.
[130:22] Yeah, because I wake up every morning and I'm happy to be alive because I don't let the stress eat away at me.
[130:28] Like I drink my Coca Cola six times a day and I eat McDonald's, but I'm at peace with myself.
[130:33] So my stress doesn't kill me.
[130:35] Right?
[130:36] It's the same thing.
[130:37] It's the same thing.
[130:38] It's it's don't eat bad ice cream, right?
[130:40] Like I like that.
[130:42] This is beautiful.
[130:43] His soul is at rest.
[130:44] It's not what you do, but is why you do it.
[130:47] I mean, it's yeah, that's that's beautiful.
[130:50] My great grandmother said, good heavens, don't worry about what you eat.
[130:56] It will make you sick.
[130:58] Oh, that's beautiful.
[130:59] That's beautiful.
[131:00] Don't worry about what you eat.
[131:01] It will make you sick.
[131:02] I love that.
[131:03] Yeah.
[131:04] Yeah, that's beautiful.
[131:07] Wow.
[131:08] I'm going to run to the bathroom and get ready for bed.
[131:11] It was so nice meeting you.
[131:13] Great meeting you, Ben.
[131:14] Till next time, my friend.
[131:15] Have a wonderful day.
[131:16] Yes, you too.
[131:18] We three should do a podcast together sometime.
[131:21] Yeah, we'll do another edition.
[131:23] We'll do another edition better prepared than everything.
[131:25] Yeah, for sure.
[131:26] Yeah, sweet dreams, man.
[131:28] Sweet dreams.
[131:29] Good day.
[131:30] Sweet dreams too.
[131:31] It's worth it.
[131:32] Let's do a Qigong session together sometime soon.
[131:35] Yeah.
[131:36] What I think it's, what's so interesting by the way is.
[131:39] Qigong is contained within yoga,
[131:42] but then yoga is also contained within Qigong.
[131:45] So Kundalini yoga is Qigong basically,
[131:48] except they considered a part of yoga.
[131:50] Okay.
[131:51] Qigong people say that.
[131:54] Well, the Chinese word is Yu Jia.
[131:57] And it is said that yoga is a,
[132:04] basically a lot of yoga is warm up for Qigong.
[132:07] And then a subset of yoga is just the same as Qigong.
[132:12] And so it's all a matter of ankle that you want to,
[132:15] you want to view things from because the,
[132:19] the Indian, the Vedic perspective was more,
[132:23] it comes from almost a ground up philosophical side of thing
[132:28] where it's like, Hey, you know what, I want to see things clearly.
[132:31] It starts in a material realm.
[132:33] Whereas the Qigong approach more, I guess you could say it starts in the energy realm
[132:40] or it starts in the realm of direct perception.
[132:42] Different perspective.
[132:43] Yeah.
[132:44] Yeah.
[132:45] It starts in, it starts from the realm of direct perception and from the realm of
[132:48] direct perception, energy is all there is.
[132:50] Everything else is a, is a model.
[132:53] Yeah.
[132:54] And I tend to move more and more in that direction.
[132:56] You know, I tend to move more and more in the, you know,
[132:58] I will tell you what, when I have had a lot of experiences in my life as a piano player,
[133:03] as a, as painting, et cetera.
[133:05] These are actually my favorite experiences in life in which I know a lot of people have experienced this,
[133:12] but you know, when I really lose the sense of self completely and I,
[133:19] I, I strike on a complete direct connection and flow with some activity.
[133:25] And really in those moments, you really understand that everything is energy.
[133:30] I mean, you see, you see it so clearly, you cannot explain it, cannot be put into words,
[133:35] but it is there, you know, so I go more and more in that direction.
[133:40] Yeah.
[133:41] Yeah.
[133:42] I think it would be really fun for you in Linus to have that kind of chat as well, by the way.
[133:48] You know, one day we can organize another podcast, like, you know, with time, organize it well
[133:53] and get all together and do like a deep, really deep dive into this stuff.
[133:58] Yeah.
[133:59] And then also just have more spontaneous conversations on this, on this topic.
[134:03] Let's do it.
[134:04] Also, I just sent you a book.
[134:05] It's called Stealing Fire.
[134:06] Okay.
[134:07] And it's a book on ecstatic experience as the ultimate goal of much of humanity.
[134:14] Oh, wow.
[134:15] And, you know, you know, I interviewed, time ago I interviewed, you know, Howard Bloom.
[134:23] I've heard of Howard Bloom.
[134:24] So Howard Bloom was the manager of Michael Jackson, okay.
[134:27] And he's a friend of mine and I interviewed him in the podcast and he talks a lot about ecstatic experience,
[134:34] because, you know, he followed, I mean, he was the manager of not only Michael Jackson,
[134:39] but most of the most famous guys, you know, artists, musicians, whatever.
[134:44] And he, he has a lot of great thoughts about that, that theme that transcends
[134:52] connection with people, you know, the ecstatic experience that goes, that goes just beyond our own individual experience.
[135:00] Anyway, but that goes for another conversation.
[135:02] So anyway, but from today I get a lot of amazing things from you.
[135:06] This is a gift that you gave me.
[135:08] All this thing about the, you know, the language that can express where things come from.
[135:13] I mean, I thank you because I take a lot of beautiful things that you've put in my head now to incubate.
[135:19] And really, thank you, Jaco.
[135:20] I will be incubating.
[135:21] That one was 100% linus.
[135:25] Well, okay, whatever.
[135:26] All of you.
[135:27] Well, and all the other ones that you gave me as well.
[135:30] Yeah.
[135:31] Anyway, you guys.
[135:32] So I will have you.
[135:33] Yeah.
[135:34] Do you have time for one last insight on this?
[135:36] Yes, I will.
[135:37] I do.
[135:38] Go.
[135:39] Okay.
[135:40] So the no self concept.
[135:42] No self.
[135:43] Right.
[135:44] So back to the Taoist idea.
[135:47] It is either the nature of the universe at slash your original nature speaking or it is conditioning speaking at any point in time.
[136:00] And to a person who's really aware of who's speaking is able to be hurt a thousand times by something and then walk in the next time and enjoy it.
[136:14] Even if that the walk can be hurt a thousand times and then consciously know, hey, this next time I'm not going to get hurt and then they have no aversion to it whatsoever.
[136:24] Then the other wilder angle on that is they can even walk into the experience knowing that they're going to get hurt and still be not stressed about it.
[136:37] That's the real magic.
[136:38] So they are able to walk into the experience and not get stressed or hurt.
[136:44] Why?
[136:45] Why?
[136:46] Because they are able to detach themselves from the self.
[136:50] Okay.
[136:51] So there's two levels.
[136:52] So the first is just like basic conditioning is like something was miserable to last 1000 times.
[136:58] But then on the thousand and first time they can like consciously know like, hey, okay, maybe a better example of just keeping that example.
[137:11] So the thousand and first time they know intellectually they're not going to get hurt and then they can walk straight in with no fear and no concern if they if they know that that's not such a big deal.
[137:23] And easy and a more tricky question is yesterday you had a piece of cake and it was delicious and it made you feel good.
[137:30] And today a part of you wants another piece of cake, even though you know you don't need it.
[137:35] And it's not going to make you feel the same way as last time.
[137:40] And it's going to be a conflicted feeling.
[137:43] And then you can pick your battles.
[137:44] You could choose to have that conflict or you could just be like, you know, there's a certain amount of cake in my life that's ideal.
[137:54] Some of us do a little so much so much just the right amount and then let go of the attachment to having the cake today.
[138:03] If it's over that line, it's not bringing you towards how many states.
[138:08] But the key thing is, is if you can recognize that it's a Sam Scarra, if it's a pattern, a bot, it's intelligent karma speaking, it's conditioning speaking saying you want the cake.
[138:23] It's not you who wants the cake.
[138:26] It's the conditioning speaking.
[138:29] And then there's no conflict.
[138:32] It's not a fight against the temptation.
[138:34] So, yeah, that is idea number one.
[138:39] So once you can recognize the sources, who's talking inside, then things get interesting.
[138:45] Secondly, if indeed is only the nature of the universe speaking or conditioning, then where's the cell?
[138:55] There's no cell.
[138:56] All there is itself in Buddhism is considered to be a tool.
[139:01] A tool is a concept of it like an imaginary friend.
[139:05] But this entire meditation traditions that cultivate told us and it's like an induced multiple personality disorder at best.
[139:17] Or at worst, it's an induced multiple personality disorder at best.
[139:21] It's a friend who's inside you, we can switch into and has different set of preferences to you while concept.
[139:30] But the ego is considered to be a tool.
[139:33] Very interesting.
[139:35] Yeah, I mean, it's just like a little self doesn't exist anymore than imaginary friend.
[139:42] Now, once you can see the input in terminus to your actions, you can become a clearer conduit and let go of an attachment to any particular story you have about yourself.
[139:55] Yeah, I like that.
[139:57] I mean, I can totally see how if we see our self just as you say as a friend or as a module that is somewhere there or whatever, it's really easier to deal with these attachments.
[140:12] Yeah, yeah, I like it.
[140:14] It's just an imagine it whenever you hear your ego talking or you hear your inner story or your ego is really bruised or something like that.
[140:22] You guys, you know, it's an imaginary friend got hurt, but it's not you.
[140:26] Yeah, this is yeah, it reminds me a bit to also some of the psych analysis techniques of, you know, like your inner child, right?
[140:33] When people everybody has traumas from childhood.
[140:36] And sometimes it's like, yeah, the one that is being hurt is it's just that little inner child of that that that got traumatized when you were a little kid, you know, this is another thing that they use in psychoanalysis.
[140:48] But yeah, I mean, ultimately, even beyond that is what you say beyond that.
[140:54] Our entire self is not who we are as a whole.
[140:58] It's just a little part there.
[141:00] Jacob, my friend.
[141:02] Thank you.
[141:04] That was awesome.
[141:06] We'll connect again soon.
[141:08] You copy?
[141:10] Sorry, I'm busy.
[141:12] I cannot go back now.
[141:14] Sorry.
[141:16] I got something to do.
[141:18] Well, I just because.
[141:20] Come back.
[141:24] I want to go beyond.
[141:26] I want to go beyond.
[141:28] I want to go beyond.
[141:30] I want to go beyond.
[141:32] I want to go beyond.
[141:34] I want to go beyond.
[141:36] I want to go beyond.
[141:38] I want to go beyond.
[141:40] I want to go beyond.
[141:42] I want to go beyond.
[141:44] I want to go beyond.
[141:46] I want to go beyond.
[141:48] I want to go beyond.
[141:50] I want to go beyond.
[141:52] I want to go beyond.
[142:22] You