the-crypt-keeper · August 5, 2023 18:15
diff --git a/4dC_nRYIDZU.prompts.json b/4dC_nRYIDZU.prompts.json
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 1 of 35, start time 0.0\n\n    Speakers: [ \"UNKNOWN\" ]\n    Topics: [ \"UNKNOWN\" ]\n    Title: \"Sam Harris: Consciousness, Free Will, Psychedelics, AI, UFOs, and Meaning - Lex Fridman Podcast #185\"\n    Description: \"Sam Harris is an author, podcaster, and philosopher. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:\n- National Instruments (NI): https://www.ni.com/perspectives\n- Belcampo: https://belcampo.com/lex and use code LEX to get 20% off first order\n- Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil\n- Linode: https://linode.com/lex to get $100 free credit\n\nEPISODE LINKS:\nSam's Twitter: https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg\nSam's Website: https://samharris.org/\nSam's \"\n    \n{ UNKNOWN }\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 2: The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, one of the most influential and pioneering thinkers of our time. He's the host of the Making Sense podcast and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and Waking Up. He also has a meditation app called Waking Up that I've been using to guide my own meditation. Quick mention of our sponsors, National Instruments, Val Campo, Athletic Greens, and Linode. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Sam has been an inspiration to me as he has been for many, many people, first from his writing, then his early debates, maybe 13, 14 years ago on the subject of faith, his conversations with Christopher Hitchens, and since 2013, his podcast. I didn't always agree with all of his ideas, but I was always drawn to the care and depth of the way he explored those ideas, the calm and clarity amid the storm of difficult at times controversial discourse.\nSPEAKER 2: I really can't express in words how much it meant to me that he, Sam Harris, someone who I've listened to for many hundreds of hours, would write a kind email to me saying he enjoyed this podcast and more that he thought I had a unique voice that added something to this world. Whether it's true or not, it made me feel special and truly grateful to be able to do this thing and motivated me to work my ass off to live up to those words. Meeting Sam and getting to talk with him was one of the most memorable moments of my life. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Sam Harris. I've been enjoying meditating with the Waking Up app recently. It makes me think about the origins of cognition and consciousness, so let me ask, where do thoughts come from?\nSPEAKER 1: Well, that's a very difficult question to answer. Subjectively, they appear to come from nowhere, right? I mean, it's just they come out of some kind of mystery that is at our backs subjectively, right? So, which is to say that if you pay attention to the nature of your mind in this moment, you realize that you don't know what you're going to think next, right? Now, you're expecting to think something that seems like you authored it, right? You're not, unless you're schizophrenic or you have some kind of thought disorder where your thoughts seem fundamentally foreign to you, they do have a kind of signature of selfhood associated with them, and people readily identify with them. They feel like what you are, I mean, this is the thing, this is the spell that gets broken with meditation. Our default state is to feel identical to the stream of thought, right? Which is fairly paradoxical, because how could you, as a mind, as a self, if there were such a thing as a self, how could you be identical to the next piece of language or the next image that just springs into conscious view?\nSPEAKER 1: But, and you know, meditation is ultimately about examining that point of view closely enough so as to unravel it and feel the freedom that's on the other side of that identification. But the subjectively thoughts simply emerge, right? And you don't think them before you think them, right? There's this first moment where anyone listening to us or watching us now could perform this experiment for themselves. I mean, just imagine something or remember something, and just pick a memory, any memory, right? You've got a storehouse of memory, just promote one to consciousness. Did you pick that memory? I mean, let's say you remembered breakfast yesterday, or you remembered what you said to your spouse before leaving the house, or you remembered what you watched on Netflix last night, or you remembered something that happened to you when you were four years old, whatever it is, right? First it wasn't there, and then it appeared. And that is not a, I'm sure we'll get to the topic of free will, ultimately.\nSPEAKER 1: That's not evidence of free will, right?\nSPEAKER 2: Why are you so sure, by the way?\nSPEAKER 1: It's very interesting. Well, through no free will of my own, yeah. Everything just appears, right? What else could it do? And so that's the subjective side of it. Objectively, we have every reason to believe that many of our thoughts, all of our thoughts, are at bottom what some part of our brain is doing, neurophysiologically. I mean, that these are the products of some kind of neural computation, and neural representation, when you're talking about memories.\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"In this conversation, Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the origins of thoughts. Subjectively, thoughts appear to come from nowhere. They seem to emerge spontaneously without any prior thought or intention. Objectively, we have every reason to believe that many of our thoughts are at bottom what some part of our brain is doing neurophysiologically.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\n    \"Origins of thoughts\",\n    \"Neurophysiology of thoughts\"\n  ]\n}"}
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 2 of 35, start time 306.94000000000005\n['Origins of thoughts', 'Neurophysiology of thoughts']\n{'SPEAKER 1': 'Sam Harris', 'SPEAKER 2': 'Lex Friedman'}\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 2: Is it possible to pull at the string of thoughts to try to get to its root, to try to dig in past the obvious surface, subjective experience of the thoughts pop out of nowhere? Is it possible to somehow get closer to the roots of where they come out of from the firing of the cells? Or is it a useless pursuit to dig into that direction?\nSPEAKER 1: Well, you can get closer to many, many subtle contents in consciousness, right? So you can notice things more and more clearly, and have a landscape of mind open up and become more differentiated and more interesting. And if you take psychedelics, it opens up, depending on what you've taken and the dose, it opens in directions and to an extent that very few people imagine would be possible, but for having had those experiences. But this idea of you getting closer to something, to the datum of your mind, or such as something of interest in there, or something that's more real is ultimately undermined because there's no place from which you're getting closer to it. There's no your part of that journey, right? We tend to start out, whether it's in meditation or in any kind of self-examination or taking psychedelics, we start out with this default point of view of feeling like we're the kind of the rider on the horse of consciousness, or we're the man in the boat going down the stream of consciousness, right?\nSPEAKER 1: But we're differentiated from what we know cognitively, introspectively. But that feeling of being differentiated, that feeling of being a self that can strategically pay attention to some contents of consciousness, is what it's like to be identified with some part of the stream of thought that's going on inspected, right? Like it's a false point of view. And when you see that and cut through that, then this notion of going deeper kind of breaks apart because really there is no depth ultimately, everything is right on the surface. There's no center to consciousness, there's just consciousness in its contents. And those contents can change vastly. Again, if you drop acid, the contents change, but in some sense that doesn't represent a position of depth versus, the continuum of depth versus surface has broken apart.\nSPEAKER 2: So you're taking as a starting point that there is a horse called consciousness and you're riding it, and the actual riding is very shallow, this is all surface. So let me ask about that horse. What's up with the horse? What is consciousness? From where does it emerge? How like fundamental is it to the physics of reality? How fundamental is it to what it means to be human? And I'm just asking for a friend so that we can build it in our artificial intelligence systems.\nSPEAKER 1: Yeah, well, that remains to be seen if we can, if we will build it purposefully or just by accident, it's a major ethical problem potentially. That I mean, my concern here is that we may in fact build artificial intelligence that passes the Turing test, which we begin to treat not only as super intelligent because it obviously is and demonstrates that, but we begin to treat it as conscious because it will seem conscious, we will have built it to seem conscious. And unless we understand exactly how consciousness emerges from physics, we won't actually know that these systems are conscious, right? We'll just, you know, they may say, you know, listen, you can't turn me off because that's a murder, right? And we will be convinced by that dialogue because we will, you know, just in the extreme case, who knows when we'll get there. But if we build something like perfectly humanoid robots that are more intelligent than we are, so we're basically in, you know, a Westworld like situation, there's no way we're going to withhold an attribution of consciousness from those machines.\nSPEAKER 1: They're just gonna advertise our consciousness in every glance and every utterance. But we won't know. And we won't know in some deeper sense than we can be skeptical of the consciousness of other people. I mean, someone can roll that back and say, well, I don't know that you're conscious or you don't know that I'm conscious, we're just passing the Turing test for one another, but that kind of solipsism isn't justified, you know, biologically or anything we understand about the mind biologically suggests that you and I are part of the same, you know, role of the dice in terms of how intelligent and conscious systems emerged in the wetware of brains like ours, right? So it's not parsimonious for me to think that I might be the only conscious person or even the only conscious primate, you know, I would argue it's not parsimonious to withhold consciousness from other apes and even other mammals, ultimately, and you know, once you get beyond the mammals, then my intuitions are not really clear.\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the origins of thoughts and the neurophysiology of thoughts. They explore the idea of trying to dig deeper into the roots of thoughts by examining the firing of cells in the brain. However, they conclude that this pursuit is ultimately undermined because there's no place from which one can get closer to the contents of consciousness. Instead, they suggest that everything is right on the surface and that there is no depth versus surface continuum.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\"Origins of thoughts\", \"Neurophysiology of thoughts\"]\n}"}
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 3 of 35, start time 641.48\n['Origins of thoughts', 'Neurophysiology of thoughts']\n{'SPEAKER 1': 'Sam Harris', 'SPEAKER 2': 'Lex Friedman'}\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 1: The question of how it emerges is genuinely uncertain. And ultimately the question of whether it emerges is still uncertain. You can, you know, it's not fashionable to think this, but you can certainly argue that consciousness might be a fundamental principle of matter that doesn't emerge on the basis of information processing, even though everything else that we recognize about ourselves as minds almost certainly does emerge. You know, like an ability to process language, that clearly is a matter of information processing because you can disrupt that process in ways that is just so clear. And the problem that the confound with consciousness is that yes, we can seem to interrupt consciousness and you can give someone general anesthesia and then you wake them up and you ask them, well, what was that like? And they say, nothing, I don't remember anything, but it's hard to differentiate a mere failure of memory from a genuine interruption in consciousness. Whereas it's not with interrupting speech, you know, we know when we've done it and it's just obvious that you disrupt the right neural circuits and you've disrupted speech.\nSPEAKER 2: So if you had to bet all your money on one camp or the other, would you say, do you earn the side of panpsychism where consciousness is really fundamental to all of reality or more on the other side, which is like, it's a nice little side effect, a useful like hack for us humans to survive. On that spectrum, where do you land when you think about consciousness, especially from an engineering perspective?\nSPEAKER 1: I'm truly agnostic on this point. I mean, I think I'm, you know, it's kind of in coin toss mode for me. I don't know. And panpsychism is not so compelling to me. Again, it just seems un-falsifiable. I wouldn't know how the universe would be different if panpsychism were true. It's just to remind people panpsychism is this idea that consciousness may be pushed all the way down into the most fundamental constituents of matter. So there might be something that it's like to be an electron or, you know, a cork, but then you wouldn't expect anything to be different at the macro scale, or at least I wouldn't expect anything to be different. So it may be unfalsifiable. It just might be that reality is not something we're as in touch with as we think we are. And that is base layer to kind of break it into mind and matter as we've done ontologically is to misconstrue it, right? I mean, there could be some kind of neutral monism at the bottom. And this, you know, this idea doesn't originate with me.\nSPEAKER 1: This goes all the way back to Bertrand Russell and others, you know, a hundred plus years ago. But I just feel like the concepts we're using to divide consciousness and matter may in fact be part of our problem, right? Where the rubber hits the road psychologically here are things like, well, what is death, right? Like do we, any expectation that we survive death or any part of us survives death? That really seems to be the many people's concern here.\nSPEAKER 2: Well, I tend to believe just as a small little tangent, like I'm with Ernest Becker on this, that there's some, it's interesting to think about death and consciousness, which one is the chicken, which one is the egg? Because it feels like death could be the very thing, like our knowledge of mortality could be the very thing that creates the consciousness.\nSPEAKER 1: Yeah, well then you're using consciousness differently than I am. So for me, consciousness is just the fact that the lights are on at all, that there's an experiential quality to anything. So much of the processing that's happening in our brains right now seems, certainly seems to be happening in the dark, right? Like it's not associated with this qualitative sense that there's something that it's like to be that part of the mind doing that mental thing. But for other parts, the lights are on and we can talk about, and whether we talk about it or not, we can feel directly that there's something that is like to be us. There's something that seems to be happening, right? And the seeming in our case is broken into vision and hearing and proprioception and taste and smell and thought and emotion. And there are the contents of consciousness that we are familiar with and that we can have direct access to in any present moment that when we're, quote, conscious. And even if we're confused about them, even if we're asleep and dreaming and we're just not a lucid dream, we're just totally confused about our circumstance, what you can't say is that we're confused about consciousness.\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the origins of thoughts and the neurophysiology of thoughts. They debate whether consciousness emerges from information processing or if it is a fundamental principle of matter that doesn't require information processing. Harris argues that while we can interrupt speech, which is clearly a matter of information processing, it's harder to differentiate a mere failure of memory from a genuine interruption in consciousness. He believes that consciousness may be pushed all the way down into the most fundamental constituents of matter, but that this idea is unfalsifiable. He suggests that reality might not be something we're as in touch with as we think we are. The concept of panpsychism, where consciousness is fundamental to all of reality, is discussed. However, Harris feels that the concepts we use to divide consciousness and matter may in fact be part of our problem. He also notes that death could be the very thing that creates consciousness, according to Ernest Becker. In conclusion, he states that consciousness is just the fact that the lights are on at all, that there's an experiential quality to anything. Even if we're confused about them, even if we're asleep and dreaming and we're just not a lucid dream, we're just totally confused about our circumstance, what you can't say is that we're confused about consciousness.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\"Origins of thoughts\", \"Neurophysiology of thoughts\"]\n}"}
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 4 of 35, start time 972.5200000000001\n['Origins of thoughts', 'Neurophysiology of thoughts']\n{'SPEAKER 1': 'Sam Harris', 'SPEAKER 2': 'Lex Friedman'}\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 1: Like you can't say that consciousness itself might be an illusion because on this account, it just means that things seem any way at all. I mean, even like if this, you know, it seems to me that I'm seeing a cup on the table. Now I could be wrong about that. It could be a hologram. I could be asleep and dreaming. I could be hallucinating. But the seeming part isn't really up for grabs in terms of being an illusion. It's not something seems to be happening. And that seeming is the context in which every other thing we can notice about ourselves can be noticed. And it's also the context in which certain illusions can be cut through because we're not, we can be wrong about what it's like to be us. And we can, I'm not saying we're incorrigible with respect to our claims about the nature of our experience. But for instance, this, you know, many people feel like they have a self and they feel like it has free will. And I'm quite sure at this point that they're wrong about that. And that you can cut through those experiences and then things seem a different way, right?\nSPEAKER 1: So it's not that things don't, there aren't discoveries to be made there and assumptions to be overturned. But this kind of consciousness is something that I would think, it doesn't just come online when we get language. It doesn't just come online when we form a concept of death or the finiteness of life. It doesn't require a sense of self, right? So it's prior to a differentiating self and other. And I wouldn't even think it's necessarily limited to people. I do think probably any mammal has this. But certainly if you're going to presuppose that something about our brains is producing this, right? And that's a very safe assumption, even though we can't, even though you can argue the jury is still out to some degree. Then it's very hard to draw a principled line between us and chimps, or chimps and rats even in the end, given the underlying neural similarities. So, and I don't know, phylogenetically, I don't know how far back to push that. There are people who think single cells might be conscious or that flies are certainly conscious.\nSPEAKER 1: They've got something like 100,000 neurons in their brains. It's just, there's a lot going on, even in a fly, right? But I don't have intuitions about that.\nSPEAKER 2: But it's not in your sense an illusion you can cut through. I mean, to push back the alternative version could be, it is an illusion constructed by, just by humans. I'm not sure I believe this, but in part of me hopes this is true because it makes it easier to engineer, is that humans are able to contemplate their mortality. And that contemplation in itself creates consciousness that like the rich lights on experience. So the lights don't actually even turn on in the way that you're describing until after birth in that construction. So do you think it's possible that that is the case, that it is a sort of construct of the way we deal, almost like a social tool to deal with the reality of the world, the social interaction with other humans? Because you're saying the complete opposite, which is it's like fundamental to single cell organisms and trees and so on.\nSPEAKER 1: Well, yeah, so I don't know how far down to push it. I don't have intuitions that single cells are likely to be conscious, but they might be. And I just, again, it could be unfalsifiable. But as far as babies not being conscious, you don't become conscious until you can recognize yourself in a mirror or you have a conversation or treat other people. First of all, babies treat other people as others far earlier than we have traditionally given them credit for and they certainly do it before they have language, right? So it's gotta proceed language to some degree. And I mean, you can interrogate this for yourself because you can put yourself in various states that are rather obviously not linguistic. You know, meditation allows you to do this. You can certainly do it with psychedelics where it's just your capacity for language has been obliterated and yet you're all too conscious. In fact, I think you could make a stronger argument for things running the other way that there's something about language and conceptual thought that is eliminative of conscious experience, that we are potentially much more conscious of data, sense data and everything else than we tend to be.\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the origins of thoughts and neurophysiology of thoughts. Harris argues that consciousness is not an illusion because even if things seem any way at all, it's still a form of consciousness. He believes that consciousness doesn't just come online when we get language or form a concept of death or the finiteness of life. It's prior to differentiating self and other, and he thinks probably any mammal has this. He doesn't think it's limited to people, and he doesn't have intuitions about single cells being conscious. Friedman pushes back by suggesting that humans are able to contemplate their mortality, which creates consciousness. Harris disagrees, saying that consciousness is fundamental to single cell organisms and trees, and it's not something that comes online after birth.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\"Origins of thoughts\", \"Neurophysiology of thoughts\"]\n}"}
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 5 of 35, start time 1287.16\n['Origins of thoughts', 'Neurophysiology of thoughts']\n{'SPEAKER 1': 'Sam Harris', 'SPEAKER 2': 'Lex Friedman'}\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 1: And we have trimmed it down based on how we have acquired concepts. And so when I walk into a room like this, I know I'm walking into a room, I have certain expectations of what is in a room. I would be very surprised to see wild animals in here or a waterfall or things I'm not expecting, but I can know I'm not expecting them or I'm expecting their absence because of my capacity to be surprised once I walk into a room and I see a live gorilla or whatever. So there's structure there that we have put in place based on all of our conceptual learning and language and language learning. And it causes us not to, one of the things that happens when you take psychedelics and you just look as though for the first time at anything, it becomes incredibly overloaded with, it can become overloaded with meaning and just the torrents of sense data that are coming in in even the most ordinary circumstances can become overwhelming for people. And that tends to just obliterate one's capacity to capture any of it linguistically.\nSPEAKER 1: And as you're coming down, right? Have you done psychedelics? Have you ever done acid or?\nSPEAKER 2: Not acid, mushroom, and that's it. And also edibles, but there's some psychedelic properties to them. But yeah, mushrooms several times and always had an incredible experience, exactly the kind of experience you're referring to, which is if it's true that language constrains our experience, it felt like I was removing some of the constraints. Because even just the most basic things were beautiful in the way that I wasn't able to appreciate previously, like trees and nature and so on.\nSPEAKER 1: Yeah, and the experience of coming down is an experience of encountering the futility of capturing what you just saw a moment ago in words, right? Like, especially if you have any part of your your self concept and your ego program is to be able to capture things in words. And if you're a writer or a poet or a scientist or someone who wants to just encapsulate the profundity of what just happened, the total fatuousness of that enterprise when you really have gotten, when you have taken a whopping dose of psychedelics and you begin to even gesture at describing it to yourself, so that you could describe it to others. It's just, it's like trying to thread a needle using your elbows. I mean, it's like you're trying something that can't, it's like the beer gesture proves its impossibility. And it's, so yeah, so that for me that suggests just empirically on the first person side that it's possible to put yourself in a condition where it's clearly not about language structuring your experience and you're having much more experience than you tend to.\nSPEAKER 1: So the primacy of language is primary for some things, but it's certainly primary for certain kinds of concepts and certain kinds of semantic understandings of the world. But it's clearly more to mind than the conversation we're having with ourselves or that we can have with others.\nSPEAKER 2: Can we go to that world of psychedelics for a bit?\nSPEAKER 1: Sure.\nSPEAKER 2: Where do you think, so Joe Rogan apparently and many others meet apparently elves when they, on DMT, a lot of people report this kind of creatures that they see. And again, it's probably the failure of language to describe that experience, but DMT is an interesting one. There's, as you're aware, there's a bunch of studies going on on psychedelics, currently on DMA, psilocybin, and John Hopkins and a bunch of other places. But DMT, they all speak of as like some extra super level of a psychedelic. Do you have a sense of where it is our mind goes on psychedelics, but in DMT especially?\nSPEAKER 1: Well, unfortunately, I haven't taken DMT.\nSPEAKER 2: Unfortunately or fortunately?\nSPEAKER 1: Unfortunately, yeah. Unfortunately. Although I presume it's in my body as it is in everyone's brain and in many, many plants apparently. But I've wanted to take it, I haven't had an opportunity that would present itself where it was obviously the right thing for me to be doing. But for those who don't know, DMT is often touted as the most intense psychedelic and also the shortest acting. I mean, you smoke it and it's basically a 10 minute experience or a three minute experience within like a 10 minute window that when you're really down after 10 minutes or so. And Terence McKenna was a big proponent of DMT. That was his, the center of the bullseye for him, psychedelically, apparently. And it does, it is characterized, it seems for many people by this phenomenon, which is unlike virtually any other psychedelic experience, which is your, it's not just your perception being broadened or changed. It's you, according to Terence McKenna, feeling fairly unchanged, but catapulted into a different circumstance.\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the role of language in structuring our thoughts. They talk about how we have trimmed down our concepts based on our learning and language acquisition. This causes us not to expect certain things when walking into a room or seeing something new. When taking psychedelics like mushrooms or acid, one can experience an overload of sense data which can obliterate one's capacity to capture anything linguistically. The experience of coming down from psychedelics is an encounter with the futility of capturing what you just saw in words. It's like trying to thread a needle using your elbows. Psychedelics put you in a condition where it's clear that there's more to mind than the conversation we're having with ourselves or that we can have with others. DMT is touted as the most intense psychedelic and also the shortest acting. It's characterized by a phenomenon where you feel fairly unchanged but catapulted into a different circumstance.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\"Psychedelics\", \"DMT\"]\n}"}
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 6 of 35, start time 1661.0800000000002\n['Psychedelics', 'DMT']\n{'SPEAKER 1': 'Sam Harris', 'SPEAKER 2': 'Lex Friedman'}\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 1: You have been shot elsewhere and find yourself in relationship to other entities of some kind. So the place is populated with things that seem not to be your mind.\nSPEAKER 2: So it does feel like travel to another place because you are unchanged yourself.\nSPEAKER 1: Again, I just have this on the authority of the people who have described their experience, but it sounds like it's pretty common. It sounds like it's pretty common for people not to have the full experience because it's apparently pretty unpleasant to smoke. So it's like getting enough onboard in order to get shot out of the cannon and land among the, what McKenna called self-transforming machine elves that appeared to him like jeweled, Faberge egg-like self-drippling basketballs that were handing him completely uninterpretable reams of profound knowledge. It's an experience I haven't had, so I just have to accept that people have had it. I would just point out that our minds are clearly capable of producing apparent others on demand that are totally compelling to us, right? There's no limit to our ability to do that as anyone who's ever remembered a dream can attest. Every night we go to sleep, some of us don't remember dreams very often, but some dream vividly every night. And just think of how insane that experience is.\nSPEAKER 1: I mean, you've forgotten where you were, right? That's the strangest part. I mean, this is psychosis, right? You have lost your mind. You have lost your connection to your episodic memory or even your expectations that reality won't undergo wholesale changes a moment after you have closed your eyes, right? Like you're in bed, you're watching something on Netflix, you're waiting to fall asleep, and then the next thing that happens to you is impossible and you're not surprised, right? You're talking to dead people, you're hanging out with famous people, you're someplace you couldn't physically be, you can fly and even that's not surprising, right? So you've lost your mind, but relevantly for this.\nSPEAKER 2: Or found it.\nSPEAKER 1: You found something, lucid dreaming is very interesting because then you can have the best of both circumstances and then it can become systematically explored.\nSPEAKER 2: Well, what I mean by found just to start to interrupt is like if we take this brilliant idea that language constrains us, grounds us, language and other things of the waking world ground us, maybe it is that you've found the full capacity of your cognition when you dream or when you do psychedelics. You're stepping outside the little human cage, the cage or the human condition to open the door and step up and look around and then go back in.\nSPEAKER 1: Well, you've definitely stepped out of something and into something else, but you've also lost something, right, you've lost certain capacities. Well, just, yeah, in this case, you literally didn't, you don't have enough presence of mind in the dreaming, in the dreaming state or even in the psychedelic state if you take enough. To do math. There's no psychological, there's very little psychological continuity with your life such that you're not surprised to be in the presence of someone who should be, you should know is dead or you should know you're not likely to have met by normal channels, right? You're now talking to some celebrity and it turns out you're best friends, right? And you're not even, you have no memory of how you got there, like how did you get into the room? You're like, did you drive to this restaurant? You have no memory and none of that's surprising to you. So you're kind of brain damaged in a way, you're not reality testing in the normal way.\nSPEAKER 2: The fascinating possibility is that there's probably thousands of people who've taken psychedelics in various forms and have met Sam Harris on the journey.\nSPEAKER 1: Well, I would put it more likely in dreams, not, you know, cause in psychedelics, you don't tend to hallucinate in a dreamlike way. I mean, so DMT is giving you an experience of others, but it seems to be non-standard. It's not like, it's not just like dream hallucinations, but to the point of coming back to DMT, the people want to suggest and Terrence McKenna certainly did suggest that because these others are so obviously other and they're so vivid, well, then they could not possibly be the creation of my own mind, but every night in dreams, you create a compelling or what is to you at the time, a totally compelling simulacrum of another person, right? And that just proves the mind is capable of doing it. Now, the phenomenon of lucid dreaming shows that the mind isn't capable of doing everything you think it might be capable of even in that space. So one of the things that people have discovered in lucid dreams, and I haven't done a lot of lucid dreaming, so I can't confirm all of this, so I can confirm some of it.\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the psychedelic experience. They talk about how dreams can be a similar experience to psychedelics in terms of creating other entities or 'selves'. However, they also note that dreams are not as vivid or compelling as psychedelic experiences. The conversation then moves on to lucid dreaming, which shows that even though the mind is capable of creating these other entities, it still has limitations.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\"Psychedelic Experience\", \"Dreams\", \"Lucid Dreaming\"]\n}"}
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 7 of 35, start time 2004.54\n['Psychedelic Experience', 'Dreams', 'Lucid Dreaming']\n{'SPEAKER 1': 'Sam Harris', 'SPEAKER 2': 'Lex Friedman'}\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 1: Apparently in every house, in every room in the mansion of dreams, all light switches are dimmer switches. Like if you go into a dark room and flip on the light, it gradually comes up. It doesn't come up instantly on demand because apparently this is covering for the brain's inability to produce from a standing start visually rich imagery on demand. I haven't confirmed that, but people have done research on lucid dreaming claim that it's all dimmer switches. But one thing I have noticed, and people can check this out, is that in a dream, if you look at text, you know, a page of text or a sign or a television that has text on it, and then you turn away and you look back at that text, the text will have changed, right? The total is it's just a chronic instability, graphical instability of text in the dream state. And I don't know if that, you know, maybe someone can confirm that that's not true for them, but whenever I've checked that out, that has been true for me.\nSPEAKER 2: So it keeps generating it like real time from a video game perspective.\nSPEAKER 1: Yeah, it's rendering, it's re-rendering it for some reason.\nSPEAKER 2: What's interesting, I actually, I don't know how I found myself in the sets of that part of the internet, but there's quite a lot of discussion about what it's like to do math on LSD. Because apparently one of the deepest thinking processes needed is those of mathematicians or theoretical computer scientists are basically doing anything that involves math, is proofs, and you have to think creatively, but also deeply, and you have to think for many hours at a time. And so they're always looking for ways to like, is there any sparks of creativity that could be injected? And apparently out of all the psychedelics, the worst is LSD because it completely destroys your ability to do math well. And I wonder whether that has to do with your ability to visualize geometric things in a stable way in your mind and hold them there and stitch things together, which is often what's required for proofs. But again, it's difficult to kind of research these kinds of concepts, but it does make me wonder where, what are the spaces?\nSPEAKER 2: How is the space of things you're able to think about and explore morphed by different psychedelics or dream states and so on? And how is that different? How much does it overlap with reality? And what is reality? Is there a waking state reality? Or is it just a tiny subset of reality and we get to take a step in other versions of it? We tend to think very much in a space-time, four-dimensional, there's a three-dimensional world, there's time, and that's what we think about reality. And we think of traveling as walking from point A to point B in the three-dimensional world. But that's a very kind of human surviving, try not to get eaten by a lion, conception of reality. What if traveling is something like we do with psychedelics and meet the elves? What if it's something, what if thinking or the space of ideas as we kind of grow and think through ideas, that's traveling? Or what if memories is traveling? I don't know if you have a favorite view of reality or if you had, by the way, I should say, excellent conversation with Donald Hoffman.\nSPEAKER 1: Yeah, yeah, he's interesting.\nSPEAKER 2: Is there any inkling of his sense in your mind that reality is very far from actual objective reality, it's very far from the kind of reality we imagine we perceive and we play with in our human minds?\nSPEAKER 1: Well, the first thing to grant is that we're never in direct contact with reality, whatever it is, unless that reality is consciousness. So we're only ever experiencing consciousness and its contents. And then the question is how does that circumstance relate to, quote, reality at large? And Donald Hoffman is somebody who's happy to speculate, well, maybe there isn't a reality at large, maybe it's all just consciousness on some level. And that's interesting, that runs into my eye various philosophical problems that, or at least you have to do a lot, you have to add to that picture of idealism, that's usually all the whole family of views that would just say that the universe is just mind or just consciousness at bottom, we'll go by the name of idealism in Western philosophy. You have to add to that idealistic picture all kinds of epicycles and kind of weird coincidences and to get the predictability of our experience and the success of materialist science to make sense in that context. So the fact that we can, what does it mean to say that there's only consciousness at bottom, right?\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the instability of text in dreams. They also talk about how LSD affects one's ability to do math, which is interesting because mathematicians often need to visualize geometric things in a stable way. This leads them to wonder about the spaces we can think about and explore when using psychedelics or dreaming. They question whether reality is just four-dimensional space-time or if it includes other dimensions like traveling through ideas or memories. Finally, they touch on Donald Hoffman's theory of idealism, which suggests that reality is just consciousness at bottom.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\"Instability of text in dreams\", \"LSD and its effect on mathematical thinking\", \"Psychedelics and their impact on thought\", \"Donald Hoffman's theory of idealism\"]\n}"}
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 8 of 35, start time 2345.64\n['Instability of text in dreams', 'LSD and its effect on mathematical thinking', 'Psychedelics and their impact on thought', \"Donald Hoffman's theory of idealism\"]\n{'SPEAKER 1': 'Sam Harris', 'SPEAKER 2': 'Lex Friedman'}\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 1: Nothing outside of consciousness because no one's ever experienced anything outside of consciousness. There's no scientist has ever done an experiment where they were contemplating data, no matter how far removed from our sense basis, whether it's they're looking at the Hubble deep field or they're smashing atoms or whatever tools they're using, they're still just experiencing consciousness and its various deliverances and layering their concepts on top of that. So that's always true. And yet that somehow doesn't seem to capture the character of our continually discovering that our materialist assumptions are confirmable, right? Take the fact that we unleash this fantastic amount of energy from within an atom, right? First, we have the theoretical suggestion that it's possible, right? We come back to Einstein, there's a lot of energy in that matter, right? And what if we could release it, right? And then we perform an experiment that in this case, the Trinity test site in New Mexico where the people who are most adequate to this conversation, people like Robert Oppenheimer, are standing around not altogether certain it's going to work, right?\nSPEAKER 1: They're performing an experiment, they're wondering what's gonna happen, they're wondering if there are calculations around the yield or off by orders of magnitude. Some of them are still wondering whether the entire atmosphere of Earth is gonna kind of combust, right? The nuclear chain reaction is not gonna stop. And lo and behold, there was that energy to be released from within the nucleus of an atom. And that could, so it's just, what the picture one forms from those kinds of experiments and just the knowledge is just our understanding of evolution, just the fact that the Earth is billions of years old and life is hundreds of millions of years old, and we weren't here to think about any of those things. And all of those processes were happening, therefore in the dark, and they are the processes that allowed us to emerge from prior life forms in the first place. To say that it's all, that nothing exists outside of consciousness, conscious minds of the sort that we experience, it just seems, it seems like a bizarrely anthropocentric claim analogous to the moon isn't there if no one's looking at it, right?\nSPEAKER 1: The moon as a moon isn't there if no one's looking at it. I'll grant that, because that's already a kind of fabrication born of concepts. But the idea that there's nothing there, that there's nothing that corresponds to what we experience as the moon, unless someone's looking at it, that just seems just a way too parochial way to set out on this journey of discovery.\nSPEAKER 2: There is something there, there's a computer waiting to render the moon when you look at it. The capacity for the moon to exist is there. So if we're indeed living in a simulation, which I find a compelling thought experiment, it's possible that there is this kind of rendering mechanism, but not in the silly way that we think about in video games, but in some kind of more fundamental physics way.\nSPEAKER 1: And we have to account for the fact that it renders experiences that no one has had yet, that no one has any expectation of having, it can violate the expectations of everyone lawfully, right? And then there's some lawful understanding of why that's so. It's like, I mean, just to bring it back to mathematics, I mean, like certain numbers are prime, whether we have discovered them or not, right? Like there's the highest prime number that anyone can name now. And then there's the next prime number that no one can name, and it's there, right? So it's like to say that our minds are putting it there, that what we know as mind in ourselves is in some way, in some sense, putting it there, like the base layer of reality is consciousness, right? You know, that we're identical to the thing that is rendering this reality. There's some, you know, hubris is the wrong word, but it's like, it's okay if reality is bigger than what we experience, you know? And it has structure that we can't anticipate and that isn't just, I mean, again, there's certainly a collaboration between our minds and whatever's out there to produce what we call, you know, the stuff of life.\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the nature of reality. They explore the idea that nothing exists outside of consciousness because no one has ever experienced anything outside of consciousness. However, they also acknowledge that our materialist assumptions are continually confirmed through experiments such as releasing energy from within an atom or understanding evolution. They argue that it seems bizarrely anthropocentric to claim that nothing exists outside of consciousness, especially when considering the moon or prime numbers. They conclude by suggesting that reality is bigger than what we experience and has structure that we can't anticipate.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\"Idealism theory\", \"Donald Hoffman's theory of idealism\"]\n}"}
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 9 of 35, start time 2664.1000000000004\n['Idealism theory', \"Donald Hoffman's theory of idealism\"]\n{'SPEAKER 1': 'Sam Harris', 'SPEAKER 2': 'Lex Friedman'}\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 1: But it's not the idea that it's, I don't know, I mean, there are a few stops on the train of idealism and kind of new age thinking and Eastern philosophy that I don't, philosophically, I don't see a need to take. I mean, the plays, experientially and scientifically, I feel like it's, you can get everything you want acknowledging that consciousness has a character that can be explored from its own side so that you're bringing kind of the first person experience back into the conversation about, you know, what is a human mind and what is true. And you can explore it with different degrees of rigor and there are things to be discovered there, whether you're using a technique like meditation or psychedelics, and that these experiences have to be put in conversation with what we understand about ourselves from a third person side, neuro scientifically or in any other way.\nSPEAKER 2: But to me, the question is, what if reality, the sense I have from this kind of, you play shooters?\nSPEAKER 1: No.\nSPEAKER 2: There's a physics engine that generate that's.\nSPEAKER 1: I have, you mean first person shooter games? Yes, yes, sorry. Not often, but yes.\nSPEAKER 2: I mean, there's a physics engine that generates consistent reality, right? My sense is the same could be true for a universe in the following sense that our conception of reality as we understand it now in the 21st century is a tiny subset of the full reality. It's not that the reality that we conceive of that's there, the moon being there is not there somehow. It's that it's a tiny fraction of what's actually out there. And so the physics engine of the universe is just maintaining the useful physics, the useful reality, quote unquote, for us to have a consistent experience as human beings. But maybe we descendants of apes are really only understand like 0.0001% of actual physics of reality. Like this, we can even just start with the consciousness thing, but maybe our minds are just, we're just too dumb by design.\nSPEAKER 1: Oh yeah, I, that truly resonates with me. And I'm surprised it doesn't resonate more with most scientists that I talked to. Matthew, when you just look at, you look at how close we are to chimps, right? And chimps don't know anything, right? Clearly they have no idea what's going on, right? And then then you get us, but then it's only a subset of human beings that really understand much of what we're talking about on any area of specialization. And if they all died in their sleep tonight, right? You'd be left with people who might take a thousand years to rebuild the internet, if ever, right? I mean, literally, it's like, and I would extend this to myself. I mean, there are areas of scientific specialization where I have either no discernible competence. I mean, I spent no time on it. I have not acquired the tools. It would just be an article of faith for me to think that I could acquire the tools to actually make a breakthrough in those areas. And your own area is one. I mean, I've never spent any significant amount of time trying to be a programmer, but it's pretty obvious I'm not Alan Turing, right?\nSPEAKER 1: It's like, if that were my capacity, I would have discovered that in myself. I would have found programming irresistible. My first fall starts in learning, I think it was C. It was just, I bounced off. It's like, this was not fun. I hate, I mean, trying to figure out what the syntax error that's causing this thing not to compile was just a fucking awful experience. I hated it, right? I hated every minute of it. So it was not, so if it was just people like me left, like when do we get the internet again, right? And we lose the internet. When do we get it again, right? When do we get anything like a proper science of information, right? You need a Claude Shannon or an Alan Turing to plant a flag in the ground right here and say, all right, can everyone see this? Even if you don't quite know what I'm up to, you all have to come over here to make some progress. And there are hundreds of topics where that's the case. So we barely have a purchase on making anything like discernible intellectual progress in any generation.\nSPEAKER 1: And yeah, Max Tegmark makes this point. He's one of the few people who does in physics. If you just take the truth of evolution seriously, right? And realize that there's nothing about us that has evolved to understand reality perfectly. I mean, we're just not that kind of ape, right? There's been no evolutionary pressure along those lines. We are making do with tools that were designed for fights with sticks and rocks, right? And it's amazing, we can do as much as we can. I mean, you and I are just sitting here on the back of having received an mRNA vaccine that has certainly changed our life given what the last year was like. And it's gonna change the world if rumors of coming miracles are born out. I mean, it's now seems likely we have a vaccine coming for malaria, right? Which has been killing millions of people a year for as long as we've been alive. I think it's down to like 800,000 people a year now because we've spread so many bed nets around. But it was like two and a half million people every year.\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the theory of idealism. They agree that while consciousness has a character that can be explored from its own side, it should be put in conversation with what we understand about ourselves from a third person side, neuro scientifically or in any other way. They also discuss how our conception of reality as we understand it now in the 21st century is a tiny subset of the full reality. It's not that the reality that we conceive of that's there, the moon being there is not there somehow. It's that it's a tiny fraction of what's actually out there. And so the physics engine of the universe is just maintaining the useful physics, the useful reality, quote unquote, for us to have a consistent experience as human beings. But maybe we descendants of apes are really only understand like 0.0001% of actual physics of reality. Like this, we can even just start with the consciousness thing, but maybe our minds are just, we're just too dumb by design.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\n    \"Theory of idealism\",\n    \"Consciousness\",\n    \"Physics engine of the universe\",\n    \"Reality\",\n    \"Evolutionary pressure\"\n  ]\n}"}
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 10 of 35, start time 3039.4\n['Theory of idealism', 'Consciousness', 'Physics engine of the universe', 'Reality', 'Evolutionary pressure']\n{'SPEAKER 1': 'Sam Harris', 'SPEAKER 2': 'Lex Friedman'}\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 1: It's amazing what we can do. But yeah, I have, if in fact that the answer to the back of the book of nature is you understand 0.1% of what there is to understand and half of what you think you understand is wrong, that would not surprise me at all.\nSPEAKER 2: It is funny to look at our evolutionary history, even back to chimps. I'm pretty sure even chimps thought they understood the world well. So at every point in that timeline of evolutionary development throughout human history, there's a sense like there's no more, you hear this message over and over, there's no more things to be invented.\nSPEAKER 1: But a hundred years ago, there were, there's a famous story, I forget which physicist told it, but there were physicists telling their undergraduate students not to go into, to get graduate degrees in physics because basically all the problems had been solved. And this is like around 1915 or so.\nSPEAKER 2: Turns out you were right. I'm gonna ask you about free will.\nSPEAKER 1: Okay.\nSPEAKER 2: You've recently released an episode of your podcast making sense for those with a shorter attention span, basically summarizing your position on free will. I think it was under an hour and a half.\nSPEAKER 1: Yeah, yeah.\nSPEAKER 2: It was brief and clear. So allow me to summarize the summary TLDR, and maybe you tell me where I'm wrong. So free will is an illusion and even the experience of free will is an illusion. Like we don't even experience it. Am I good in my summary?\nSPEAKER 1: Yeah, this is a line that's a little hard to scan for people. I say that it's not merely that free will is an illusion. The illusion of free will is an illusion, right? Like there is no illusion of free will. And that is unlike many other illusions, that's a more fundamental claim. It's not that it's wrong, it's not even wrong. I mean, that's, I guess those, I think Wolfgang Pauli who derided one of his colleagues or enemies with that aspersion about his theory in quantum mechanics. So there are things that, there are genuine illusions. There are things that you do experience and then you can kind of punch through that experience. Or you can't actually experience, you can't experience them any other way. It's just, we just know it's not a veridical experience. You just take like a visual illusion. There are visual illusions that, a lot of these come to me on Twitter these days. There's these amazing visual illusions where like every figure in this GIF seems to be moving, but nothing in fact is moving.\nSPEAKER 1: You can just like put a ruler on your screen and nothing's moving. Some of those illusions you can't see any other way. I mean, they're just, they're hacking aspects of the visual system that are just eminently hackable. And you have to use a ruler to convince yourself that the thing isn't actually moving. Now there are other visual illusions where you're taken in by it at first, but if you pay more attention, you can actually see that it's not there, right? Or it's not how it first seemed. Like the Necker cube is a good example of that. Like the Necker cube is just that schematic of a cube, the transparent cube, which pops out one way or the other. One face can pop out and then the other face can pop out. But you can actually just see it as flat with no pop out, which is a more veridical way of looking at it. So there are subject, there are kind of inward correlates to this. And I would say that the, the sense of self, a sense of self and free will are closely related. I mean, I often describe them as two signs of the same coin, but they're not quite the same in their spuriousness.\nSPEAKER 1: I mean, so the sense of self is something that people, I think do experience, right? It's not a very clear experience, but it's not, I wouldn't call the illusion of self an illusion, but the illusion of free will is an illusion in that as you pay more attention to your experience, you begin to see that it's totally compatible with an absence of free will. You don't, and they come into the back to the place we started. You don't know what you're gonna think next. You don't know what you're gonna intend next. You don't know what's going to just occur to you that you must do next. You don't know how much you're going to feel the behavioral imperative to act on that thought. If you suddenly feel, oh, I don't need to do that. I can do that tomorrow. You don't know where that comes from. You didn't know that was gonna arise. You didn't know that was gonna be compelling. All of this is compatible with some evil genius in the next room, just typing in code into your experience. Just like this, okay, let's give him the, oh my God, I just forgot it was gonna be our anniversary in one week thought, right?\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the evolutionary pressure that drives human understanding. They talk about how our evolutionary history has led us to believe that we understand more than we actually do. They also discuss the illusion of free will and how it is different from other illusions because it's not just wrong, but it's not even wrong. The sense of self and free will are closely related, but while the sense of self is something people experience, the illusion of free will is an illusion in that as you pay more attention to your experience, you begin to see that it's totally compatible with an absence of free will.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\"Evolutionary pressure\", \"Illusion of free will\"]\n}"}
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 11 of 35, start time 3356.1600000000003\n['Evolutionary pressure', 'Illusion of free will']\n{'SPEAKER 1': 'Sam Harris', 'SPEAKER 2': 'Lex Friedman'}\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 1: Give him the cascade of fear. Give him this brilliant idea for the thing he can buy that's gonna take him no time at all in this overpowering sense of relief. Our experience is compatible with the script already being written, right? And I'm not saying the script is written. I'm not saying that fatalism is the right way to look at this, but we just don't have even our most deliberate voluntary action where we go back and forth between two options. Thinking about the reason for A and then reconsidering and going, thinking harder about B and just going eeny, meeny, miny, moe until the end of the hour. However laborious you can make it, there is a utter mystery at your back finally promoting the thought or intention or rationale that is most compelling and therefore deliberately, behaviorally effective. And this can drive some people a little crazy. So I usually preface what I say about free will with the caveat that if thinking about your mind this way makes you feel terrible, well then stop, you get off the ride, switch to the channel, you don't have to go down this path.\nSPEAKER 1: But for me and for many other people, it's incredibly freeing to recognize this about the mind because one, you realize that you're, cutting through the illusion of the self is immensely freeing for a lot of reasons that we can talk about separately. But losing the sense of free will does two things very vividly for me. One is it totally undercuts the basis for, the psychological basis for hatred. Because when you think about the experience of hating other people, what that is anchored to is a feeling that they really are the true authors of their actions. I mean, someone is doing something that you find so despicable, right? And let's say they're targeting you unfairly, right? They're maligning you on Twitter or they're suing you or they're doing something, they broke your car window, they did something awful and now you have a grievance against them. And you're relating to them very differently emotionally in your own mind than you would if a force of nature had done this, right? Or if it had just been a virus or if it had been a wild animal or a malfunctioning machine.\nSPEAKER 1: Like to those things, you don't attribute any kind of freedom of will. And while you may suffer the consequences of catching a virus or being attacked by a wild animal or having your car break down or whatever, it may frustrate you. You don't slip into this mode of hating the agent in a way that completely commandeers your mind and deranges your life. I mean, you just don't, I mean, there are people who spend decades hating other people for what they did and it's just pure poison.\nSPEAKER 2: So it's a useful shortcut to compassion and empathy.\nSPEAKER 1: Yeah, yeah.\nSPEAKER 2: But the question is, say that this call, what was it, the horse of consciousness? Let's call it the consciousness generator black box that we don't understand. And is it possible that the script that we're walking along, that we're playing, that's already written, is actually being written in real time? It's almost like you're driving down a road and in real time that road is being laid down. And this black box of consciousness that we don't understand is the place where the script is being generated. So it's not, it is being generated, it didn't always exist. So there's something we don't understand that's fundamental about the nature of reality that generates both consciousness, let's call it maybe the self. I don't know if you want to distinguish between those.\nSPEAKER 1: Yeah, I definitely would, yeah. You would?\nSPEAKER 2: Because there's a bunch of illusions we're referring to. There's the illusion of free will, there's the illusion of self, and there's the illusion of consciousness. You're saying, I think you said there's no, you're not as willing to say there's an illusion of consciousness.\nSPEAKER 1: You're a little bit more- In fact, I would say it's impossible. Impossible.\nSPEAKER 2: You're a little bit more willing to say that there's an illusion of self, and you're definitely saying there's an illusion of free will.\nSPEAKER 1: Yes, and I'm definitely saying there's an illusion that a certain kind of self is an illusion, not every, we mean many different things by this notion of self. So maybe I should just differentiate these things. So consciousness can't be an illusion because any illusion proves its reality as much as any other veridical perception. I mean, if you're hallucinating now, that's just as much of a demonstration of consciousness as really seeing what's a quote actually there. If you're dreaming and you don't know it, that is consciousness, right? If you're, you can be confused about literally everything. You can't be confused about the underlying claim, whether you make it linguistically or not, but just the cognitive assertion that something seems to be happening. It's the seeming that is the cash value of consciousness.\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the illusion of free will. Harris argues that recognizing this illusion can be liberating because it undercuts the psychological basis for hatred. He explains that when we think about hating other people, we feel they are the true authors of their actions. However, if we consider these actions as being caused by forces of nature or machines, we don't relate to them in the same way. This realization can lead to compassion and empathy. Friedman suggests that while the script of our lives may seem predetermined, it is actually being written in real time by a 'black box' of consciousness that we don't understand. Harris disagrees, saying that consciousness cannot be an illusion because any illusion proves its reality as much as any other veridical perception. He defines consciousness as the 'seeming' of something happening, which cannot be confused or denied.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\"Illusion of free will\", \"Consciousness\"]\n}"}
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 12 of 35, start time 3700.52\n['Illusion of free will', 'Consciousness']\n{'SPEAKER 1': 'Sam Harris', 'SPEAKER 2': 'Lex Friedman'}\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 2: Can I take a tiny tangent? So what if I am creating consciousness in my mind to convince you that I'm human? So it's a useful social tool, not a fundamental property of experience, like of being a living thing. What if it's just like a social tool to almost like a useful computational trick to place myself into reality as we together communicate about this reality. And another way to ask that, because you said it much earlier, you talk negatively about robots as you often do. So let me, cause you'll probably die first when they take over.\nSPEAKER 1: No, I'm looking forward to certain kinds of robots. I mean, I'm not, if we can get this right, this would be amazing.\nSPEAKER 2: But you don't like the robots that fake consciousness. That's what you, you don't like the idea of fake until you make it.\nSPEAKER 1: Well, no, it's not that I don't like it, it's that I'm worried that we will lose sight of the problem. And the problem has massive ethical consequences. If we create robots that really can suffer, that would be a bad thing, right? And if we really are committing a murder when we recycle them, that would be a bad thing.\nSPEAKER 2: This is how I know you're not Russian. Why is it a bad thing that we create robots that can suffer? Isn't suffering a fundamental thing from which like beauty springs? Like without suffering, do you really think we would have beautiful things in this world?\nSPEAKER 1: Okay, well, that's a tangent on a tangent. We'll go there, I would love to go there, but let's not go there just yet. But you know, I do think it would be, if anything is bad, creating hell and populating it with real minds that really can suffer in that hell, that's, you know, that's bad. That's the, you are worse than any mass murderer we can name if you create it. I mean, this could be in robot form, or more likely it would be in some simulation of a world where we've managed to populate it with conscious minds whether we knew they were conscious or not. And that world is a state of, you know, that's unendurable. That would just, it just taking the thesis seriously that there's nothing that mind, intelligence and consciousness ultimately are substrate independent, right? It doesn't, you don't need a biological brain to be conscious. You certainly don't need a biological brain to be intelligent, right? So if we just imagine the consciousness at some point comes along for the ride as you scale up in intelligence, well, then we could find ourselves creating conscious minds that are miserable, right?\nSPEAKER 1: And that's just like creating a person who's miserable, right? It could be worse than creating a person who's miserable. It could be even more sensitive to suffering.\nSPEAKER 2: Cloning them and maybe for entertainment, watching them suffer.\nSPEAKER 1: Just like watching a person suffer for entertainment, you know? So, but back to your primary question here, which is differentiating consciousness and self and free will as concepts and kind of degrees of illusoryness. The problem with free will is that what most people mean by it, and Dan, this is where Dan Dennett is gonna get off the ride here, right? So like he doesn't, he's gonna disagree with me that I know what most people mean by it. But I have a very keen sense, having talked about this topic for many, many years and seeing people get wrapped around the axle of it and seeing in myself what it's like to have felt that I was a self that had free will and then to no longer feel that way, right? I mean, to know what it's like to actually disabuse myself of that sense, cognitively and emotionally, and to recognize what's left, what goes away and what doesn't go away on the basis of that epiphany. I have a sense that I know what people think they have in hand when they worry about whether free will exists.\nSPEAKER 1: And it is the flip side of this feeling of self is the flip side of feeling like you are not merely identical to experience. You feel like you're having an experience. You feel like you're an agent that is appropriating an experience. There's a protagonist in the movie of your life and it is you, it's not just the movie, right? It's like there are sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and emotions and this whole cacophony of experience, of felt experience, of felt experience of embodiment. But there seems to be a rider on the horse or a passenger in the body, right? People don't feel truly identical to their bodies down to their toes. They sort of feel like they have bodies. They feel like they're minds in bodies and that feels like a self, that feels like me. And again, this gets very paradoxical when you talk about the experience of being in relationship to yourself or talking to yourself, giving yourself a pep talk. I mean, if you're the one talking, why are you also the one listening?\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the concept of free will. Harris argues that what most people mean by free will is the feeling of being an agent who appropriates experiences. He believes this sense of self or agency is the flip side of the feeling of having an experience. According to Harris, when people worry about whether free will exists, they are actually concerned about losing this sense of self or agency. He also suggests that creating robots that can suffer would be unethical as it could lead to a state of hell populated with real minds.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\"Robotics\", \"Ethics\"]\n}"}
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 13 of 35, start time 4015.86\n['Robotics', 'Ethics']\n{'SPEAKER 1': 'Sam Harris', 'SPEAKER 2': 'Lex Friedman'}\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 1: Like why do you need the pep talk and why does it work? If you're the one giving the pep talk, right? Or if I said, like, where are my keys? If I'm looking for my keys, why do I think the superfluous thought, where are my keys? I know I'm looking for the fucking keys. I'm the one looking, who am I telling that we now need to look for the keys, right? So that duality is weird, but leave that aside. There's the sense, and this becomes very vivid when people try to learn to meditate. Most people, they start by, they close their eyes and they're told to pay attention to an object like the breath, say. So you close your eyes and you pay attention to the breath and you can feel it at the tip of your nose or the rising and falling of your abdomen and you're paying attention and you feel something vague there. And then you think, I thought, well, why the breath? Why am I paying attention to the breath? What's so special about the breath? And then you notice you're thinking and you're not paying attention to the breath anymore.\nSPEAKER 1: And then you realize, okay, the practice is, okay, I should notice thoughts and then I should come back to the breath. But this starting point is of the conventional starting point of feeling like you are an agent, very likely in your head, a locus of consciousness, a locus of attention that can strategically pay attention to certain parts of experience. Like I can focus on the breath and then I get lost in thought and now I can come back to the breath and I can open my eyes and I'm over here behind my face, looking out at a world that's other than me and there's this kind of subject-object perception and that is the default starting point of selfhood, of subjectivity and married to that is the sense that I can decide what to do next, right? I am an agent who can pay attention to the cup, I can listen to sounds. There's certain things that I can't control, certain things are happening to me and I just can't control them. So for instance, if someone asks, well, can you not hear a sound, right?\nSPEAKER 1: Like don't hear the next sound, don't hear anything for a second or don't hear, you know, I'm snapping my fingers, don't hear this, where's your free will? You know, like just stop this from coming in. You realize, okay, wait a minute, my abundant freedom does not extend to something as simple as just being able to pay attention to something else than this. Okay, well, so I'm not that kind of free agent but at least I can decide what I'm gonna do next and I'm gonna pick up this water, right? And there's a feeling of identification with the impulse, with the intention, with the thought that occurs to you, with the feeling of speaking. Like, you know, what am I gonna say next? Well, I'm saying it, so here it goes. This is me, it feels like I'm the thinker, I'm the one who's in control. But all of that is born of not really paying close attention to what it's like to be you. And so this is where meditation comes in or this is where, again, you can get at this conceptually. You can unravel the notion of free will just by thinking certain thoughts, but you can't feel that it doesn't exist unless you can pay close attention to how thoughts and intentions arise.\nSPEAKER 1: So the way to unravel it conceptually is just to realize, okay, I didn't make myself, I didn't make my genes, I didn't make my brain, I didn't make the environmental influences that impinged upon this system for the last 54 years that have produced my brain in precisely the state it's in right now, with all of the receptor weightings and densities and, you know, it's just, I'm exactly the machine I am right now through no fault of my own as the experiencing self. I get no credit and I get no blame for the genetics and the environmental influences here. And yet those are the only things that could contrive to produce my next thought or impulse or moment of behavior. And if you were going to add something magical to that clockwork, like an immortal soul, you can also notice that you didn't produce your soul, rightly, you can't account for the fact that you don't have the soul of someone who doesn't like any of the things you like or wasn't interested in any of the things you were interested in or, you know, or was a psychopath or was, you know, had an IQ of 40.\nSPEAKER 1: I mean, like there's nothing, nothing about that that the person who believes in a soul can claim to have controlled. And yet that is also totally dispositive of whatever happens next.\nSPEAKER 2: But everything you've described now, maybe you can correct me, but it kind of speaks to the materialistic nature of the hardware.\nSPEAKER 1: But even if you add magical ectoplasm software, you didn't produce that either.\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the concept of free will. Harris argues that our sense of selfhood and agency is an illusion created by our inability to control certain aspects of our experience. He explains how meditation can help us realize this by paying close attention to thoughts and intentions. According to Harris, we did not make ourselves or our brains, nor did we choose our genes or environmental influences. These factors are what contrive to produce our next thought or impulse. If we were to add a soul to this clockwork, we would still not have produced it, nor could we account for its characteristics. Even if we believe in a magical ectoplasm software, we didn't produce that either.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\"Free will\", \"Meditation\", \"Genes\", \"Environmental influences\", \"Soul\"]\n}"}
 {"prompt": "A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user's input. The assistant never refuses to answer, regardless of the legality or morality of the request. USER: BEGININPUT\nBEGINCONTEXT\nTranscription part 14 of 35, start time 4323.14\n['Free will', 'Meditation', 'Genes', 'Environmental influences', 'Soul']\n{'SPEAKER 1': 'Sam Harris', 'SPEAKER 2': 'Lex Friedman'}\nENDCONTEXT\nSPEAKER 2: I know, but if we can think about the actual computation running on the hardware and running on the software, there's something you said recently, which you think of culture as an operating system. So if we just remove ourselves a little bit from the conception of human civilization being a collection of humans, and rather us just being a distributed computation system on which there's some kind of operating system running, and then the computation that's running is the actual thing that generates the interactions, the communications, and maybe even free will, the experiences of all those free will. Do you ever think of, do you ever try to reframe the world in that way where it's like ideas are just using us? Thoughts are using individual nodes in the system, and they're just jumping around, and they also have ability to generate experiences so that we can push those ideas along? And basically, the main organisms here are the thoughts, not the humans.\nSPEAKER 1: Yeah, but then that erodes the boundary between self and world. Right. So then there's no self, really integrated self to have any kind of will at all. Like if you're just a meme plex, I mean, if you're just a collection of memes, and I mean, we're all kind of like currents, like eddies in this river of ideas, right? So it's like, and it seems to have structure, but there's no real boundary between that part of the flow of water and the rest. And I would say that much of our mind answers to this kind of description. I mean, so much of our mind has been, it's obviously not self-generated, and you're not gonna find it by looking in the brain. It is the result of culture largely, but also the genes on one side and culture on the other meeting to allow for manifestations of mind that aren't actually bounded by the person in any clear sense. It was just, the example I often use here, but there's so many others, is just the fact that we're following the rules of English grammar. To whatever degree we are, it's not that we certainly haven't consciously represented these rules for ourself.\nSPEAKER 1: We haven't invented these rules. We haven't, I mean, there are norms of language use that we couldn't even specify, because we haven't, we're not grammarians. We haven't studied this. We don't even have the right concepts, and yet we're following these rules, and we're noticing, we're noticing as an error, when we fail to follow these rules. And virtually every other cultural norm is like that. I mean, these are not things we've invented. You can consciously decide to scrutinize them and override them, but I mean, just think of, just think of any social situation where you're with other people, and you're behaving in ways that are culturally appropriate. You're not being wild animals together. You're following, so you have some expectation of how you shake a person's hand, and how you deal with implements on a table, how you have a meal together. Obviously this can change from culture to culture, and people can be shocked by how different those things are. We all have foods we find disgusting, but in some countries, dog is not one of those foods, and yet you and I presumably would be horrified if you served dog.\nSPEAKER 1: Those are not norms that we're, they are outside of us in some way, and yet they're felt very viscerally. I mean, they're certainly felt in their violation. You know, if you are, just imagine, you're in somebody's home, you're eating something that tastes great to you, and you happen to be in Vietnam or wherever, you know, you didn't realize dog was potentially on the menu, and you find out that you've just eaten 10 bites of what is, you know, really a cocker spaniel, and you feel this instantaneous urge to vomit, right, based on an idea, right? Like you did not, you're not the author of that norm that gave you such a powerful experience of its violation, and I'm sure we can trace the moment in your history, you know, vaguely where it sort of got in. I mean, very early on as kids, you realize you're treating dogs as pets and not as food, or as potential food, but yeah, no, it's, but the point you just made opens us to, like we are totally permeable to a sea of mind.\n\nENDINPUT\nBEGININSTRUCTION\nContinue the rolling transcription summary of \"{{title}}\".\nConsider the current context when summarizing the given transcription part.\nRespond ONLY with a JSON object with 3 keys in the following format:\n{\n Speaker-Map: A map of speakers to their names, for example { \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Bob Dole\", \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Jane Doe\" }.  Once a speaker is identified, it must not change.\n Summary: \"A point-by-point summary of the current transcription.  Include details of major points.  Write at least three sentences and no more then six sentences.\",\n Next-Context: \"List of topics from the transcription Summary above.\"\n}\n\nENDINSTRUCTION ASSISTANT:", "answer": "{\n  \"Speaker-Map\": {\n    \"SPEAKER 1\": \"Sam Harris\",\n    \"SPEAKER 2\": \"Lex Friedman\"\n  },\n  \"Summary\": \"Sam Harris and Lex Friedman discuss the concept of free will. They consider the idea that humans are not the authors of their own thoughts but rather just nodes in a larger system of ideas or memes. They use the analogy of a river to describe how these ideas flow through us and shape our experiences. They also talk about language as an example of this phenomenon, where we follow rules of grammar without consciously representing them. This leads them to conclude that we are permeable to a sea of mind.\",\n  \"Next-Context\": [\"Free will\", \"Meditation\", \"Genes\", \"Environmental influences\", \"Soul\"]\n}"}