YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Schmachtenberger

lines on the record: 278
first: 2021-06-14
most recent: 2021-06-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There are other types of phenomenal experience that are the phenomenal experience of pure agency. And, you know, like the Catholic theologian, but evolutionary theorist Th ⁇ rard de Chardon describes this, and that rather than a creator agent God in the beginning, there's a creative impulse or a creative process. And he would go into a type of meditation that identified as the pure essence of that kind of creative process. And I think the types of experience we've had and then one, the types of experience we've had make a big deal to the nature of how we do symbol grounding. The other thing is the types of experiences we have can't not be interpreted through our existing interpretive frames. And most of the time our interpretive frames are unknown even to us, some of them. So this is a tricky topic.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a particular kind of meditative experience. And the people in the Vedantic tradition and some of the Buddhist traditions thousands of years ago described similar experiences and somewhat similar conclusions, some slightly different.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what you could see was that what the words meant, right, at the level of symbol grounding might be quite different. One 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 Perce 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 going to 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.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dennett believed there is something like free will. He is a determinist compatibilist, but no consciousness, an radical eliminativist. And Sam was saying, no, there is consciousness, but there's no free will. And that's the most fundamental. Or logical fallacies, and they kind of spoke past each other. 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 because they weren't making any progress in shared understanding. It seems that we simply have different intuitions about this.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 Dennet critiqued it. And then there was some writing back and forth between the two 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”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 one 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.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 I think apes also depend upon troops 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. Tool creation and our language creation and our coordination are all kind of the results of a certain type of capacity for abstraction.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Upon them. They all seem fungible. If you take Baby. Obviously, that you didn't even get to a baby without a mom. Was it dependent upon each other, right? Without two 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 this has happened a few times. It doesn't learn language. 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.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think we have a weird sense of this today relative to most previous periods of sapien history. Think the vast majority of sapiens Depending upon your early human model, two or three hundred thousand 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 you're in my ability to talk to each other using these mics and the phones that we coordinated on took millions of people over six 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 on.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 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. a good social system would be one 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”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's go back further and smaller then rather than just a single human or the entire human species. Let's look at In a relatively isolated tribe. In the relatively isolated probably sub Dunbar number sub ten hundred fifty people tribe, do I look at that as one 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? Evolutionary adaptiveness of humans existed. 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.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that I know where you're coming from when you have asked the question the same way before the Industrial Revolution or before the agricultural revolution when there were half a billion people and no telecommunications connecting them.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even accidentally. 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. 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.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundamentally not. Fundamentally the nature of how they operate and the nature of how we operate would be incommensurable is a deep question”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 as 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... Would they be different in ways where we could still figure out a way to inhabit a biosphere together?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Kardash 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.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To summon enough energy to generate black holes and to orbit, 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 have to be a very large size, a very dense, but perhaps that's it, perhaps that's one way to communicate. It's a very effective way. And that would explain”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Knows. Interesting field. We tend to assume like SETI that's listening out for aliens out there. Just been recently reading more and more about gravitational waves, and you have Orbiting black holes. Orbit each other, they generate ripples and space time. My for fun at night when I lay in bed, I think about what it would be like to ride those waves when not the low magnitude they are when they reach Earth, but get closer to the black holes because it will basically be shrinking and expanding us in all dimensions, including time. So it's actually ripples through space-time that they generate. Why is it that you couldn't use that? It travels this speed of light. Travels, which are 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...”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there, I've heard some things, 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. Think what you said also about would it be super low tech alien craft? 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? One of the things that the crafts 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 the two 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.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 very long time for reasons of at least supposedly national security, which is also a nice source of plausible deniability for Covering their ass for doing things that would be problematic and other purposes. There are scientists at Stanford. 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 It was something we didn't currently have the ability to do was not naturally occurring.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the starting assumption they have similar perception systems. They have similar cognitive capabilities. And that very well may not be the case. Ask you Thing in aliens for just a little longer because I think it's a good transition talking about governments and human societies. Do you think US government or any government was in possession. An alien spacecraft or of information related to alien spacecraft. 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.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Version of alien technologies. 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 spaced 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... Would not be able to perceive, not because they're hiding, but because it's so far advanced that it would be beyond the cognitive capabilities of us humans, just as you were saying. As per your answer for aliens summarizing Earth,”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it some kind of human 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, one could say, okay, well, could it be a hologram? Well, would it show up on radar if radar is also seeing it? And so I don't know. I think there's enough, I mean, and for that to be a massive coordinated psyop, is it 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”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Named Stephen Greer organized a bunch of mostly U.S. military and some commercial flight. 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 Radar with visual Their own eyes or cameras. 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. Specifically, like we can ask the question how much of it is natural phenomena, ball lightning or something This is why I'm more interested in what Pilots and astronauts, and people who are trained in Being able to identify flying objects and atmospheric phenomena have to say about it. The thing, then you could say, Well, are they more advanced”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One 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 don't have firm beliefs on this because I haven't got to study it as much as I want. So what I'm going to 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. Interested in is the ones that we don't have better explanations for, and then not just immediately jumping to Theory of what it is, but holding it as unidentified and being curious and earnest. One is quite interesting and made it in major media recently. But I don't know if you ever saw the disclosure project.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be hard to think otherwise. I know, I think Bost 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. Look at the total number of Kepler planets that we're aware of just galactically and Life forms were discovered in Mono Lake that didn't have the same six primary atoms. I think it had arsenic replacing phosphorus as one of the primary aspects of its energy metabolism. We get to think about that the building blocks might be more different, so the physical constraints even that the planets have to have might be more different. Seems really unlikely not to mention. Interesting things that we've observed that are still unexplained”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually self induced. They're looking at us now as we move past the nuclear weapons age into the full globalization anthropocene exponential tech age. Making our decisions relatively similar 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 one of the planets that is not going to make it to being intergalactic because we blow ourselves up in the technological adolesc We are going to, we're going to need 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.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thoughts take more than a page. Probably distill it. 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. If they've watched throughout all of history, Saw the burning of Alexandria, they saw that 2,000 years ago in Greece we were producing things like clocks, the anti-Kytheria mechanism, and then that technology got lost. They saw that there wasn't just a steady dialectic of progress.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source