Mark Vernon

00:00:00 Intro: Mark's journey from undergrad physics to psychology, philosophy, and theology.

00:05:17 Philosophy: "Who you are is directly related to what you know".

00:06:25 The psychology of being a scientist. Lived dualism.

00:07:49 Becoming a scientist is to become a certain kind of person, and this very much shapes the scientific worldview.

00:08:46 AI is leaked from the lab and becoming a focal point around which the world is turning.

00:12:05 Psychology and theology. How are they related? Developmental psychology. Thresholds, crisis moments, self-transcendence.

00:17:23 Intelligence is a deeply felt notion. Crisis, suffering, struggle, not knowing who we will become, are part of our intelligence. Intelligence is a deeply felt notion. It is not isolated, part of the cosmos, which is why science can be done.

00:20:11 Self-transformation is optional as an adult. Dante and Barfield: are individual and collective transformations similar?

00:32:28 Dante and AI. In hell there is no novelty: closed data set, no imagination, frozen world. Paradise: the joy of knowing more. Music.

00:36:00 Fear.

00:37:15 Addiction. AI recommendation engines. The infinite scroll.

00:41:25 Francis Bacon: "technology was given to humanity by God to bring us back to the garden of Eden, to relieve suffering". Infinite as more and more vs the one thing opening onto all things.

00:43:53 The therapeutic use of addictive AI. https://balazskegl.substack.com/p/mental-jujitsu-between-me-and-the My story with social media addiction and martial arts and its theological interpretation.

00:49:48 Turing test. First of Mark's ten points. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHIvKFY2kbk The dialogical Turing test. https://balazskegl.substack.com/p/gpt-4-in-conversation-with-itself GPT-4 is a much more sophisticated hell.

00:55:53 AI leaders are incentivized to oversell AI. Governments do have levers. "We need more science."

00:58:57 AI and feelings. What is to be human?

01:01:20 Model of cognition is not cognizant itself.

01:04:21 Metaphors of mind. Engineers realize metaphors.

01:07:12 Engineering organisms vs machines. Michael Levin.

01:09:40 We dwell in presence, not just compute. We participate in reality, not just observe it. The field metaphor. Memory is not stored in the brain.

01:16:30 Technology is unadaptive. It is not built into reality, but our reality is built in a way into which technology fits. Thinking machine is an ancient dream.

01:19:13 Attention is a moral act. How to manage fear. The GPT panic.

01:23:35 Love of life is part of intelligence. Intellect is driven towards what is loved. The silence around the words.

01:26:40 Embrace the boredom. Dwell in uncertainty. Convert suffering to hope. Think about our own psychology. The purgatorial state.

01:29:27 Mark's question to me: do I feel that this crisis moment can be a turn for the better, rather than this panic-driven fear of what's going to happen. Agency in AI. Cybernetics.

01:34:40 Alignment. John Vervaeke's program of bringing up AI.

01:38:59 The exponential take-off is a theology. Agency gets more dependent as it gets more sophisticated.

01:41:31 The high-functioning zombie metaphor. The fear of zombie AI is what will create it.

I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/balazskegl

Artwork: DALL-E

Music: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw

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