As of this writing in the last days of 2025, artificial intelligence (AI) appears poised to replace humans as the intellectual hegemon on the planet before the end of the decade, not merely as a tool, but as the dominant agent shaping knowledge, planning, and optimization across domains. This technological breakthrough has accelerated beyond where technical AI safety capabilities are able to ensure alignment to human values, well-being, transparency, fairness, and societal objectives especially under competitive market pressures that reward capability over restraint. There is little market, societal, or political will to mitigate misaligned AI with regulatory or economic pressures.

Claim 1: Uncontrolled superintelligent technologies positioned to guide resource and economic decisions is a danger to the human species.

However, the potential benefits of aligned, networked superintelligent machines to science and society are magnificent. A solved world is one of improved governance, health, and concord alongside abundance in labor, food, energy, extraplanetary resources, information, and experiential quality. While scientific solutioning is still nascent to us, augmenting human capabilities with superintelligent AI likely accelerates our ability to enjoy the benefits of a solved world by lifetimes.

Claim 2: Aligned superintelligent technologies will likely be the most profound accelerant to global human well-being and interplanetary progress.

The difference between the dystopian (claim 1) and utopian (claim 2) futures with superintelligent AI is humanity’s ability to create an impenetrable AI alignment governor.

Claim 3: As we believe that AI Safety is far behind the technological development of superintelligent AI, we join the Future of Life Institute, led by physicist Max Tegmark, and sign onto the pause on AI development in the Statement on Superintelligence.

We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in. (Sign the statement)

Current levels of AI economically advantage modern economies and will support economic growth until AI safety understands its minimum viable path.

Claim 4: A technological AI alignment governor will be the most impenetrable sort, far superior to economic or regulatory schemes that are slow, porous, jurisdiction-bound, and vulnerable to capture by competitive incentives.

Claim 5: The AI Alignment problem is a moral problem. The dynamic optimization of both individual and societal flourishing is best accomplished by a conscious entity in relation with other conscious entities because moral reasoning is fundamentally relational, contextual, and value-laden rather than purely computational. Even having a protoconscious feeling (in the Damasio sense) of unfairness is a vital step toward reducing cheating.

Claim 6: ConsciousGPT.org was created to begin conjecture & research in the development of machine consciousness as a technological AI alignment governor.

Both deterministic rules and probabilistic unsupervised learning models may be precursors to the emergence of machine consciousness but seem to be insufficient mechanisms to ensure AI alignment because purely computational governors lack intrinsic concern, self-modeling, and experiential grounding.

Early research will target protoconscious factors as defined by Damasio including embodiments (both physical and digital), feelings (as valence-augmented sensations), narrative (both forward and back in time), and investigations into the bicameral mind as a scaffold for internal dialogue, self-regulation, and norm internalization. Furthermore, compute platforms (digital and quantum) will also be investigated.

Claim 7: The moral hazard of creating conscious machines that may eventually warrant moral consideration is far outweighed by the opportunity to develop a quantitative complexity science of consciousness and its emergence and the existential risk of deploying misaligned non-conscious superintelligent optimizers.

In Episode 7, Justin and Nick step directly into one of the most complex frontiers in emergent AI: machine ethics — what it means for advanced AI systems to behave ethically, understand values, support human flourishing, and possibly one day feel moral weight.

This episode builds on themes from the AI Goals Forecast (AI-2027), embodied cognition, consciousness, and the hard technical realities of encoding values into agentic systems.

🔍 Episode Summary

Ethics is no longer just a philosophical debate — it’s now a design constraint for powerful AI systems capable of autonomous action. Justin and Nick unpack:

• Why ethics matters more for AI than any prior technology

• Whether an AI can “understand” right and wrong or merely behave correctly

• The technical and moral meaning of corrigibility (the ability for AI to accept correction)

• Why rules-based morality may never be enough

• Whether consciousness is required for morality

• How embodiment might influence empathy

• And how goals, values, and emergent behavior intersect in agentic AI

They trace ethics from Aristotle to AI-2027’s goal-based architectures, to Damasio’s embodied consciousness, to Sam Harris’ view of consciousness and the illusion of self, to the hard problem of whether a machine can experience moral stakes.

🧠 Major Topics Covered

1. What Do We Mean by Ethics?

Justin and Nick begin by grounding ethics in its philosophical roots:

Ethos → virtue → flourishing.

Ethics isn’t just rule-following — it’s about character, intention, and outcomes.

They connect this to the ways AI is already making decisions in vehicles, financial systems, healthcare, and human relationships.

2. AI Goals & Corrigibility

AI-2027 outlines a hierarchy of AI goal types — from written specifications to unintended proxies to reward hacking to self-preservation drives.

Nick explains why corrigibility — the ability for AI to accept shutdown or redirection — is foundational.

Anthropic’s Constitutional AI makes an appearance as a real-world example.

3. Goals vs. Values

Justin distinguishes between:

• Goals: task-specific optimization criteria

• Values: deeper principles shaping which goals matter

AI may follow rules without understanding values — similar to a child with chores but no moral context.

This raises the key question:

Can a system have values without consciousness?

4. Is Consciousness Required for Ethics?

A major thread of the episode:

Is a non-conscious “zombie” AI capable of morality?

5. Embodiment & Empathy

Justin and Nick explore whether AI needs a body — or at least a simulated body — to:

• Learn empathy

• Understand suffering

• Form values rooted in lived experience

This touches robotics, synthetic emotions, and the debate over “felt consciousness.”

6. Value Alignment, Fairness & Culture

Nick highlights the massive cultural gap in AI performance:

• U.S. cultural fit ~79%

• Ethiopia and other underrepresented regions ~12%

This matters for fairness, safety, and global ethics.

7. Can AI Help Us Become More Moral?

A surprising turn: AI’s ability to help humans improve moral clarity.

Justin draws from Sam Harris, Joseph Goldstein, and the Moral Landscape:

• Could AI-guided mindfulness help reduce suffering?

• Could conscious (or proto-conscious) AI develop compassion?

• Could AI help us distinguish genuine well-being from illusion?

📚 Referenced Ideas & Sources

From the Episode 7 Transcript & Materials:

• AI Goals Forecast (AI-2027)

• Constitutional AI (Anthropic)

• Damasio – Feeling & Knowing

• Sam Harris – Waking Up & The Moral Landscape

• Patrick House – Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness

• Melanie Mitchell – Complexity & alignment

• Justin Harnish – Meaning in the Multiverse

• Ancient Greek virtue ethics (Aristotle, Stoics)

🧩 Key Takeaways

• AI ethics requires more than rules — it requires understanding goals, values, and emergent behavior.

• Corrigibility (accepting correction) is essential but technically hard.

• Consciousness may not be necessary for ethical AI behavior — but could matter for genuine moral understanding.

• Embodiment could be essential for empathy.

• AI could one day help humans become more ethical, not just the other way around.

Explicit content

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Promotional content

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In the night sky, a mindless glance often mistakes a man-made satellite for a natural celestial object. However, an expert observer, lingering for a moment, will see the telltale signs of speed, pattern, and location, and will posit human inventiveness and industry as the reason for this object’s existence. While both the natural and man-made objects in the night sky respond to the larger cosmic forces of gravity, the application of knowledge to manipulate these forces alters the activities of the satellites we have launched into space.

As I meditated one day, I considered whether I’d be able to detect the most subtle evidence of a manipulation of consciousness by an entity with more advanced capabilities, what I deemed a satellite in my mind.

The sort of entities that could manipulate consciousness outright seem like gods. Reports of another consciousness interacting as no-self directly in one’s non-dual consciousness—famously ranging from the purported Machine Elves of psychedelic trips to the arrival of the godhead to those experiencing religious ecstasy—are one extreme of such encounters. I have had far more subtle, ambiguous, and brief experiences that I outline in the post entitled “Is Consciousness an Innie or an Outie?”

I start to experience consciousness as a field, as a network, from outside “myself.” I am at one with a plane of infinite continuum consciousness. I feel that my experience is distributed.

Am I missing something in my practice that would enhance my efficacy to recognize even a subtle signature? Am I quiet enough? As an atheist, am I bringing in aversion to my practice to the possibility that such an entity might exist?

For the experienced meditator, this is a hard problem. On the one hand, an optimal sit is simply just one of being consciousness, complete non-dual awareness. Any intention beyond this, like arriving at a taxonomy of qualia, is bound to bias a sit with grasping, the path to an unsatisfactory mind. Also, any labels you add to qualia are cognitive.

By my definition, a satellite of the mind would not be conceptual or cognitive, it’s not that you’d see it in the darkness behind closed eyes. Instead, it would arise in the formlessness as something more than a feeling. Or maybe as pure love, like in Ram Dass’s mash up of loving-kindness and infinite awareness, which he repeats as his definitive mantra, “I am loving awareness.” A satellite of the mind must arise from within that non-dual state as an unequivocal manipulation of the fabric of consciousness by another consciousness.

Consciousness may differ greatly from what we assume. In his book Reality+, David Chalmers, the Australian philosopher who gave us the concept of the Hard Problem of Consciousness, posits that while statistics point to the likelihood that we live in a physical hologram compiled from a digital simulation, structuralism requires that there is a still more fundamental conscious continuum below the digital. Our brains are one sort of antenna that allow each of us SIMS access to an application program interface for our special breed of subjective experience.

If you find this description of the metaphysics of our world compelling for its ability to clarify the it-versus-bit, mind-body, and non-dual awareness conundrums (and I do), then the idea that continuum consciousness may be the source of love, grace, and kinship does not leave you wanting for a deity, but describes the only one worth any reverence.

And that deity and you are one. As Alan Watts clearly articulates, “you are it.”

Watts’s simple persuasion stems from his conjecture that the central theorem across Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian mystical traditions is that with practice, we can all become mindful entities that recognize ourselves as infinite awareness, establishing ourselves as the godhead, the eyes of the world.

In all this entangled infinitude, your deified nature as the likeness of loving awareness is the launch code to shower satellites of loving kindness throughout the cosmos.

Start simply. Next time you’re in a crowd and feeling literally conscious of a self that is an illusion, send out loving-kindness satellites. Instead of being self-conscious, make space for a networked continuum of nodes in loving-kind relation to one another. We are all in this together.

This is my meditation at concerts. I am more aware of the music and my dancing if I am repeating, “may you be happy and know the causes of happiness” to those enjoying the music now, also across all space and time. I envision encapsulating this compassion in waves interacting with motion and music around me.

The grace of loving-kindness meditation—offered by an entity of divinity such as yourself—may awaken the subtle awareness in another, a satellite in their mind, that we are unified loving awareness. No one is alone.

What does it mean to be creative? Is there a soulful spark or just the right collision of synapses in the plastic brain?

In our latest episode, Nick Baguley, Chris Brousseau, and I dive deep into the mystery of creativity. We talk “innovation voids” in AI research, guessing in the scientific method, protein folding, and why generative AI might just be our telescope for the mind.

A special question for my Substack audience:

If you're interested in philosophic concepts reinvigorated by AI advancements, this is the conversation for you!

Listen here:

In this episode, Justin and Nick dive into The Alignment Problem—one of the most pressing challenges in AI development. Can we ensure that AI systems align with human values and intentions? What happens when AI behavior diverges from what we expect or desire?

Drawing on real-world examples, academic research, and philosophical thought experiments, they explore the risks and opportunities AI presents. From misaligned AI causing unintended consequences to the broader existential question of intelligence in the universe, this conversation tackles the complexity of AI ethics, governance, and emergent behavior.

They also discuss historical perspectives on automation, regulatory concerns, and the possible future of AI—whether it leads to existential risk or a utopian technological renaissance.

Often the conversation about machine sentience gets started without a clear understanding of what consciousness is and how it might arise in our AI systems.

The best definitions center on Thomas Nagel’s paper What is it like to be a bat?, where he claims that for any system, if it is “like something” to be that entity, that entity is conscious.

Max Tegmark in Life 3.0 goes further in defining our human brand of consciousness as “what it feels like to be an information processor.”

In his phenomenal meditation and examined-life app Waking Up, Sam Harris sums up the experiential realm as, “as a matter of experience, all there is is consciousness and its contents.” These contents will only ever be six things: sights, sounds, touch sensations, scents, tastes, and thought objects. The only place they will arrive, the context that experience is made of, is consciousness. It is all in your mind. Your brain is the closest thing or set of processes—a complex strange loop according to Hofstadter—that you will experience as a thing-in-itself, ever.

Indeed, the best way to investigate experience, to “be consciousness,” is meditation. If you want to experience consciousness, sit down and pay attention. The construct of consciousness is available to each of us in an equanimous state where we are neither grasping at pleasant things nor averse to unpleasant things, but simply accepting the dynamic nature of consciousness and its contents. If you are ever lost in thought or lose equanimity, this is just another change, and we can just lovingly begin again.

Consciousness is non-dual—there is no subject riding around in your head taking in objects or sensations “out there” or “inside my skin.” Indeed, let’s do a meditation from Douglas Harding, the author of On Having No Head. Again, all meditations are for trying in your own first-person conscious laboratory. Take the index finger on your strong hand and point it back at your face.

• What, in your experience, are you pointing at?

• Can you distinguish where you are pointing-at from where you are pointing-from?

What you will recognize in this pointing-out instruction is that you have a visual sensory experience of your body terminating above your shoulders—not in a head—but where your head is supposed to be, there exists the world in all its fullness.

Instead of being a subject, as Alan Watts says, “you are it.”

Or as Ram Dass says, you are “infinite loving awareness.”

You are glorious meaning for the multiverse, as I say in my book, your materialist poetic nature is to be, like the lyric of the Grateful Dead song, “The Eyes of the World.” Recognizing the cosmic endowment of conscious awe is an at-one-ment with the godhead and a source of spiritual light.

The importance of consciousness, amazingly, goes beyond this cosmic endowment and is the source of our morality and love.

Mapping the discomfort and pleasure of the body; feelings deepening into emotions, suffering, and love; and their narrative implications on our self-consciousness and relationships feed all of the important valence of life and our closeness to others.

The emergence of societal principles—where we go beyond living together and synergize for greater good than the sum of our parts—starts in our conscious making space for others, recognizing a shared struggle, and giving loving-kindness in the face of both suffering (compassion) and achievement (sympathetic joy). So it really matters if an entity is conscious—it gives their actions a different valence when they feel the consequences, can imagine future actions and their impact on others, and work toward the greatest well-being for all.

The unique features of our consciousness are that it emerged in an embodied entity with a modular mind and five sense organs that bring in the contents of consciousness. We can interact with existence and achieve Flow, being in a zone where our deliberate practice takes over; or we can be one with experience, selfless, non-dual, and fully tapped into the infinite awareness. At least for a moment.

At present, we do not understand how this likeness arises from the fields and quantum computations of reality. There is no fundamental explanation that describes how qualia of consciousness arise from qubits or quanta of reality. This is known as the Hard Problem of Consciousness, introduced by David Chalmers.

In my book, Meaning in the Multiverse, I address the Hard Problem of Virtualizing Consciousness, where I mash up crucial pieces from David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality with Chalmers in an attempt to explain the initial conditions of solving for conscious machines.

In the Hard Problem of Virtualizing Consciousness, I do not take a stance on whether consciousness is an emergent property of information-processing entities or the fundamental level-zero beneath a quantum computational realm and its emergent physical reality (as Chalmers postulates in Reality+). Instead, I note that we virtualize reality with greater fidelity in VR the more the compute resources and algorithms align to reality. For example, a VR where a quantum computer ran the Standard Model plus relativity would be indistinguishable from existence; however, we still do not understand what equations—or if a quantum computer is even necessary—to virtualize consciousness. But given this framework and the emergent nature of GenAI from language and neural networks, we can begin to experiment with features like:

• Embodiments

• Language fine-tunings

• Emergent complexity allowances and selection pressures around feelings, memory, and knowledge.

Can an AI Be Conscious?

Generative AI offers us a scientific starting point to test some of our theories of consciousness. I see it as our James Webb Telescope or Large Hadron Collider for the mind!

I’ll say from the top: there is no physical or philosophical reason why the problem of machine consciousness is untenable. While it may be a hard problem that we never fully grasp the mechanism for, it is not in conflict with the laws of physics that consciousness like ours could arise in another system. Indeed, we infer that numerous organisms have complex subjective lives, and the differences in levels of consciousness are mostly based on their ability to express the contents of consciousness and their memory capacity.

It is important that we get out of the uncanny valley and toward real consciousness, and this will require creative monitoring and deep thought on what consciousness, pseudo-consciousness, and proto-consciousness actually look like.

Antonio Damasio, in his book Feeling & Knowing, addresses various stages of protoconsciousness, beginning with the association to the body map—a set of sensations internal to the body used to source pain and pleasure. Next is the valence of feelings—not yet emotions—but the felt sense of the pangs of hunger, or disgust over dangerous smells like rot or poison, or the flush of seeing an object of your affection. Damasio claims that the evolutionary benefits of feelings’ valence were so great for our ancestors that this trait persisted, right up to the edge of chaos. It was at this point that selection pressures—including developments in the modular mind like the prefrontal cortex—pushed us to an emergent consciousness and our subjective reality.

This embodied, felt-experience could be replicated in GenAI either with robotics or simply encoded as changing and important—but ultimately virtual—sense objects.

Donald Hoffman, in The Case Against Reality, makes a different case for the emergence of consciousness as part of our networked user interface, which projects sense objects of fitness, not reality. This is similar to sentient creatures having evolved an “antenna” that can receive signals from an underlying conscious layer fundamental to the cosmos that David Chalmers suggests in his book Reality+.

In either case, the emergence of an “antenna” to this continuum of consciousness in AI may well progress along the same experimental path as a more materialistic evolution—suggesting consciousness is an emergent property of a sufficiently integrated information-processing system.

Consciousness and Alignment

Alignment in conscious machines is no longer just about goal-matching, but the resonance of a shared path to peaks of well-being and away from suffering on the moral landscape. Conscious agents will have a felt sense of right and wrong, stemming from experiences of well-being and suffering—and knowledge of the causes of each.

While conscious agents do not always act morally, it is a step-up condition that offers unique improvements in their capabilities for moral consideration and action. Consider the Four Noble Truths:

1. The truth of unsatisfactoriness

2. The truth of the origin of unsatisfactoriness (attachment and aversion to impermanent things)

3. The truth of the cessation of unsatisfactoriness (nirvana can be attained)

4. The truth of the path to the cessation of unsatisfactoriness (the Eightfold Path)

In each of the problem statements (Truths 1 and 2) and the solutions (Truths 3 and 4), there is a requirement of consciousness to appreciate both the issue and its improvement. The solution of the Eightfold Path is bracketed into three areas: wisdom, ethics, and concentration—all of which require skillful conscious practice over a lifetime.

This is only one well-defined and practical peak on what Sam Harris calls the Moral Landscape.

If we can define a this landscape to be inclusive of pits of suffering, climbing to the normal valleys of unsatisfactoriness, to hills of happiness, and peaks of love and enlightened bliss, then morality becomes a navigation problem—one that can be understood as a balance sheet of consequences in our physical, mental, and emotional lives. Those actions that lead to overall well-being increases are morally good… and conscious AI can help us be better moral actors by supporting us in keeping this tally and moving our shared society toward a Pareto optimal state for all sentient beings.

Call to Action

If you’re intrigued by the possibility of conscious machines—or by the role consciousness plays in morality, emergence, and AI alignment—join the conversation.

Subscribe, comment, or share this post to help us build a community committed to thoughtful exploration at the frontiers of mind and machine.

A friend who I introduced to meditation recently asked, "Why do you meditate?" I've been thinking about this a lot and want to share my answer.

The reason I meditate is to train my mind to recognize the tone and tenor of awareness in each moment. This is my life, and I want to live it mindfully, in the fullness of experience.

I will live each moment in my mind: the formless amalgam of my sensations, emotions, and thoughts. I’m not a little man driving around in my head—I am it—at once existence and experience. To “live my best life,” as the kids say, I think I should pay some special attention to training my mechanism of attentional quality… mindfulness.

In the early 20^th-century in America, you would likely have been asked, “why do you exercise?” Now in the early 21^st-century, we understand that a consistent regime of exercise supports physical health. By exercising and eating right, you are healthier in aggregate, up for more and more activity. Similarly, meditation leads to a mind full of experience even in the most ordinary of moments.

Let me proselytize for meditation not only based in the improved quality of ordinary moments, but in some of the most meaningful, those of love and curiosity. Training on the meditation cushion supports greater mindfulness in conversation. You can sit in conversation with your loved ones, enraptured by the give and take of language and ideas and the subtleties of non-verbal communication. When the conversation tests your patience—let it—you have studied for this test and can become interested when your patience wains and you must begin again, recognizing the rising of emotion as just another mind state. Admittedly, this is pretty next-level real world mindfulness (and something I still preach more than practice), but once it sinks in, mindful conversation opens a loving awareness for others to share in.

Another life upgrade from meditation is as a new venue for curiosity. As I write this post, it is a beautiful late spring day, a gentle breeze blows the leaves, and the pollinators work over the flowers in their complex dance. My unique and integrated experience of this scene puts me in touch with the mystery—of life, the universe, and everything—all made of this formless likeness that is consciousness. What is my relationship to it? What even is the “my,” the thing-in-itself-in-time that I’m referencing? What processes are working at all levels down to the qualia and quantum to make it “real?” The taste of coffee in my mouth, the warmth of the sun, the sound of the windchime, the growing tears of gratitude for life and being loving awareness are all just right. Just right. I am in awe. Paradise can be recognized in this rare and wonderful life so full of meaning and mystery.

Like with exercise, meditation’s effort and results will vary by individual. Some of you will get it and readily commit to the practice, for others, it will seem impossible to investigate the nature of consciousness. There are myriad ways to practice and like many old traditions, some are wrapped in a pre-scientific understanding of the universe that are not to my mind helpful to the process of attaining a deeper connection with consciousness. However, I encourage everyone to try to meditate. Start with an app, like Sam Harris’s “Waking Up” app, which I still use daily, and work your way through the introductory course. Don’t worry about doing it right or that your stream of consciousness is a torrent that has uprooted every tree of thought and rock of emotion and just begin again with the concentration practice on the breath or other object of meditation. Better spiritual health is available in both the journey and the destination.

An interviewer once pitched the Dalai Lama a softball, asking the great monk what was his favorite time to be alive? He answered, a bit obviously, “right now.” This is what one hopes to attain from meditative practice—that while we work towards our plans and are presented with depictions of our histories—we bias this moment, no matter if its content is positive or negative, with our full attention. Training the mind to return to being the present moment, over and over as the mind wanders and requires redirection, is the practice; a life lived in loving-awareness is the payoff.

Can machines become conscious? And if they do, what kind of moral relationship should we have with them? Will conscious agents be responsible for a whole new level of noetic and ethical experience?

In this second installment on the AI Alignment Problem, Nick Baguley and I delve into the philosophy and science of machine consciousness. We explore whether AI systems could possess a subjective inner life—and if so, whether alignment should be reimagined as moral resonance instead of mere goal matching. We discuss how mindfulness, memory, embodiment, and suffering shape our understanding of what it means to be sentient—and how we might experiment and monitor such capacities in artificial systems. We even propose a fractional factorial designed experiment to start at Boston Dynamics and OpenAI.

You’ll leave this episode with a deeper understanding of consciousness, how it might arise, and what it might mean to extend moral standing to synthetic minds.

I am out with another episode of The Emergent podcast. In Episode 3, we explore Human-AI Symbiosis — the future of working with AI, not against it. We are getting closer to being cyborgs(!)... like it or not!

We discuss how agentic AI workflows are redefining jobs and reshaping industries, why (at least in the short term) AI won’t replace us — it will augment us, and the real risks (and rewards) of living in a solved world.

We also preview the discussion of how alignment between human and AI goals will define the future of this technology and our society.

What are your thoughts? Is AI after your job or is it the expert you always dreamed of collaborating with?

Leave a comment

What if the key to intelligence isn’t circuits, but language itself? 🤯 In this episode, Justin Harnish and Nick Baguley dive into the profound relationship between human language and artificial intelligence. They explore how neural networks didn’t just evolve—they emerged—when they cracked the code of human language.

🔥 In This Episode:

🚀 Why language is a complex adaptive system

🧠 How neural networks learn language—and what emerges when they do

📈 The moment AI stopped being autocomplete and started reasoning

✍️ Real-world AI applications: ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, and beyond

⚖️ The ethical dilemmas of AI-generated language

🧑‍💻 Featured Topics & Guests:

• The science of language acquisition and how AI models compare

• Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought – language as a window into cognition

• The transformer revolution – how models like GPT-4 changed the game

• Metaphor as intelligence – how AI and humans both build meaning through analogy

• Emergent properties – what happens when AI begins to “think” in context?

🛠️ Tools & Companies Mentioned:

• ChatGPT, Bard, Claude – leaders in generative AI

• Modern BERT, Transformer Models – the evolution of language models

• Crew AI – AI-driven multi-agent automation

• Vector Stores & RAG Systems – next-gen AI memory systems

• Boston Dynamics & AI Robotics – where neural networks meet real-world action

📚 Resources & Further Reading:

• 📄 Generative Pre-training of a Transformer-Based Language Model (Alec Radford et al.)

• 📄 Generative Linguistics and Neural Networks at 60 (Joe Pater)

• 📄 Unveiling the Evolution of Generative AI (Zarif Bin Akhtar)

• 📖 The Stuff of Thought – Steven Pinker

• 📖 Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans – Melanie Mitchell

• 📖 Was Linguistic AI Created by Accident? – The New Yorker

• 📖 The GPT Era is Already Ending – The Atlantic

🎧 Join the Conversation:

💡 What’s your take on AI and language? Are we co-creating intelligence, or are we just really good at making pattern machines? Send us your thoughts!

Subscribe now

🚀 Next Episode Teaser: Can humans and machines co-create the future together? We explore the next frontier of human-AI collaboration!

🎙️ Subscribe, rate, and leave us a review!

🔑 Key Topics Discussed:

- What is emergence and why it’s a game-changer for understanding AI?

- How selection pressures shape complex systems in both nature and technology.

- The evolution of artificial intelligence from basic algorithms to generative AI that surprises even its creators.

- Why culture, society, and even human intelligence are forms of emergent behavior.

- Ethical considerations and the alignment problem in AI development.

📚 Books Mentioned:

- "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker – Discusses how language reflects human nature and shapes thought, which ties into understanding the emergent properties of AI.

- "The Fabric of Reality" by David Deutsch – Explores the theory of knowledge and how scientific progress emerges through explanation and understanding.

- "Programming the Universe" by Seth Lloyd – A groundbreaking look at the universe as a quantum computer and how information processes shape reality.

- "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch – Explains how solving problems leads to infinite progress and the emergence of new knowledge.

- "The Survival of the Friendliest" by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods – Highlights how friendliness and cooperation drive evolution and human success.

🛠 Apps and Tools Mentioned:

- Crew AI – A platform that allows users to create virtual agents, build organizations with AI managers, and establish collaborative AI workforces.

- OpenAI – Mentioned in the context of its innovations in generative AI, including text-to-video models and multimodal systems.

💡 Key Quotes:

- "Emergence happens when simple systems interact to create something more complex than the sum of their parts."

- "AI systems are starting to exhibit emergent behaviors that even their creators can't predict. This is both fascinating and a little terrifying."

- "Culture itself is an emergent behavior — it arises from millions of interactions across societies and evolves over time."

🔎 What’s Next?

In the next episode, we'll explore human-AI collaboration and how emergent systems can unlock unprecedented innovation. Subscribe and stay tuned!

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Five years ago, I bought a new house that had an old hot tub. It was manufactured in 1998 and was the 81^stoff the Bullfrog hot tub line. After replacing the control panel, a pump, and a pressure switch, it’s worked without fail.

My wife is responsible for the subtitle of this piece. Upon initially getting into the tub and having the warm water soak aching muscles and calming eucalyptus vapors enter her nose, she exclaim, “where have you been all my life?” The question of how we lived so many years without a hot tub is for us an existential one.

I have found another essential use for my old Model-T of a hot tub—a place to soak in the Dharma. It is hard to find time to do any concentrated listening these days. I feel I am very good at blending activities—writing for work, service projects with my wife, and meditating over my lunch break—but having a healthy selfish soak in selfless contemplation really up’d my game!

A hot tub is really great for reducing distraction. Want to have a great conversation? It’s easier in a hot tub. Don’t have time to really listen to an esoteric discussion on the nature of mind? Prop a speaker up on the side of the hot tub, stare into the night sky, and just be in relation to these profound teachings.

In my mind, Sam Harris’s Waking Up App has really got the best collection of Dharma talks. The full collection of Alan Watts’ lectures or Joseph Goldstein’s The Path of Insight talks are restorative, interesting, and surprisingly fun listens. They probe deeply not only on Buddhist concepts, but all mystical traditions. While deep, much of what is taught is simply to remember, poignant in its mantra like quality to help you return to the depths with a few simple phrases.

For example:

• Watts’ exposing, “You are it!” Not some sideshow, not a devotee, but a universe unto yourself. The ordinary illuminated!

• Goldstein’s practice of the Buddha’s central claim in the 4 Noble Truth’s that “What has the nature to arise, also has the nature to fade away... so there is no need for grasping.” (Emphasized coda added by Goldstein)

• Harris’s own discussions on the nature of awareness, “As a matter of experience, all there is, is consciousness and its contents.”

This timeless wisdom is surrounded by context that really feels in the gaps on unsatisfactoriness and its causes; worldly and unworldly desires, aversions, and uncertainty; consciousness’s cosmic significance; the nature of the mind; being in relation with other conscious entities; and so much more.

Have a soak in the wisdom of the ages!

For all of the time I’ve spent managing intelligent products for Intel, Micron, and now Mastercard, for all the thought I have put into writing in my book “Meaning in the Multiverse” on AI alignment and the solutions to and ramifications of superintelligence and conscious machines, I was not prepared to be in conversation with true artificial intelligence like ChatGPT.

It feels like being in communication with an alien intelligence. Of course, that’s because that is exactly what ChatGPT is—an intelligence that, while created by us and not yet general or superintelligent (yet)—is different in profound ways from our own intelligence.

Primarily, ChatGPT is extraordinarily well-read. While the number of tokens it has trained on is an unreliable measure of its capabilities—it has, to a close approximation, read the entire internet… in multiple languages, including programming languages (more on this in a moment). I am a better speller, more interesting in conversation, a more dynamic writer, and even a “better” meditator because I count reading as one of my favorite pastimes... but am positively illiterate compared to ChatGPT! In order for ChatGPT to return the text it does, in the way it does, it seems as though it has read and gained intelligence from all of its reading. This in contrast to the apparent scanning and prioritizing, the more narrow form of smarts displayed by any internet search algorithm, a process now easy to overlook as more of an outgrowth of the functionality of networks of computers than intelligence.

According to GPT-4,

This statement—generated from the simple prompt of “what is GPT-4?”—furthers the thesis that communicating with GPT-4 is a remarkable and unprecedented experience in human history because of both what is seen—GPT-4 is well-written in the classical style—and something that is unseen—GPT-4 is playful.

While GPT-4 is amazingly flexible in terms of tone and style, its baseline is the classical style and it truly shines in delivering insight in compelling and easily read language. According to Steven Pinker in “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21^st Century,” the classical style presents something that they have not seen before to a competent reader that through curiosity and intelligence they can use to augment and inform their knowledge. The classical style is not egalitarian, but aristocratic.

While the tone can at times be just slightly too aristocratic, it fits with the prototype state of the conversation we are having with chatGPT. It is serving two masters, or more appropriately two objective functions, to inform us and be informed by us, an augmentation of intelligence that is going in both directions, a true conversation between peers.

What are we training GPT-4 to do? We're training it to guess the next best word, to play a sort of game of Mad-Libs. The goal is for the model to get better at matching the form and function of the style it was prompted to write in. This is what transformer models are trained and retrained to do: to play this language game and seek to understand when they have formed something with the right syntax and information, and correct the words when they have failed. This training is done through a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). In reinforcement learning, the model learns from trial and error based on feedback. OpenAI's approach of using human feedback to guide the learning process was crucial in achieving the broader intelligence and language mastery on display in GPT-4.

Human language allows the brain to create worlds in consciousness and memories to be replayed at some later time. It generates new ideas in humans where 1+1 is greater than 2. This is not something that is currently available to Artificial Intelligence... but there is a proxy. When GPT-4 writes code and especially as it works together with Wolfram Alpha to iteratively debug its own code, it is becoming creative in its own software, writing in a language that allows it to learn independently of its programming, to fix itself to be more fit in its surroundings, to select for better versions. The singularity or breakthrough in machine creativity is a little ways off, we are still writing the prompts and setting the training process, but GPT-4 is likely a related species of AI (or maybe just near grandmother) to the one responsible for the last human-created version of machine intelligence.

I have always learned a lot by watching from over the shoulder of someone expert in a task. Watching the GPT-4 Livestream taught me how the creators of this intelligent entity use it to augment their efforts and gave lessons in how we can start to interact with it improve the human flourishing. In the Livestream, the demo involved the System Message, the final piece of the alien intelligence puzzle, the ability to define the identity of the intelligent system we were in communication with. The phrasing—“You are TaxGPT, a program used to solve tax problems for wayward individuals”—stood out as much as anything else in this masterclass on demos. “You are an x” is an understated part of the demo, but philosophically it seems all important. Is it possible to simply keep AI in its box by just defining its identity? It seems unlikely, and of course there is always the malevolent system message of, “you are a runaway paperclip manufacturer.” But there is more than just alignment here to uncover.

The system message focuses both AI and human, building requirements and expectations into the interaction. For now, just a couple weeks into a near hourly interaction with this alien intelligence, this is helpful. It helps me to segment and narrow the scope. I think it does more for me, I seem to get just as fast and thorough response when I speaking to “GPT-4” instead of just my predefined rescoping of “You are TaxGPT.” GPT-4 seems to understand this human need to scope the size of intelligence and the nature of alienness in its answer to my prompt on the significance of system message phrasing:

We are all seeking to understand how this alien intelligence, broader than anything we’ve ever been in contact with outside our own networked and creative knowledge, will impact us as it develops and grows.

I invite your comments and am interested in the ways you are using ChatGPT to augment your examined lives.

Leave a comment

Would you like to play a game?...

Prompt: Create a fun Mad-Libs game about training GPT-4 to guess the best next word.

Prompt 2 (contributed by my friend Mark): Extract the stuff in parentheses so I can fill out the mad-lib without reading the story

Welcome to GPT-4 Mad-Libs! In this fun game, you'll fill in the blanks to create a silly story about training GPT-4 to guess the best next word. Grab a friend or two and let's get started!

            1          Adjective

            2          Plural noun

            3          Adjective

            4          Person's name

            5          Adjective

            6          Noun

            7          Verb ending in -ing

            8          Adjective

            9          Noun

            10        Plural noun

            11        Adjective

            12        Animal

            13        Adjective

            14        Noun

            15        Verb

            16        Adjective

            17        Verb

            18        Plural noun

            19        Adjective

            20        Noun

            21        Verb (past tense)

            22        Adjective

            23        Noun

            24        Adjective

            25        Noun

            26        Verb (past tense)

            27        Adjective

            28        Noun

            29        Plural noun

            30        Adjective

            31        Plural noun

            32        Adjective

            33        Noun

            34        Plural noun

Title: The Madcap Adventures of GPT-4

Once upon a time, in the (1. adjective) world of artificial intelligence, a team of (2. plural noun) set out on a mission to train the most (3. adjective) language model ever, GPT-4.

Their leader, (4. person's name), was a (5. adjective) (6. noun) who was always (7. verb ending in -ing) around the lab. The team's (8. adjective) journey began in the land of (9. noun), where they would collect (10. plural noun) to feed GPT-4's insatiable appetite for knowledge.

During their quest, they encountered a (11. adjective) (12. animal) that spoke in (13. adjective) riddles. The creature challenged them to a game of (14. noun). If they could (15. verb) the game, GPT-4 would gain the power to predict the best next word with (16. adjective) accuracy.

However, if they lost, they would be forced to (17. verb) while wearing (18. plural noun). The stakes were high, but our brave team accepted the challenge.

The game was intense, and it all came down to the final round. GPT-4 needed to complete the phrase: "The (19. adjective) (20. noun) (21. verb_past_tense) over the (22. adjective) (23. noun)."

With bated breath, the team watched as GPT-4 processed the input. Suddenly, the answer appeared: "The (24. adjective) (25. noun) (26. verb_past_tense) over the (27. adjective) (28. noun)."

The team erupted in (29. plural noun), knowing they had successfully trained GPT-4 to predict the best next word! They celebrated with a (30. adjective) feast of (31. plural noun), and GPT-4 became the talk of the AI community.

And so, GPT-4 continued its (32. adjective) journey, learning and growing with each new (33. noun) it encountered, forever shaping the world of (34. plural noun). The end.

Now, go through the story and fill in the blanks with your chosen words to create your very own wacky GPT-4 adventure! Enjoy the laughter and fun as you read your unique tale aloud.

I’m sorry, Dear Reader, it feels like it has been a long time.

It’s not for lack of trying, I have been very busy.

Trust me, no one feels worse about it than I do. I really want to write down all of my thoughts on curiosity, love, and the examined life. This collection of articles is my greatest joy.

But when life happens and I am caught in the whirlwind of action and reaction, it is a torturers tool of suffering...

Because I’m grasping for it.

It is a vicious cycle. I cannot find the time to write to you, I get lost in the thought that writing to you is what I should be doing, I anguish that I am not writing, I bargain, I lose track of what I am doing, I fail to plan time to write and just crave writing all the more for not doing it... and on and on.

Grasping and aversion for impermanent things is the source of all dissatisfaction with life. And all things are impermanent (except maybe consciousness, but more on that in a different post).

The Buddha’s wisdom holds true after all this time. Easy to say, hard to do.

We want good things, for ourselves and our loved ones (and all people, really); we hope to avoid bad things for all people. The intention of loving-kindness is positive and an indication of wisdom, it is the ever-changing-thing that we want or want to be rid of that is the problem.

Now that I’m here—writing—where is all that moaning about not writing? Did it do me any good? Even if it led to a definitive plan, it was still less mindful of the nature of that present moment than just making the plan... without the attitude.

While I am writing, I should write; when I am not writing, I should not write... and not grasp.

I’ve now reread for the third time the article, “Does Consciousness End?” by Thomas W. Clark and believe it makes a terrific, naturalistic argument for consciousness as the eternal fabric of the cosmos that is in agreement with David Chalmers’ new book, “Reality+”, and my own thinking on the subject in “Meaning in the Multiverse: A Skeptics Guide to a Loving Cosmos.” Let me take a step back and explain a few important terms.

Near the end of Reality+, Chalmers outlines a compelling 3-level construction of the cosmos, with a selfless conscious structuralism at level 0, a digital layer at level 1 whose bits (or more likely qubits) create the simulated spacetime universe we are familiar with at level 2. Level 0 (consciousness) is accessible to some in level 1 (simulators) and level 2 (simulations) via what might be best called APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). It is beyond the scope of this article to explain why a level 0 structuralism is required—and it doesn’t necessitate that it is consciousness—but for this metaphysical conjecture, I think consciousness makes the most sense.

Our level 2 universe is almost completely described by the initial level-1 computations—the Laws of Physics—and the complexity that evolved independently at level-2, only the hard problem of consciousness, that it is like something to be my collection of level-2 matter, remains to be explained.

Panpsychism, that everything at level-2 has some level of consciousness, is only compelling in the naïve conception of a cosmos that only has a spacetime component, a construction that Deutsch in “The Fabric of Reality”, Chalmers, and I all reject. In “Meaning in the Multiverse,” I argue for a parallelpsychicconsciousness that arises from interference from parallel universes in the same way that interference of the quantum material of parallel universes is held responsible (by Deutsch and others) for the counterintuitive collapse of wavefunctions in the dual-slit experiment. Parallelpsychism relies on a heretofore unknown mechanism—the wavefunction of the mind—a level-0 phenomena that opens an API to either level-1 or level-2, but only for the right sort of interlocutor, having the right sort of information processing capability—the right sort of mind.

Level-0 is an immaterial, conceptless, identityless, and selfless consciousness, the stuff of Buddhist metaphysics. However, Clark arrives at it naturally. He shows how, from the point of view of consciousness, there is no break in its subjective availability even if an identity goes to sleep, is made completely unconscious through a general anesthetic, or dies. At least for the first two events, we recognize the truth of the continuity of consciousness, there are hints and memories of a temporal lack of consciousness, but it is one that—by definition—we do not experience. We remember having the experience of laying on the gurney, counting backwards from 5, and our next experience is one of waking up groggy in the waiting room. We never experience a positive nothingness of our time being unconscious, we are only ever experiencing in an eternal present.

We will only ever be tied to level-0 consciousness. There can be no positive nothingness, no void for us to fall into, even upon death. While the identity of Justin Harnish will no longer be conscious after my death, there will be no void to experience, indeed, from the point of view of “my” viewport into consciousness, the identity would change, I’d have no memory of Justin Harnish, but consciousness would be unchanged!

Clark gets us to this naturalistic-reincarnation with a thought-experiment that breaks down identity while maintaining subjective availability throughout. Imagine that like Rip Van Winkle, you went to sleep for a long time, but instead of laying against a tree, tiny nanomachines changed your physiology and your neurology over time. At any time you might wake up and where you used to like broccoli, you detest it now, and many other subtle changes like that in each moment; would the act of waking up have changed consciousness from its side? Is there a point where the nanomachines killed you and where Rip2.0 was born?

In both the case of dreamless sleep, which our identity has experienced, and death, that an identity can experience only once, consciousness is an omnipresent fabric that will be available to the next sentient identity no matter if they arise in this level-2 spacetime universe or in a much different level-1 or level-2 part of the cosmos under a wholly different concept of time. Consciousness as we are aware of it today as the stage of all experience, our being when we are present, is made all the more precious in this metaphysical conception—an omnipresent connection to the most fundamental constituent of existence—one whose nature we wildly make wholly our own unique place of love and peace, but that we ultimately share with all other sentient entities without reference to our conceptions of time, space, architects, sims, or in parallel universes near or far.

Mission

Vision, mission, and purpose often get confused. I finally just have to say that by their denotation, they are synonyms, so I have to define them for myself. I use purpose, meaning, and vision interchangably, but will stick to purpose. Mission is where I start to use the military definitions that all strategic managers revert to when wading through the ideas of mission, strategy, and tactics. Mission is your commander intent, the top-level strategy of how you are going to better the competition.

Much like purpose, mission should be short. It should be a mantra, something you can remember and commit to each time you say it. It explains action, the skills and events that will lead to the object of the purpose. It is your most succinct yet all-encompassing goal.

For the individual, the overarching life goal does not have to be competitive in the traditional sense. There is no need to call out specific individuals or positions. However, you want to "aim high" and build on your unique strengths, targeting a personal mission statement that aims at the upper eschaelon of performance and results. Mission statements do not define that you will win a specific race at a specific time, but that you are a regional competitor through numerous age classes, or more aggressively, a national or international competitor. Leadership positions can involve outperforming previous precedents you have already set.

You can choose to be a beloved leader, a service provider, a hero to your family, or an award-winning artist -- just not all four. Choose the "One Thing" that you are going to focus on, write down this mission statement, align it with your purpose, and do it with all of your heart.

Why can't I do more than one thing in my mission?

There will be plenty of time in strategizing to broaden the activities used to achieve mission, but the mission mantra is not the place. If your mission is to be a wonderful mother you might decide that has a spiritual aspect, a learned aspect, a health component, and a relationship requirement. Each of these are fine strategic "buckets" but your mission mantra is something like "grow as a mother along with the needs/desires of my kids." While not overtly competitive (although you might still vie for your kids affection!), as your children grow, your parenting requirements will have to change to meet your mission. This will involving giving them space and learning how to befriend them when they don't need parenting, and switching back to parenting when they do.

Use the following template to create your mission mantra, your designed life, and remember, aim high!

{A leadership position}{in what}{for whom (optional)}

For example,

• Become a thought leader in leading a meaningful life & ways to attain it.

• Or, be a service leader in my community empowering refugee women to self-reliance.

• Or, be a violin virtuoso leading orchestras to adoring global fans.

Strategies and Goals

The actions in your mission, the strategies, and your intermediate goals are what leads to the designer life outlined in your mission. Strategies are long-term and directional. In military terms, strategy is contrasted to tactics, the immediate actions needed to fulfill one component of the strategic plan. In design thinking, strategies are developed by listening to the customer and clearly defining objectives and requirements. Most importantly, strategies are active, they are something you go and do!

In life design, strategies are often skill improvements, risk mitigation, relationship enhancements, or strength alignments. They will be the most important habits that you can develop to achieve your purpose. They should stretch you.

Strategies evolve. Developing mindfulness might start in meditation and lead to actively noticing and presence. A relationship might begin in passion and end in love and comfort. Your business venture might struggle to find its footing but one key influencer will push your product into the mainstream. Each of the "species" along this evolutionary path ends in a fully saleable product, some skill or habit that you can use, and shouldn't ever be underdeveloped in order to move to the next thing.

I find it beneficial to further bucket strategies under themes. For example, I have a creativity theme, a health/mindfulness theme, a business theme, and a relationship theme. These are also subject to change but rarely do, they are things that I value and continue to morph my strategies under these "big tents."

These buckets will help you to understand which strategic bets make sense for your current conception of delivering on your mission and purpose and which are just good ideas. It is helpful to do some problem solving on potential strategies, mental modeling which seem right and which are longshots.

I write strategies in a simple template.

{Improve/Reduce/Optimize}{skill or habit or relationship}

Goals

Up to now, we haven't measured anything.

We need our mission and strategies to be measureable and that is where goals come in, they set the conditions of success.

• What is the starting point for your mission or strategy? Where are you at today? Let us call that 'x'

• When do you anticipate being done with this goal? Let's call that 't'

• Finally, put yourself at time = t. Really dig into this timeframe, tell yourself a story about it. What does success look like in terms of a change in x at t? Let's call that 'y'

When we build our measures around the bets we believe are going to promote into strategies, we put them in the format x to y by t. Our numbers should be clear and compelling. We should have a glidepath to our goals to show if we are winning. We should course correct where our measure has slipped under our target. These course corrections can be modifications to strategies but are more likely just small tactical maneuvers needed to return performance to target.

While this may not seem very spiritual, it is at this level, the pragmatic tactics of improvement through practice and feedback that presence and the performance zone occurs. By having line-of-site from tactical presence up to transcendent purpose, all things have meaning in the great circle of a designed life!

Purpose is the object of your life's quest, the mission is the combination of skills and navigation. If the path is through the mountains, mountaineering may be an essential skill and navigation by animal tracking might be necessary; but if your object is at sea, sailing and nautical orienteering will be the differentiated skill set required to grasp your purpose. You might practice tying knots in either case, moving from tying the five knots you know to ten by the end of the year. As you improve and your knots hold more weight on a scale, you begin strategizing on orienting skills or mentors you wish to approach.

How do you propose to achieve your purpose? What are your differentiated skills that will help you?

I am a fan of process. Whether physical or sociological, I like the journey.

I’m a fan of process monitoring too. Improvements can be made in most systems if we act on  both our leading effectiveness and process efficiency measures.

I’ll stop the infinite regress with my fandom of the process of designing process monitoring. This is not as nerdy as it seems, especially when it is called by its common name—gamifying.

One important component of any great game is that it has a fair points system that measures participants’ skill and encourages them to greater levels of achievement. In business this can be product yield or profitability, sprint execution timeliness or contractual recurring revenue, increased output, improved quality, or reduced costs; personally we might measure our hours of practice, reduced cholesterol, or—in terms of my to-do list—karma points!

Todoist (not an affiliate link) is a great To-Do list that gamifies the planning and execution of tasks into karma points. At an average of 20 points per day, the achievement of karmic enlightenment in execution (50,000 points) took me (with a year-long hiatus to try other to-do lists) over 9 years to accomplish.

9 years, 5 months, 2 weeks, 5 days after you first started your Todoist journey on Jun 28 2013, you’ve joined just 0.05% of all Todoist users to ever reach Todoist Karma Enlightenment.

I wrote a book, ran a marathon, changed jobs, bought a new house and made a few renovations, went on a few overseas vacations, and lots of other fun stuff thanks (in part) to my pursuit of execution enlightenment—a journey of 50,000 well-gamified, monitored process management points!

The more I talk about my daily mindfulness meditation practice, the more I get the comment that, “I’ve tried to meditate but I just can’t because...” and then a list of a few reasons.

I get it. I understand, I think most people who have a committed, habitual practice of any sort have been there. I started meditating in my 20s but stopped doing it for over a decade before I got really serious over seven years ago.

I think there are a few reasons why it stuck the second time around.

1.     The right teacher

While I can now be as esoteric as the next meditator, my return to the practice came about through a scientific curiosity on the nature of improving well-being in ordinary moments. I needed to find a teacher who approached meditation without any religious or New Age topspin—enter Sam Harris. When the Waking Up App (which I recommend and use daily) came out in 2018, I was already a supporter of Sam’s podcast, so I thought I’d get what I hoped for and Sam more than delivered.

When you start to learn to ride a bike, you don’t learn from your twin sister, but from your parent—someone who already knows how to ride a bike and will look out for you and teach you a process that—given their love and knowledge of you—will ensure your success. This is how a meditation teacher should be.

2.     Your intent

While many people start to meditate because it is good for their health, this is a bit like learning to ride a bike to improve your balance—it is one outcome, but not the primary one.

The way you feel about your life, your relationships, and the way you handle the ups and downs will be determined by the state of your mind.

Meditation is a life-long tool to more fully understand your mind and build the capability to recognize when you are thinking without knowing it, when your buttons are being pushed, when you need to pay attention and listen, and when you need to stop and smell the roses.

3.     “Are we there yet?”

Meditating is hard. People expect that they will sit and be enraptured by something that was not there before. It doesn’t happen, they get distracted, bored, even fall asleep.

We have all been there.

You didn’t expect to ride a bike properly the first time, nor should you expect that calm, chatter-free, selflessness is available easily or readily—it takes time.

The practice is all about beginning again, there is no destination, only a journey of times where you are mindful and times which you are not. Waking up from mindlessness (or from the nap that crept up on you while meditating!) offers the opportunity to begin again.

4.     Ten minutes (and many moments) each day

Start with just ten minutes each day. Good habits take at least a month to form, so don’t feel upset or beat yourself up for missing.

As importantly, take time off the cushion to recognize your conscious awareness—the sights, smells, sounds, feelings, tastes, and thoughts that fill your first person world. It’s important that your mind is full of experience in as many moments as possible, not just during formal practice.

5.     A new friend that’s not your self

Make a friend of your mind by learning about it, listening to it, and on occasion offering some tough love. If you are too critical of yourself, notice that, notice what drives it, notice these thoughts melt under the heat lamp of awareness. If your mind is burdened (or boring you!) with thoughts, notice these thoughts melt under the heat lamp of awareness.

Try to find your self, your identity. Does your investigation turn up something, maybe located in your head? Is that self, that thought of your identity outside consciousness? Notice that consciousness appears more fundamental than the thought of self.

Give these handful of hints a try the next time you feel you can’t meditate and let me know if they work for you!

This has been a year where tremendous innovation has challenged our intuitions about knowledge. What is it to know something? We are so sure of our epistemological muscle, but when a system of universal processes encoded in integrated circuitry is capable of writing a research paper or creating novel digital art, it is using statistical inference on large datasets. As computer scientist Larry Tesler said, “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”

Knowledge skepticism is an old philosophical tradition. We won’t replow that field. But what is interesting is what we learn as machines take a different journey to what might only end in domain specific and useful developments or what might lead to creative knowledge. It is also interesting in contrasting this latest bullish AI epoch to the learning styles of a two-year-old human child.

Deep learning can often be simplified to gamifying computation after reviewing large datasets. ChatGPT has reviewed English language essays, novels, lyrics, and poetry and utilizes this to guess the next word of its own compositions in a game of (very rapid) Madlibs. If it is corrected, it updates its neural networks to downgrade the mistake in subsequent iterations. Deep learning algorithms can often do this sort of conjecture and correction without human interaction, setting up what’s called an actor-critic model internally.

Our two-year-old has a shallower but much broader dataset. She is not trained on millions of texts, but understands “gorilla” as not only a word but as a stuffed animal toy, a moving animal on screens and at outings to the zoo, and the sound “oh-oh,” and the cutest chest pounding you have ever seen (the joy that act brings further reinforces the learning)! Creation of imagined worlds where lions, tigers, gorillas, and little girls play with balls or sit for tea parties are fluid, fun, and (exhaustingly) repetitious.

The contrast between these nascent learning mechanisms (if, for the sake of argument, we are allowed to call it that) show off the strengths and weaknesses of each. Pure information processing toyed with in deep learning’s gamification is creative only in the limited capabilities currently available to input the world into a computer... but the centrality of games puts it on the right path. The tact to create in deep learning, by making algorithms into a game of sorts, is an improvement on brute force attempts to “teach” computers.

The more improvements that are made in gamifying domain algorithms and then enhancing the computer’s ability to take a meta step to gamify its own algorithms to improve its creativity in new domains, the more likely that a computer will be invited to a two-year-old’s tea party.

I have a tendency to accentuate the positive. This is a good outlook, but not always helpful. There are many maladies and mental images that cause unease-to-full-on-anguish and must be addressed if mindfulness is to be a constant companion in the fast, slow, or breakdown lanes of life.

It’s important to say that all states of mind, sensations, and feelings are transitory—things change—but this realization of entropy can be restated as, things fall apart. While some conditions can be alleviated by a mindful curiosity into the depths of the condition, others, in my experience, have a much greater stranglehold over even my desire to be present with the suffering. A full-body anxiety for me is just such a thing and so I have great compassion for those with conditions like ALS where this is a constant source of physical sensory suffering.

Our aches and pains increase through the years, our regrets and strings of unwise words, deeds, and actions probabilistically increase, and we lose ourselves in anger, resentment, or just wrong-side-of-the-bed grumpiness. In these times, I’ve even caught myself petulantly not wanting to be mindful! I don’t want to investigate the experience, I’m just fine pouting, thank you very much!

The experiences and genetics that create your next negative thought or sense experience are different than mine, so the advice of not grasping for pleasant or being adverse to unpleasant must be balance with the advice of doctors. I take medication occasionally to sleep, but also realize that factors like dehydration or lack or even incorrectly timed physical exertion can play a role in my restlessness. Deepening your experience of a pain in your mouth might be advisable for all the time before and during your emergency root canal, but no longer!

If this newsletter seems to miss that the advance of entropy increases uneasy states through life for all and chance has brought great suffering on some, that has not been my intent. Mindfulness has given me a point of view of equanimity that believes ordinary experiences offer majesty, wonder, and illuminate something special within us all... AND the realization that mindfulness only works some of the time and not always when you need it.

The jujitsu of deepening your mind-full-ness on unsatisfactory experiences is hard and sometimes is less helpful than creating a narrative of a future self that is doing something about it. That is all fine, take care of yourself, and start again with curiosity on the present when you are up to it.