Daniel Schmachtenberger is a philosopher and founding member of The Consilience Project. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Daniel's Website: https://civilizationemerging.com/
The Consilience Project: https://consilienceproject.org/

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:31 - Aliens and UFOs
20:15 - Collective intelligence of human civilization
28:12 - Consciousness
39:33 - How much computation does the human brain perform?
43:12 - Humans vs ants
50:30 - Humans are apex predators
57:34 - Girard's Mimetic Theory of Desire
1:17:31 - We can never completely understand reality
1:20:54 - Self-terminating systems
1:31:18 - Catastrophic risk
2:01:30 - Adding more love to the world
2:28:55 - How to build a better world
2:46:07 - Meaning of life
2:53:49 - Death
2:59:29 - The role of government in society
3:16:54 - Exponential growth of technology
4:02:35 - Lessons from my father
4:08:11 - Even suffering is filled with beauty

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The following is a conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger, a founding member of the Consilience Project that is aimed at improving public sense-making and dialogue.

He's interested in understanding how we humans can be the best version of ourselves as individuals and as collectives at all scales.

Quick mention of our sponsors, Ground News, NetSuite, 4 Sigmatic, Magic Spoon, and BetterHelp.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that I got a chance to talk to Daniel on and off the mic for a couple of days.

We took a long walk the day before our conversation.

I really enjoyed meeting him, just on a basic human level.

We talked about the world around us with words that carried hope for us individual ants actually contributing something of value to the colony.

These conversations are the reasons I love human beings, our insatiable striving to lessen the suffering in the world.

But more than that, there's a simple magic to 2 strangers meeting for the first time and sharing ideas, becoming fast friends and creating something that is far greater than the sum of our parts.

I've gotten to experience some of that same magic here in Austin with a few new friends and in random bars in my travels across this country, where a conversation leaves me with a big stupid smile on my face and a new appreciation of this too short, too beautiful life.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast and here is my conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger.

If aliens were observing Earth through the entire history, just watching us, and we're tasked with summarizing what happened until now,

What do you think they would write up in that summary?

Like in Hitchhiker's Guide, there's I think like a paragraph or a couple sentences.

How would you summarize, sorry, how would the aliens summarize do you think all of human civilization?

Because if they watched, well, I mean, first, I have no idea if their senses are even attuned to similar stuff to what our senses are attuned to or what the nature of their consciousness is like relative to ours.

So let's assume that they're kind of like us, just technologically more advanced to get here from wherever they are.

That's the first kind of constraint on the thought experiment.

And then if they've watched throughout all of history, they saw the burning of Alexandria, they saw that 2,000 years ago in Greece, we were producing things like clocks, the Antikythera Mechanism, and then that technology got lost.

They saw that there wasn't just a steady dialectic of progress.

So every once in a while, there's a giant fire that destroys a lot of things.

There's a giant like commotion that destroys a lot of things.

And so as they're looking at us now as we move past the nuclear weapons age into the full globalization, Anthropocene, exponential tech age, still making our decisions relatively similarly to how we did in the Stone Age as far as rivalry game theory type stuff.

I think they would think that this is probably most likely 1 of the planets that is not going to make it to being intergalactic because we blow ourselves up in the technological adolescence.

And if we are going to, we're going to need some major progress rapidly in the social technologies that can guide and bind and direct the physical technologies so that we are safe vessels for the amount of power we're getting.

Actually, Hitchhiker's Guide has an estimation about how much of a risk this particular thing poses to the rest of the galaxy and I think, I forget what it was, I think it was medium or low.

So their estimation would be that this species of ant-like creatures is not going to survive long.

There's ups and downs in terms of technological innovation.

The fundamental nature of their behavior from a game theory perspective hasn't really changed.

They have not learned in any fundamental way how to control, properly incentivize, or properly do the mechanism design of games to ensure long-term survival.

Do you think there is, in a more, slightly more serious question, do you think there's some number, or perhaps a very, very large number of intelligent alien civilizations out there?

I know, I think Postrom had a new article not that long ago on why that might not be the case, that the Drake equation might not be the kind of in story on it, but when I look at the total number of Kepler planets, just that we're aware of just galactically, and also like when those life forms were discovered in Mono Lake that didn't have the same 6 primary atoms, I think it had arsenic replacing phosphorus as 1 of the primary aspects of its energy metabolism.

We get to think about the building blocks might be more different.

So the physical constraints, even that the planets have to have might be more different.

It seems really unlikely, not to mention interesting things that we've observed that are still unexplained.

As you've had guests on your show discussing Tic Tac and.

What do you make sense of the rich human psychology of there being hundreds of thousands, probably millions of witnesses of UFOs of different kinds on Earth, most of which I presume are conjured up by the human mind through the perceptual system.

Some number might be reflective of actual physical objects, whether it's drones or testing military technology that's secret or otherworldly technology.

Because it's gained quite a bit of popularity recently.

That's us humans being hopeful and dreaming of otherworldly creatures as a way to escape the dreariness of the human condition.

But In another sense, it really could be something truly exciting that science should turn its eye towards.

Speaking of turning eye towards, this is 1 of those super fascinating, actually super consequential possibly, topics that I wish I had more time to study and just haven't allocated So I I don't have firm beliefs on this because I haven't got to study it as much as I want So what I'm gonna say comes from a superficial assessment While we know there are plenty of things that people thought of as UFO sightings that we can fully write off We have other better explanations for them what we're interested in is the ones that we don't have better explanations for and then not just immediately jumping to a theory of what it is, but holding it as unidentified and being curious and earnest.

I think the Tic Tac 1 is quite interesting and made it in major media recently, but I don't know if you ever saw the Disclosure Project.

A guy named Stephen Greer organized a bunch of mostly US military and some commercial flight, people who had direct observation and classified information, disclosing it at a CNN briefing.

And so you saw high-ranking generals, admirals, fighter pilots all describing things that they saw on radar with visual, with their own eyes or cameras, and also describing some phenomena that had some consistency across different people.

And I find this interesting enough that I think it would be silly to just dismiss it.

And specifically, like we can ask the question, how much of it is natural phenomena, ball lightning or something like that.

And this is why I'm more interested in what fighter pilots and astronauts and people who are trained in being able to identify flying objects and atmospheric phenomena have to say about it.

I think the thing, then you could say, well, are they more advanced military craft?

The interesting thing that a number of them describe is something that's kind of like right angles at speed, or if not right angles, acute angles at speed, but something that looks like a different relationship to inertia than physics makes sense for us.

I don't think that there are any human technologies that are doing that even in really deep underground black projects.

Now 1 could say, okay, well, could it be a hologram?

What would it show up on radar if radar is also seeing it?

I mean, and for that to be a massive coordinated PSYOP is as interesting and ridiculous in a way as the idea that it's UFOs from some extra planetary source.

So it's up there on the interesting topics.

To me, if it is at all alien technology, it is the dumbest version of alien technology.

It's so far away, it's like the old, old crappy VHS tapes of alien technology.

These are like crappy drones that just floated or even like space, to the level of like space junk.

Because it is so close to our human technology.

We talk about it moves in ways that's unlike what we understand about physics, but it still has very similar kind of geometric notions and something that we humans can perceive with our eyes, all those kinds of things.

I feel like alien technology most likely would be something that we would not be able to perceive.

Not because they're hiding, but because it's so far advanced that it would be much, it would be beyond the cognitive capabilities of us humans.

Just as you were saying, as per your answer for aliens summarizing Earth, the starting assumption is they have similar perception systems, they have similar cognitive capabilities, and that very well may not be the case.

aliens for just a little longer, because I think it's a good transition

in talking about governments and human societies.

Do you think if a US government or any government was in possession of an alien spacecraft or of information related to alien spacecraft, they would have the capacity structurally, would they have the processes, would they be able to communicate that to the public effectively, or would they keep it secret in a room and do nothing with it?

Both of to try to preserve military secrets but also because of the incompetence that's inherent to bureaucracies or either.

Well we can certainly see when certain things become declassified 25 or 50 years later that there were things that the public might have wanted to know that were kept secret for a very long time for reasons of at least supposedly national security, which is also a nice source of plausible deniability for people covering their ass for doing things that would be problematic and other purposes.

There's a scientist at Stanford who supposedly got some material that was recovered from Area 51 type area, did analysis on it using, I believe, electron microscopy and a couple other methods and came to the idea that it was a nanotech alloy that was something we didn't currently have the ability to do, was not naturally occurring.

And again, like I said, I'm not going to stand behind any of these because I haven't done the level of study to have high confidence.

I think what you said also about would it be super low-tech alien craft, like would they necessarily move their atoms around in space?

Or might they do something more interesting than that?

Might they be able to have a different relationship to the concept of space or information or consciousness?

1 of the things that the craft supposedly do is not only accelerate and turn in a way that looks non-inertial but also disappear.

So there's a question as to, like the 2 are not necessarily mutually exclusive and it could be possible to, some people run a hypothesis, that they create intentional amounts of exposure as an invitation of a particular kind.

We tend to assume, like SETI, that's listening out for aliens out there.

I've just been recently reading more and more about gravitational waves, and you have orbiting black holes

For fun at night when I lay in bed, I think about what it would be like to ride those waves when they, not the low magnitude they are as when they reach Earth, but get closer to the black holes, because it would basically be shrinking and expanding us in all dimensions, including time.

So it's actually ripples through space-time that they generate.

Travels at a speed, which is a very weird thing to say when you're morphing space-time.

You could argue it's faster than the speed of light.

So if you're able to communicate by, to summon enough energy to generate black holes and to force them to orbit each other, why not travel as the ripples in space-time, whatever the hell that means, somehow combined with wormholes.

So if you're able to communicate through, like we don't think of gravitational waves as something you can communicate with because the radio will have to be a very large size and very dense, but perhaps that's it.

And that would explain, we wouldn't even be able to make sense of that, of the physics that results in an alien species that's able to control gravity at that scale.

I think you just jumped up the Kardashev scale so far.

You're not just harnessing the power of a star, but harnessing the power of mutually rotating black holes.

That's way above my physics pay grade to think about, including even non-rotating black hole versions of transwarp travel.

I think, you know, you can talk with Eric more about that.

I think he has better ideas on it than I do.

My hope for the future of humanity mostly does not rest in the near term on our ability to get to other habitable planets in time.

And even more than that, in the list of possible solutions of how to improve human civilization, orbiting black holes is not on the first page for you.

Okay, I bet you did not expect us to start this conversation here.

I am excited on a much smaller scale of Mars, Europa, or Titan, Venus potentially having very bacteria-like life forms.

Just on a small human level, it's a little bit scary, but mostly really exciting that there might be life elsewhere.

In the volcanoes, in the oceans, all around us, teeming, having little societies, and whether there's properties about that kind of life that's somehow different than ours.

I don't know what would be more exciting if those colonies of single-cell type organisms, what would be more exciting, if they're different or if they're the same?

If they're the same, that means through the rest of the universe, there's life forms like us, something like us everywhere.

If they're different, that's also really exciting because there's life forms everywhere that are not like us.

It's both scary and exciting no matter what, right?

The idea that they could be very different is philosophically very interesting for us to open our aperture on what life and consciousness and self-replicating possibilities could look like.

The question on are they different or the same, obviously there's lots of life here that is the same in some ways and different in other ways.

When you take the thing that we call an invasive species is something that's still pretty the same hydrocarbon based thing, but co-evolved with co-selective pressures in a certain environment, we move it to another environment, it might be devastating to that whole ecosystem because it's just different enough that it messes up the self-stabilizing dynamics of that ecosystem.

So the question of, are they, would they be different in ways where we could still figure out a way to inhabit a biosphere together?

Or fundamentally not, fundamentally the nature of how they operate and the nature of how we operate would be incommensurable is a deep question.

Well, we offline talked about mimetic theory, right?

It seems like if there were sufficiently different where we would not even, we can coexist on different planes, it seems like a good thing.

If we're close enough together to where we'd be competing, then you're getting into the world of viruses and pathogens and all those kinds of things to where we would, 1 of us would die off quickly through basically mass murder without

If we just had a self-replicating, single-celled kind of creature that happened to not work well for the hydrocarbon life that was here that got introduced because it either output something that was toxic or utilized up the same resource too quickly and it just replicated faster and mutated faster.

That it wouldn't be a memetic theory, conflict theory kind of harm.

It would just be a von Neumann machine, a self-replicating machine that was fundamentally incompatible with these kinds of self-replicating systems with faster OODA loops.

For 1 final time, putting your alien slash God hat on, and you look at human civilization, do you think about the 7.8 billion people on Earth as individual little creatures, individual little organisms, or do you think of us as 1 organism with a collective intelligence?

What's the proper framework through which to analyze it, again, as an alien?

So that I know where you're coming from, would you have asked the question the same way before the Industrial Revolution, before the Agricultural Revolution, when there were half a billion people and no telecommunications connecting them?

I would indeed ask the question the same way, but I would be less confident about your conclusions.

It would be an actually more interesting way to ask the question at that time, but I would nevertheless ask it the same way, yes.

Well, let's go back further and smaller then.

Rather than just a single human or the entire human species, let's look at a relatively isolated tribe.

In the relatively isolated, probably sub-Dunbar number, sub-150 people tribe, do I look at that as 1 entity where evolution is selecting for it based on group selection, or do I think of it as 150 individuals that are interacting in some way?

Well, could those individuals exist without the group?

The evolutionary adaptiveness of humans was involved critically group selection and individual humans alone trying to figure out stone tools and protection and whatever aren't what was selected for.

And so I think the or is the wrong frame.

I think it's individuals are affecting the group that they're a part of, they're also dependent upon and being affected by the group that they're a part of.

And so this now starts to get in deep into political theories also, which is theories that orient towards the collective at different scales, whether a tribal scale or an empire or a nation state or something, and ones that orient towards the individual liberalism and stuff like that.

And I think there's very obvious failure modes on both sides.

And so the relationship between them is more interesting to me than either of them.

The relationship between the individual and the collective and the question around how to have a virtuous process between those.

So a good social system would be 1 where the organism of the individual and the organism of the group of individuals is they're both synergistic to each other.

So what is best for the individuals and what's best for the whole is aligned.

They're not, it's a matter of degrees, I suppose, but what defines a human more?

The social network within which they've been brought up, through which they've developed their intelligence, or is it their own sovereign individual self?

Like what's your intuition of how much, not just for evolutionary survival, but as intellectual beings, how much do we need others for our development?

Yeah, I think we have a weird sense of this today relative to most previous periods of Sapien history.

I think the vast majority of Sapien history is tribal, like depending upon your early human model, 2 or 300,000 years of Homo sapiens in little tribes, where they depended upon that tribe for survival and excommunication from the tribe was fatal.

I think they, and our whole evolutionary genetic history is in that environment.

And the amount of time we've been out of it is relatively so tiny.

And then we still depended upon extended families and local communities more.

And the big kind of giant market complex where I can provide something to the market to get money, to be able to get other things from the market where it seems like I don't need anyone.

It's almost like disintermediating our sense of need even though your and my ability to talk to each other using these mics and the phones that we coordinated on took millions of people over 6 continents to be able to run the supply chains that made all the stuff that we depend on but we don't notice that we depend upon them.

If you take a baby, obviously you didn't even get to a baby without a mom.

Without 2 parents at minimum and they depended upon other people.

But if we take that baby and we put it out in the wild, it obviously dies.

So if we let it grow up for a little while, the minimum amount of time where it starts to have some autonomy and then we put it out in the wild.

And it doesn't learn the small motor articulation that we learn.

It doesn't learn the type of consciousness that we end up having that is socialized.

So I think we take for granted how much conditioning affects us.

Is it possible that it affects basically 99.9 or maybe the whole thing.

The whole thing is the connection between us humans and that we're no better than apes without our human connections.

Because thinking of it that way forces us to think very differently about human society and how to progress forward.

I just have to object to the no better than apes, because better here, I think you mean a specific thing, which means have capacities that are fundamentally different than.

And I think the idea of humans as better than nature in some kind of ethical sense ends up having heaps of problems.

We'll table that, we can come back to it.

But when we say what is unique about homo sapien capacity relative to the other animals we currently inhabit the biosphere with?

And I'm saying it that way because there were other early hominids that had some of these capacities, We believe.

Our tool creation and our language creation and our coordination are all kind of the results of a certain type of capacity for abstraction.

And other animals will use tools, but they don't evolve the tools they use.

They keep using the same types of tools that they basically can find.

So a chimp will notice that a rock can cut a vine that it wants to, and it'll even notice that a sharper rock will cut it better, and experientially, it'll use the sharper rock.

And if you even give it a knife, it'll probably use the knife because it's experiencing the effectiveness.

But it doesn't make stone tools because that requires understanding why 1 is sharper than the other.

What is the abstract principle called sharpness to then be able to invent a sharper thing?

That same abstraction makes language and the ability for abstract representation, which makes the ability to coordinate in a more advanced set of ways.

So I do think our ability to coordinate with each other is pretty fundamental to the selection of what we are as a species.

I wonder if that coordination, that connection, is actually the thing that gives birth to consciousness, that gives birth to, well, let's start with self-awareness.

You know, I suppose there's experiments that show that there's other mammals that have a very crude theory of mind.

Not sure, maybe dogs, something like that.

But actually, dogs probably has to do with that they co-evolved with humans.

See, it'd be interesting if that theory of mind is what leads to consciousness in the way we think about it.

Is the richness of the subjective experience that is consciousness.

I have a inkling sense that that only exists because we're social creatures.

That doesn't come with the hardware and the software in the beginning.

That's learned as an effective tool for communication almost.

I think we think that consciousness is fundamental.

the idea that the illusion of consciousness is consciousness, that

it is just a facade we use to help us construct theories of mind.

You almost put yourself in the world as a subjective being and that experience, you want to richly experience it as an individual person so that I could empathize with your experience.

I find that notion compelling, mostly because it allows you to then create robots that become conscious not by being quote unquote conscious, but by just learning to fake it till they make it.

Present a facade of consciousness with the task of making that facade very convincing to us humans, and thereby it will become conscious.

I have a sense that in some way that will make them conscious if they're sufficiently convincing to humans.

Is there some element of that that you find convincing?

This is a much harder set of questions and deep end of the pool than starting with the aliens was.

This is not the trajectory I was expecting, nor you, but let us walk a while.

We can walk a while, and I don't think we will do it justice.

So what do we mean by consciousness versus conscious self-reflective awareness?

What do we mean by awareness, qualia, theory of mind?

There's a lot of terms that we think of as slightly different things and subjectivity, first person.

I don't remember exactly the quote, but I remember when reading when Sam Harris wrote the book Free Will and then Dennett critiqued it.

And then there was some writing back and forth between the 2 because normally they're on the same side of kind of arguing for critical thinking and logical fallacies and philosophy of science against supernatural ideas.

And here, Dennett believed there is something like free will.

He is a determinist compatibilist, but no consciousness and radical limitivist.

And Sam was saying, no, there is consciousness, but there's no free will.

And that's like the most fundamental kinds of axiomatic senses they disagreed on, but neither of them could say it was because the other 1 didn't understand the philosophy of science or logical fallacies.

And at the end, if I remember correctly, Sam said something that I thought was quite insightful, which was to the effect of, it seems it because they weren't making any progress in shared understanding.

It seems that we simply have different intuitions about this.

And what you could see was that what the words meant, right, at the level of symbol grounding might be quite different.

1 of them might have had deeply different enough life experiences that what is being referenced and then also different associations of what the words mean.

This is why when trying to address these things, Charles Sanders Peirce said, "'The first philosophy has to be semiotics, "'because if you don't get semiotics right, "'we end up importing different ideas and bad ideas right into the nature of the language that we're using.

And then it's very hard to do epistemology or ontology together.

So I'm saying this to say why I don't think we're gonna get very far is I think we would have to go very slowly in terms of defining what we mean by words and fundamental concepts.

Well, and also allowing our minds to drift together for

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Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction | Lex Fridman Podcast #191