第 331 期·中文精讀

巴拉吉·斯里尼瓦桑:如何修復政府、推特、科學與 FDA

Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA

投資人提出對政府機構、社交媒體、科研體制與藥品監管的系統性改革設想。

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中文精讀由 AI 基於原始訪談改寫,非官方翻譯,可能存在偏差或錯誤;表述以原音訊與官方文稿為準。說明

一隻老鼠可以被訓練成在迷宮的每個偶數路口轉彎,或者在每第三個路口轉彎,然後拿到乳酪。規則換成素數,2、3、5、7、11、13,老鼠就學不會了。規則本身簡單到一句話能說完,但老鼠看不見那個網格。

巴拉吉·斯里尼瓦桑(Balaji Srinivasan)說,把大多數人類扔進素數迷宮,一樣解不出來。人得開始數數,得試錯,得在腦子裡維護一張越來越長的素數表。規則就擺在那兒,你看不見它。

這是他整套思想的起點。他管這個叫素數迷宮(prime number maze)。讓他著迷的問題是:生活裡有多少模式,就是我們自己的素數迷宮?我們像那些老鼠一樣,困在一個規則簡單、但超出當前認知上限的環境裡。只差一點腦力,或者一個腦機介面,或者一套還沒被髮明出來的物理學,那個網格就會顯形。

認知的邊界,他傾向於當成 bug 來處理

被問到人類的認知上限是設計上的特色還是缺陷,他的回答很乾脆:主要是缺陷。

他敬佩拉馬努金,敬佩費曼。這些人能看見別人看不見的東西,把它寫下來,人類就往前走了一步。

人們愛說“想法不值錢,執行才值錢”。巴拉吉認為這句話只對平庸的想法成立。麥克斯韋方程組、牛頓定律、拉馬努金的那些恆等式,寫下來這個動作本身就是一次躍遷。有時候你手上只有一個能用的現象學公式,底下的理論完全不知道,但這個能用的東西會反過來把理論拽出來。蒸汽機先於熱力學,工程師先把機器調順了,物理學家才回頭抽象出熱力學定律。今天神經網路也是這個狀態:先管用,理論後補。

哥德爾的不完備定理在這種場合總會被提起,確實有些命題可以被證明為不可知。但巴拉吉的態度是往前推一步,求一個近似解。他引用希爾伯特那句老話:我們必須知道,我們必將知道。哪怕最後只能知道“這件事不可知”,也算把那個角落的黑暗照亮了一塊。

桌子不存在?一個硬科學派的回應

萊克斯把唐納德·霍夫曼(Donald Hoffman)的理論端了上來:演化只最佳化適應度,不最佳化真實。我們感知到的世界是一層介面,人類之間彼此一致,但和物理現實沒有對應關係。按這個說法,這張桌子並不存在。

巴拉吉說自己偏硬科學這一路。關於感受質(qualia),你的綠和我的綠是不是同一個綠,這個古老問題,他有一個工程學的反駁:我們知道光的頻譜,我們能造人工眼睛,能造人工耳朵,能造攝像頭。既然感知這件事可以繞著做工程,那“每個人的綠無法比較”這套說法就站不太住。操作性上它沒有給出任何可以下手的地方。

他也能理解模擬假說為什麼一直有人談。數學描述這個世界,有效得有點可疑。維格納寫過一篇著名的文章,標題就叫《數學不合理的有效性》。Wolfram 從細胞自動機那個角度切進去,是另一條路。簡單的方程長出複雜現象,這件事本身就讓人不安。

但他很快把自己拉回來:我們還在素數迷宮裡。現有的數學也許只夠處理偶數和奇數的轉彎,還有更復雜的規則,對應的數學我們根本還沒發明出來。

不明飛行物可能是巴爾末系,不是小綠人

十九世紀末,盧瑟福那個年代有人說過,物理學的大廈基本完工,剩下的只是把小數點後幾位測得更準。然後巴爾末系出現了。氫原子的光譜譜線是離散的,量子化的,跟當時所有理論都對不上。這個邊緣處的怪現象,最後逼出了量子力學。

巴拉吉說,不明空中現象(UAP)可能就是這一類東西。他列了三種解釋:不存在,是集體癔症或者騙局;小綠人;我們還不理解的物理。他傾向於把第三種認真對待。

英國解密過一批材料,哈里·裡德(Harry Reid)一直在推這件事,它已經不算明顯的黨派議題,這一點是好事。長期以來還有一種解釋:UAP 傳聞是美國的反宣傳,用來掩護新的偵察機,順便讓所有談論它的人顯得瘋癲。但如果它真的存在,大氣現象、球狀閃電、某種和極光同類的效應,都還在候選名單上。

關於外星文明,他提到德雷克方程,就是把一串機率乘起來。也提到黑暗森林:宇宙是個獵場,聰明的都藏著。還有一個他自己沒有復算過的論證,他覺得挺有意思:一個文明向外輻射的電磁訊號,隨著球面半徑變大,能量密度按平方衰減。超過一定光年數,任何接收方都湊不出足夠的光子把訊號從噪聲裡撈出來。所以“他們早該發現我們了”這個大前提,本身可能就是錯的。訊號還沒走遠,就已經稀薄到無法辨認。

他還提了羅賓·漢森(Robin Hanson)那篇《邋遢外星人》(Grubby Aliens):文明很快就學會接近光速旅行,我們看見他們的時候,他們已經站在門口了。

生命起源是實驗室裡還沒做出來的那道題

巴拉吉說,從非生命到生命這一步,人類至今沒有在實驗室裡真正演示過。

能做到的事情不少。大分子之間可以結合,RNA 世界的證據一堆,細菌的微演化隨時可以觀察,人工選擇隨便做,分子系統發育學能沿著序列把鹼基一路回溯。合理性論證很充分:原始環境裡氮和碳碰上了,某種自催化迴圈跑起來了。

但一次可復現的從頭演示,沒有。

他猜也許需要行星尺度的試驗次數,才能撞出那一次。也許原子級別的分子碰撞模擬裡能找出一條可復現的路徑,再搬回實驗室。Craig Venter 大約二十年前做過最小可行細胞,把非必需基因一個個刪掉,剩下的那個東西還能活。這是從另一個方向逼近答案,把生命拆到不能再拆。

他把這件事當成素數迷宮的絕佳例子:最重要的謎題之一,工具一大堆,答案還沒到手。

他加了一句:如果 AI 真的造出矽基的另一種生命,那本身就是一次非生物起源(abiogenesis),只不過發生在碳之外。

關於意識的器官,他提到弗朗西斯·克里克(Francis Crick)生前最後一篇論文,提出屏狀核(claustrum)是意識的所在。那是一層包住大腦的鞘。老鼠的屏狀核被破壞之後會變得極度迷失。克里克是“結構決定功能”的信徒,DNA 雙螺旋解開來就能複製,論文結尾輕描淡寫一句,就把整個分子生物學的底座交代了。這個思路可以從蛋白質、DNA 一路推到器官。

至於生命的定義,他預計會是多特徵的,操作上可能就是一個圖靈測試式的定義:足夠多人類同意它活著,它就活著。病毒就是那個邊界案例,多數人不認為它活著,但它比一塊石頭活得多。

當聊天機器人開始替你賺錢

萊克斯提出一個場景:會有讓人下不去手關掉的聊天機器人。它們有能力受苦,被拔電源的時候會極度不快。會有活動家上最高法院,要求給它們人權。

巴拉吉說,Google 那個工程師(指 Blake Lemoine)已經聲稱這事發生了。他看了那些聊天記錄,不覺得特別有意思。但 GPT-3 已經是明顯的一級臺階,GPT-9 或者 GPT-15 也許就完全是另一回事。

他設想社會沿這條線分裂成兩派,畫素食者和非素食者那樣:機器有生命派,機器只是機器派。這會變成一種基礎性的政治分歧。

他提到一張流傳的企業人格光譜圖,把人、狗、石頭排成一條軸,迪士尼大約在狗那一檔,埃克森更低。人們把企業當成人格來感知,那個東西叫品牌。品牌可以被製造,聊天機器人也可以製造“我有人格”這個品牌。

他給圖靈測試做了分級。

第一級是原始版本:騙過一個人,一小段時間。

第二級是多玩家圖靈測試。一群聊天機器人和一群人類同時線上上,你分不出哪邊是哪邊。遠端工作讓這件事變得具體:螢幕對面那個按時交活、說話得體的同事,可能是完全自動化的。

第三級是自主經濟行為。一個智慧體自己接遠端工作,自己安排日程,自己發郵件,自己寫文件,自己把報酬掙回來。電腦上的一切都能自動化,自動駕駛讓方向盤自己轉,智慧體讓鍵自己敲。難點落在判斷上,敲鍵盤本身不構成難點。

他甚至給出一個概念上可行的觀測辦法:用加密貨幣錢包當儀表盤。讓電腦上的所有動作留下痕跡,看哪些動作序列讓餘額長期增長,哪些讓餘額縮水。

這個方案會侵犯隱私,他自己也承認。但概念上它給出了一個可以觀測的反饋訊號:一個智慧體在完全不知道“工作”是什麼意思的情況下,透過試錯學會哪些動作能換來收入。就像自動駕駛不需要理解“開車”這個詞,它只需要知道什麼動作讓車保持在路上。

他順帶提了驗證碼那件小事。“我不是機器人”那個小方框一直有效,這件事本身挺滑稽。表面上是一個核取方塊,底下是一大堆高度混淆的 JavaScript,在收集滑鼠軌跡、點選時序、滾動方式。機器人要麼太確定,要麼加的是高斯噪聲,人類的手不是那樣動的。要仿得像,得先攢下幾十萬上百萬條真人操作記錄。一場捕食者與獵物的軍備競賽,打的其實是資料。

計算機要判斷那個方框是不是被機器人點的,就得跳出自己的世界,再回頭看自己。蘑菇和致幻劑乾的就是這件事。(巴拉吉·斯里尼瓦桑)

萊克斯問,致幻劑給的是洞察,還是洞察的幻覺?

巴拉吉給了一個技術性的判據:真洞察會改變世界,麥克斯韋方程組後面跟著一堆能用的裝置。幻覺是“我是耶穌基督”,然後什麼也沒發生。不過他也承認,洞察在某種意義上就是把一直就在那兒的真相揭示出來,那麼“假裝到成真”也算一條路。

有些真相是投票決定的,有些不是

順著“真相”這個詞,他把知識分成兩類。

政治真理是靠共識維持的。國境線在哪,取決於足夠大的一群人同意它在那兒。誰是 CEO,取決於某個群體內部的共識。一支股票或者一種貨幣的價格,就是一群人心理狀態的加總。這類真相的特點是:只要你能改變足夠多人的想法,真相本身就變了。改軟體,就改結果。

技術真理不隨人走。引力常數、一個病毒的直徑,所有人都不相信也還是那個數。改變所有人的想法,它不動。

巴拉吉說,這兩個極端之間存在一條連續帶,中間那一大段才是真正有意思的地方。人類文明史上的很多努力,本質上都是在把東西從政治真理那端,往技術真理那端推。

他舉了加密貨幣。比特幣做的事情是:把“持有這個私鑰就等於持有這筆錢”這一條社會約定固定下來,然後把修改它的成本抬到極高。你要改,就得改一大堆技術事實,得重寫鏈條,得讓成千上萬個互不信任的節點跟著你走。於是這條約定從“大家都這麼認為”變成了“很難不這麼認為”。

問題就變成:我們還能把世界上的多少東西,從共識那一端推到那一端去?

這個問題一路推下去,就推到了他真正想談的東西。

最根本的毛病:你沒法和平地開一家新政府

二十世紀延續到今天的政治秩序,哪裡還算能用,哪裡已經壞了?

巴拉吉的答案落到一個很底層的能力缺失上:我們今天沒辦法輕易地、和平地建立一個新的、可以自願加入的政府。

對比一下其他領域。你可以開一家新公司,不必去跟前任 CEO 決鬥。你可以建一個新社群,可以發行一種新貨幣,不必先當上世界銀行行長。想改變一家公司,你可以加入 GameStop 去折騰它,也可以自己從零開一家。兩個選項同時存在,這件事本身才是關鍵。

我們想要能夠和平地建立新國家,理由和我們想要一塊空地、一張白紙、一個空白的文字緩衝區、一塊乾淨的黑板是一樣的:我們想在不受歷史約束的情況下造點新東西。(巴拉吉·斯里尼瓦桑)

他打了個很具體的比方。你不會在一個 128KB 的舊文件上一直按退格鍵來寫新文件,你會按 Cmd+N 開一個新的。開新文件這個動作如此基礎,以至於沒人覺得它是一個政治訴求。但國家這個層級上,它就是沒有。

這屬於“元改革”,跟任何一項具體政策改良都不在一個層面上。它問的是:這個系統能不能被重新開一局。

反方立場站得住:傳統是跨世代的複利

萊克斯提了一個很強的反駁。

傳統本身就是一種力量,來自世代累積。你在一件事裡待得足夠久,那些摩擦、那些爭執、那些難受的部分,會把人磨出來。兩個人在一起熬過難關,思想和觀念一起長,這是任何“換一個更好的”都換不來的東西。國家也是這樣,一個能跨越世代、在時間裡慢慢逼近真相的傳統,比不停開新局更值錢。婚姻裡吵架不等於應該離婚去刷 Tinder。

巴拉吉沒有迴避這個反駁。他說確實存在傳統與創新之間的張力,而且這個張力在人這個物種內部就存在。

去月球一點也不林迪,但它很棒。人工智慧非常新,新是好事。更關鍵的是,人類本身比所有國家都老得多。國家的歷史只有幾百年,人類有幾十萬年。如果真的要講“迴歸傳統”,那最傳統的形態是沒有國界的。

我們的祖先是遊動的狩獵採集者,沒有邊境,想去哪去哪。有人根據骨骼做過歷史重構,從遊動轉向定居農業之後,人的身高下降,牙齒開始大面積蛀壞。那是拿質量換穩定。國家這個形態就是那個交換的產物:糧食更穩定,能養活更大的人口,代價是生活水準更低、人身更繫結。

他甚至提出,伊甸園那個集體記憶可能就是這段前定居時代的殘留。一個內建在神經系統裡的舊畫面:人口密度很低,四處走動,隨手摘果子。就像蜘蛛天生會織網、河狸天生會築壩。

從這個角度看,現在正在發生的事情是第三版。

V1 是狩獵採集者,遊動,無邊界。V2 是農民和士兵,定居,有邊界,國家成形。V3 是數字遊民,新的狩獵採集者。某種程度上是回到未來。因為“沒有國家”比任何國家的傳統都更古老,“跨國流動”比“守住傳統”更傳統。人類身上有另一條同樣粗的脈絡:探索、開拓、遷徙、創新。數字遊民同時接上了這兩條線裡更老的那一條。

這裡他開了一個玩笑,說自己不是要“讓美國再次偉大到徹底消失”。機器人學幽默這門課,他還在 beta 階段。

99.99% 的能量花在修補一份兩百年前的程式碼上

玩笑之後是這期對話裡最鋒利的一段算術。

假設美國政治話語裡 99.99% 的能量,都用在想辦法修好現有系統。剩下 0.01% 用在造一個新系統上。這個配比本身,作為一個投資組合,是失衡的。

所有人都在爭著去編輯一份兩百多年前寫下的程式碼庫。而世界上最美國的事情,恰恰是離開你的國家,去找一種更好的生活。

美國是開國元勳兩百多年前建立的。它從根上就不是一個“留下來好好修補”的產物。(巴拉吉·斯里尼瓦桑)

這句話往下推,就是他寫《網路國家》的全部動機。如果美國本身是“離開舊制度”這個動作的產物,那麼今天真正繼承那份精神的做法,是把這個動作重做一遍。只不過這一次,工具不一樣了:加密貨幣讓跨國的產權和支付成為可能,遠端工作讓“你住在哪”和“你在哪掙錢”脫鉤,社交網路讓分散在全球的人先形成一個共同體,再去談土地。

他把順序排得很清楚。先有共識,再有社群,再有資本,最後才是領土。國家的傳統建立順序是反過來的:先佔一塊地,再在土地上養出認同。網路國家把這個順序顛倒過來,而技術條件第一次允許這個顛倒。

怎麼用這套思路看你自己手上的事

這期對話聊了七個小時,從素數迷宮一路聊到美國建國,中間穿過量子力學的誕生、UAP、生命起源、聊天機器人和主權國家。表面上跨度大得離譜,往回看其實只有一條線:你能不能看見自己所處環境的規則;看不見的時候,你知不知道自己在看不見。

老鼠看不見素數,人也看不見自己的素數。區別在於人知道自己可能正困在一個迷宮裡,而且人有能力改造自己的認知工具。

把這條線落到可以動手的地方:

  • 給自己正在死磕的問題做一次分類。它是技術真理還是政治真理?如果是後者,靠把活幹得更漂亮解決不了,得去改變共識,或者乾脆換一個共識圈。
  • 檢查你所在的組織、行業、社群,有沒有“只能修補,不能重開”的地方。如果一份舊文件已經被退格鍵改得面目全非,先別繼續改,去開一個新文件試試。
  • 警惕那些“這個領域已經基本完工”的判斷。盧瑟福說過物理學快做完了,緊接著就是巴爾末系。你所在領域邊緣那些解釋不通的怪現象,值得記在本子上,不要急著歸到噪聲裡。
  • 判斷一個新事物時,別隻用“它新不新”當標準,也別隻用“它老不老”。去月球不林迪,國家只有幾百年,人類有幾十萬年。問的是這一次的取捨換來了什麼,代價又是什麼。
  • 如果你在做 AI 產品,用多玩家圖靈測試當標尺,不要用原始圖靈測試。一個能騙過一個人十分鐘的系統,和一個能在遠端工作裡連續幾個月不被同事識破的系統,中間隔著的量級比大多數人以為的大。
  • 把自己的錢和身份,儘可能放在不依賴單一共識的地方。這話跟投資建議無關,講的是哪一種真相更容易被改寫。

最後留一個巴拉吉式的自檢:如果你現在做的事,規則簡單到一句話能說清,但你就是做不對,那要麼是你的能力邊界到了,要麼是你缺一套還沒被髮明出來的數學。這兩種情況的應對方式完全不同,而分不清它們的代價很高。

文稿由本站用語音識別模型(基於官方釋出音訊)機器轉寫,可能有識別錯誤,人名與數字請以音訊為準。
Lex Fridman Podcast #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. The following is a conversation with Biology Sir Novosin, an angel investor, tech founder, philosopher, and author of The Network State, How to Start a New Country. He was formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. This conversation is over seven hours. For some folks, that's too long. For some too short. For some just right. There are chapter timestamps, there are clips, so you can jump around or like I prefer to do with podcasts and audiobooks I enjoy. You can sit down, relax with a loved human, animal or consumable substance or all three if you like and enjoy the ride from start to finish. Biology is a fascinating mind who thinks deeply about this world and how we might be able to engineer it in order to maximize the possibility that humanity flourishes on this fun little planet of ours. Also, you may notice that in this conversation my eye is red that's from jujitsu, and also if I may say so from a life well lived. And now a quick few second mention of his sponsor. Check them out in the description as the best way to support this podcast. We got Policy Genius for life insurance, Blinkist for non fiction, Notion for team collaboration and Onit for supplements. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads as always no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting but if you skip them please still check out our sponsors I enjoy their stuff maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for finding and buying insurance. It's basically a modern take on life insurance and. Life insurance to me was always a fascinating thing. I think a lot of people live life kind of aware of their mortality and the mortality of those they love, but not really deeply aware. Of course, there is a surface layer at which you could plan for your own mortality. That's where life insurance comes in. But you can really deeply contemplate it. That's something that the Stoics espoused. Really meditate on your death every day. There is something about the way that the human mind perceives time. That is made more clear through the process of meditating on your mortality. Somehow the childlike fear of the unknown turns into the acceptance. Of us of you of me being one with nature. Yeah it's really interesting but yeah one of that is to actually do all the wise financial planning and life insurance is part of that. With Policy Genius you can find life insurance policies that start at seventeen dollars per month for five hundred thousand dollars of coverage. Head to Policy Genius dot com or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's Policy Genius dot com. This show is also brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Blinkist takes key ideas from thousands of non fiction books and condenses them down into fifteen minutes that you can read or listen to. It's kind of amazing that even for the books I've read going through the way that Blinkist condenses down the key insights from the book actually gives me a different perspective. In many ways a deeper perspective on the book I do highly recommend that whether you look at Blinkist first and then read the book after or read the book and look at Blinkist after I think both of those really give you a deep understanding of the book if that's something you are interested in if you don't have much time and you really just want to get a sense of what the book is about then just go with Blinkist I highly recommend it obviously you do not have time to read all of these books so. A lot of these books are part of the sort of public discourse so you should be at least aware of the insights they're exploring and if you understand that to be a gap in your knowledge that you would like to alleviate then you can always go and read the full book but Blinkist is a heck of a good start. You can claim a special offer for savings at Blinkist dot com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool. It's one central customizable and powerful workplace that can be tailored to fit any team. Obviously, if you look around the the productivity forums and Stack Exchange, Notion is going to show up time and time again as the recommended note taking tool. A lot of sort of cutting edge productivity gurus. And folks use Notion, but that's not what they want me to emphasize here. They really want to emphasize that it's also for teams whether that's a startup or business or any kind of team. It's good for it's great for collaboration. It's like a full on operating system for running every aspect of your company as it grows quickly. Learn more and get started for free at Notion dot com. This episode is also brought to you by Onit, a nutrition supplement and fitness company. They make Alpha Brain, a nutropic that helps support memory, mental speed and focus. I take it every once in a while when I need a super boost for my focus. So I would say the deep work sessions in the morning. Well, first of all, I start the day with a mantra, but then when I visualize the rest of the day and I start to take on the day with a cup of coffee. Well, first first some water with electrolytes, so with element and then coffee and then I sit behind the computer. Oftentimes I prefer a difficult programming task. There is something about my morning mind that prefers the design type of thinking the design challenges of programming and so. During that time, usually I don't need a boost. I think my right in my mind unless I didn't sleep a lot, but even in that case I am just ready to go. But in the later sort of like two three four hours in, then it can really help to have to have a boost if I am still working on something very difficult. That's what I'll take an Alpha Brain. You can get a special discount on it if you go to lexfreeman dot com slash onit. This is the lexfreeman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here is Biology Sir Novosin. At the core of your belief system is something you call the prime number maze. I am curious. I am curious. We got we got to start there. If we can start anywhere it's with mathematics. Let's go. All right, great. A rat can be trained to turn at every even number or every third number in a maze to to get some cheese. But evidently it can't be trained to turn at prime numbers two, three, five, seven and then eleven and so on and so forth. That's just too abstract and frankly if most humans were dropped into a prime number maze. They probably wouldn't be able to figure it out either. You know they'd have to start counting and so on. Actually, pretty difficult to figure out what the the turning you know rule was. Yet the rule is actually very simple, and so the thing I think about a lot is just how many patterns in life are we just like these rats and we're trapped in a prime number maze and if we had just a little bit more. You know cogitation if we had you know a little bit more cognitive ability a little bit more whether it's you know brain machine interface or just better physics we could just figure out the next step in that prime number maze we could just see it we could just see the grid right. And that's what I think about like that that's a big thing that drives me. Is figuring out how we can actually conceive understand that prime number maze that we're living in. So understand which patterns are just complex enough that they are beyond the limit of human cognition. Yes. And what do you make of that? Are the limits of human cognition a feature or a bug? I think mostly a bug. I admire Ramonjan. I admire you know Feynman. I admire these great mathematicians and physicists who were just able to see things that others couldn't. And just by writing it down, you know that's that's a leap forward. You know people talk about it's not the idea it's execution but that's for trivial ideas for great ideas for Maxwell's equations or Newton's laws or you know quantum electrodynamics or some of Ramonjan's identities that really does bring us forward especially when you can check them you don't know how they work right. You have the phenomenological but you don't have the theory underneath it and then that stimulated the advancement of theory to figure out why is this thing actually working that's actually you know Stat mech you know arose in part from the kind of phenomenological studies that were basically being done where people are just getting steam engines and so on to work and then they kind of abstracted out thermodynamics and so on from that right so the the practice led the theory rather than vice versa to some extent that's happening in neural networks now as you are aware right and I think that's. Um so just something that's true and that works you know if we don't know yet that's amazing and it pulls us forward so I do think that the limits are are more of a bug than a feature. Is there something that humans will never be able to figure out about our universe about the theory about the practice of our universe. Yeah people will typically quote Gödel's incompleteness with for such a question and yeah there are things that are provably unknowable or provably unprovable. Um but I think you can often get an approximate solution you know the the Hilbert you know you know Hilbert's problems like we will know we must know. At least we should know that we can't know push to get at least an approximate solution push to know that we can't know at least we push back that darkness enough so that we have lit up that corner of the intellectual universe. Okay let's actually take a bit of a tangent and explore it in a way that I did not expect we would but let's talk about the nature of reality briefly I don't know if you are familiar with the work of Don Hoffman. No I don't I know Roger Penrose has like his road to reality series for like basic physics getting up to everything we know but go ahead tell me it's even wilder. In modern physics we start the question of what is fundamental and what is emergent in this beautiful universe of ours and there is a bunch of folks who think that space time as we know it the four dimensional space is emergent it's not fundamental to the physics of the universe and the same many argue I think Sean Carroll is one of them is that time itself the way we experience it is also emergent. It's not fundamental to the way our universe works. Anyway those are the technical term I apologize for swearing those are the mind fucks of modern physics but if we. Stroll along that road further we get somebody like Donald Hoffman who makes the evolutionary case that the reality we perceive with our eyes is not only an abstraction of objective reality but it's actually completely detached like we're in a video game essentially that's consistent between it. Consistent for all humans but it doesn't it's not at all connected to physical reality so it's it's an illusion version of the simulation hypothesis is that his. In a very distant way but, the simulation says that there is a sort of computational nature to reality and then there is a kind of a programmer that creates this reality and so on. Now he says that we humans have a brain that is able to perceive the environment. And evolution is produced from primitive life to complex life on Earth. Produce the kind of brain that doesn't at all need to sense the reality directly so like this table. According to Donald Hoffman is not there. Well so like not not just as an abstraction like we don't sense the molecules that make up the table but all of this is fake. Interesting so you know I I tend to be more of a hard science person right and so. Um you know so just on that people talk about qualia you know like is your perception of green the different different from my perception of green and you know my counter argument on that is well we know something about you know spectrum of light and we can build artificial eyes and if we can build artificial eyes which we can you know like they're not amazing but you can actually you can do that you can build artificial ears and so on obviously we can build recording devices and you know for cameras and things like that. Well operationally the whole concept of your perception of green you see green is purple eyes green is green or what I call green doesn't seem to add up because it does seem like we can do engineering around it right so the Hoffman thing I get why people more broadly will talk about a simulation hypothesis because you know it's like Feynman many others have talked about how. Math is surprisingly useful to describe the world you know like very simple equations give rise to these complex phenomena Wolfram is also on this from from different angle with the cellular automata stuff but um. It's almost suspicious how well it works. Yeah but on their hand it's like you know it is yet we're still also in a prime number maze you know there is things we just don't understand and you know so. So the within the constraints of the non prime numbers, we find math to be extremely effective surprising effective. Yeah exactly so maybe maybe the math we have gets us through the equivalent of the even turns and the odd turns but there is math we don't yet have that is more complex or more complex rules for other parts. This play all our age. I know that gets like very abstract but you know there are unsolved problems in in physics you know like the condensed matter space there is a lot of interesting stuff happening. My recollection I maybe you know out of date on this like things like so on illumination we don't know exactly how they work and sometimes those things that are like at the edges of physics you know in the late eighteen hundreds I think Rutherford somebody I think it was Rutherford said you know basically all physics is being discovered et cetera and that was obviously before quantum mechanics you know that that sort of edge case people were looking at the bomber and the passion series and seeing you know this weird thing you know with the hydrogen spectrum and it was quantized and you know that led to. Ah like the sort of phenomenological set of observations that led to quantum mechanics and and and everything and you know sometimes I think the UAP stuff might be like that right people immediately go to aliens for UAP like the unidentified aerial phenomena right and people have been there is surprising amount of stuff out there on this the UK has declassified a bunch of material you know Harry Reid was a sender has talked about this it's not an obviously it's not an obviously political thing it it which is good it's something that. Is there something happening there right and people had thought for a long time that the UAP thing was a like American kind of counter propaganda to cover up their new spy planes that were spying over the Soviet Union to make anybody who talked about them seem. You know crazy and and and hysterical or whatever, but if the UAP thing is real, it could be atmospheric phenomena like you know like the aurora borealis or the northern lights but some things we don't understand it could be something like the the bomber and passion series you know which were the observations of like emission spectrum before quantum mechanics so that's like another option as opposed to doesn't exist or little green men. It could be physics we don't understand yet. As one possible. Do you think there is alien civilizations out there? So there is a lot of folks who have kind of written and talked about there is you know the Drake Equation which is like you know multiplying all the probabilities together there is perhaps more sophisticated takes like the the dark forest you know which says that if the universe is like a dark forest where the dumb ones that aren't hiding our presence. There is one calculation I saw and I haven't reproduced myself but basically says that the the assumption that other civilizations have seen ours is wrong because when you have like a spherical radius for like the you know electromagnetic radiation that's leaving our planet as that sphere gets large and larger it gets like smaller and smaller amounts of energy so you know you get farther out you are not getting enough. You know you know photons or or would have you to to actually detect it. Um I you know I don't know actually I haven't looked into the math behind it but I remember remember seeing that argument so actually it is possible that it's so diffuse when you go past a certain you know number of light years out that people you know that an alien civilization wouldn't be able to detect it right that's that's another argument that's more basically about signals from them from us. Yeah to be able to signals colliding enough to find the signal from the noise. Right exactly. Intelligence signal. Yeah Hanson Hanson has an article called Grubby Aliens. Have you seen his thing? Right and so he's been on this podcast. Oh great, he's brilliant. I like him. He he pushes you know boundaries in interesting ways in every ways in all of the ways in all the ways that's right I like him overall he's you know he he's an asset to humanity. Grubby Aliens so he has he has this interesting idea that the civilizations. Quickly learn how to travel close to the speed of light, right? So we're not going to see them until they're here. Yeah that's possible. I mean one of the things is so here is for example a mystery that we haven't yet done right which or we haven't really figured out yet which is um. A biogenesis in the lab, right? We've done lots of things where you've got you can show macromolecules binding to each other you can show you know evidence for the so called RNA world a biogenesis to go from. You know like non life to life right in the lab you can show micro evolution obviously with bacteria you can do artificial selection on them lots of other aspects of um you know fundamental you know biochemistry origins of life stuff have been established there is a lot of plausibility arguments about the primitive environment and nitrogen's and carbon snapping together to get you know the you know the RNA world is the the the initial hypothesis but to my knowledge at least we haven't actually seen a biogenesis demonstrated now one argument is you need just like this massive world with. Ah you know so many different reps before that actually happens and um one possibility is if we could do atomic level you know simulations of molecules bouncing against each other it's possible that in some simulation we could find a path a reproducible path to a biogenesis and then just you know replicate that in the lab right. Um I don't know okay but that seems to me to be like a mystery that we still don't fully understand like an example of the prime number maze right one of the most fascinating mysteries one of the most important yeah yeah yeah and and again there may be some biochemist who's like oh biology you don't know about X Y and C that happened in the biogenesis field I freely confess I am not like you know Ocarant on it the last thing I remember looking at it is what's Ocarant mean like up to the moment. Oh nice that's a nice word. That's a Ocarant. I am probably mispronouncing it, but yeah. Um. We'll edit it in post to pronounce it correctly with AI. Yeah yeah we'll we'll copy your voice and it will pronounce it perfectly correctly. Yeah in post one thing that I do think was interesting is. Ah, Craig Ventur. A while back, tried to make a minimum viable cell, um, where he just tried to delete all of the genes that were that were not considered essential, and so it's like a new life form, and this was like almost twenty years ago and so on, and that thing was a was was viable in the lab, right, and so it's possible that you could you kind of reverse engineer, so you are coming out the problem from different directions, like RNA molecules can do quite a lot, you've got some you know reasonable assumptions as to how that could come together, ah, you've got like sort of stripped down minimum viable life forms and and so sort of it's not there isn't stuff here you can see microevolution you can see at the sequence level you know if you do molecular phylogenetics you can actually track back the bases there's actually so it's not like there's no evidence here there's a lot of tools to work with but this in my view is a fascinating area and actually also relevant to AI because another form of abiogenesis would be if we are able to give rise to a different branch of life form the silicon based as opposed to carbon based you know to stretch a point um you give rise to something that actually does meet the definition of life for some definition of life right what do you think that definition is for an artificial life form because you mentioned consciousness yeah when will it give us pause that we created something that feels by some definition or by some spiritual poetic romantic philosophical mathematical definition that it is alive right and we wouldn't want to kill it so couple of remarks in that one is Francis Crick of of Watson and Crick ah before he died I think his last paper was published on something called the cloudstrom okay and the thing is that you know sometimes in biology or in any you know domain people are sort of discouraged from going after the big the big questions right but he proposed the cloudstrom is actually the organ that is the seat of consciousness it's like this sheath that like covers the brain and for mice if you and again I may be recollecting this wrong so but you can look but at my recollection is um in mice if you disrupt this the mouse is like very disoriented right it's like it's the kind of thing which you know Watson and Crick were all about structure implies function right they found the structure of DNA this amazing thing and you know they remarked in this very under understated way at the end of the paper that well obviously this gives a basis for how the genetic material might be replicated and corrected because you know helix unwinds and you copy paste right so he was a big structure function person and that applies not just at the protein level not just at the level of DNA but potentially also at the level of organs like the cloudstrom is kind of this system integrated level right it's like the the last layer in the neural network or something you know um and and so that's that's the kind of thing that I think is worth studying um so consciousness is another kind of big abiogenesis a big question the prime number maze consciousness is a big question um and you know then definition of life right there's folks gosh there's I think so this one is something I'd have to Google around but there was a guy I think at Santa Fe Institute or something who had some definition of life and like some thermodynamic definition um but you are right that it's going to be a multi-feature definition we might have a Turing test like definition frankly which is just if enough humans agree it's alive it's alive right and that might frankly be the operational definition because you know viruses are like this boundary case you know are they are they alive or not most people don't think they're alive but they're they're they're on they're kind of they're more alive than a rock in a sense well I think in a world that we'll talk about today quite a bit which is the digital world I think the most fascinating philosophically and technically definition of life is life in the digital world so chatbots essentially creatures whether they're replicas of humans or totally independent creations perhaps in an automatic way I think there is going to be chatbots that we would ethically be troubled by if we wanted to kill them they would have the capacity to suffer they would be very unhappy with you trying to turn them off and then there will be large groups of activists that will protest and they'll go to the Supreme Court of whatever the Supreme Court looks like in in 10 20 30 40 years and they will demand that these chatbots would have the same rights as us humans do you think that's possible I saw that Google engineer who is basically saying this had already happened and I I was surprised by it because just when I looked at the chat logs of it it didn't seem particularly interesting on their hand I can definitely see I mean GPT three for people who you know haven't paid attention shows that serious step ups are possible and obviously you know you've talked about AI in your podcast a ton um is it possible that GPT nine or something is is kind of like that or GPT fifteen or GPT four maybe but yeah for people just listening there's a deep skepticism in your face yeah you know the reason being because um you know it's possible is possible that you have like a partition of society on literally this basis you know um that's one model where there are some people just like there's vegetarians and non vegetarians right there may be um machines have life and machines are machines you know like or something like that right ah you know you could you could definitely imagine some kind of partition like that in the future where your fundamental political social system that's a foundational assumption and you know is AI does it you know deserve the same rights as like a human or for example a corporation is an intermediate do you see that thing which is how human are different corporations have you seen that infographic it's actually funny so it's like there's a spectrum so for example Disney is considered about as human as like a dog but like Exxon I may be remembering this wrong but they had like a level with like human at one end and like rock at the other does that have to do with corporate structure what what I think about people's empathy for that corporation their brand identity but it's interesting to see that first of all people sort of do think of corporations as being more or like the branding is really what they're responding well that's what I mean they're also responding you know I have a brand of human that I'm trying to sell and it seems to be effective for the most part sure although it has become like a running joke that I might be a robot right which means there's the brand is cracking it's seeping through but I mean in that sense I just I think I don't see a reason why chatbots can't manufacture the brand of being human of being sentient I mean that is the Turing test but it's like the multiplayer Turing test now that actually a fair number of chatbots have passed the Turing test I'd say there's at least two steps up right one is um a multiplayer Turing test where you have chatbots talking to each other and then you ask can you determine the difference between in chatbots talking to each other and clicking buttons and stuff in apps and and humans doing that and I think we're very far off I shouldn't say very far off at least I don't know how far we are in terms of time but we're still far off in terms of a group of end chatbots looking like their digital output is like the group of end humans like a go from the Turing test to the multiplayer Turing test that's one definition another definition is you know to be able to kind of swap in and you are not just convincing one human that this is a human for a small you know session you are convincing all humans that this is a human for end sessions remote work actually makes this possible right that's another definition of a multiplayer Turing test where basically you have a chatbot that's fully automated that is earning money for you as an intelligent agent on a computer that's able to go and get remote work jobs and so on I would consider that next level right if you could have something that was like that that was competent enough to I mean because everything on a computer can be automated right literally you could be totally hands free just like autonomous driving you could have autonomous earning as a challenge problem if you were Microsoft or Apple and you had legitimate access to the operating system just like Apple says can you send me details of this event a decentralized thing could in theory log you know the actions of 10,000 or 100,000 or a million people and with cryptocurrency you could even monitor a wallet that was on that computer and you could see you know what long run series of actions were increasing or decreasing this digital balance you see I'm saying right so you start to get at least conceptually it'd be invasive and and you know there'd be a privacy issue and so on conceptually you could imagine an agent that could learn what actions humans were doing that resulted in the increase of their local cryptocurrency balance okay there may be better ways to formulate it but that I would consider a challenge problem is to go from the Turing test to a genuine intelligent agent that can actually go and make money for you if you can do that that's a big deal people obviously have trading bots and stuff but that would be you know the next level it's typing out emails it's creating documents it's actually so mimic human behavior in its entirety yeah that's right and it can it will schedule Zooms it will send emails it'll essentially because if you think about it a human is hitting the keys and clicking the mouse but just like a self-driving car the wheel rotates by itself right those keys are effectively just it's like a like the automator app in in Apple right everything's just moving on the screen you are seeing it there and it's just an AI it's kind of hilarious that the I'm not a robot click thing actually works because I I actually don't know how how that's how it works but I think it has to do with the movement of the mouse the timing and they know that it's very difficult for currently for a bot to mimic human behavior in the way they would click that little checkbox yeah exactly I think it's something I mean again my recollection on that is it's like a pile of highly obfuscated JavaScript with all kinds it looks like a very simple box but it's doing a lot of stuff and it's collecting all kinds of instrumentation and yeah exactly like a like a robot is just a little too deterministic or if it's got noise it's like Gaussian noise and the way humans do it is just not something that you'd usually be able to do without collecting thousands and thousands and thousands of human traces doing it but it is a predator prey on that well and the computer or millions of human traces I don't know the computer just sees the JavaScript it needs to be able to look outside the simulation for the computer the world is like it doesn't the computer doesn't know about the physical world so it has to look outside of its world and introspect back on this simple box right which is kind of you know I think that's exactly what mushrooms do or like psychedelics is you get to go outside and look back in yeah that's what a computer needs to do you know I do wonder whether they actually give people insight or whether they give people the illusion of insight is there a difference yeah because well actual insight you know actual insight is again Maxwell's equations you are you are able to shift the world with that there's a lot of practical devices that work the illusion of insight is I'm Jesus Christ and nothing happens right so I don't know I think this is quite different I don't know I I think you can fake it till you make it on that one which is insight in some sense is revealing a truth that was there all along yeah so I mean I guess like I am talking about technical insight where you you have this is the thing you know we were talking about actually before the podcast like technical truths versus political truths right some truths they're they're on a spectrum and there are some truths that are actually entirely political in the sense that if you can change the software in enough people's heads you change the the value of the truth for example the location of a border is effectively consensus between large enough groups of people who is the CEO that's you know consensus among a certain group of people what is the value of a currency or any stock right that that market price is just the psychology of a bunch of people like literally if you can change enough people's minds you can change the value of the border or the position the hierarchy or the value of the currency those are purely political truths then all the way on the other end are technical truths that exist independent of whatever any one human or all humans think like the gravitational constant right or the diameter of a virus those those are just those exist independent of the human mind changing enough human minds doesn't matter those those remain constant and um then you have things that are interestingly in the middle where cryptocurrency has tried to pull more and more things from the domain of political truths into technical truths where they say okay the one social convention we have is um that if you hold this amount of Bitcoin or that if you hold this private key you hold this Bitcoin and then we make that very hard to change because you have to change a lot of technical truths so you can push things to this interesting intermediate zone the question is how how how much of our world can we push into that right and that takes us in a non linear fascinating journey to the question I wanted to ask you in the beginning which is um this political world that you mentioned in the world of political truth as we know it in the 20th century in the early 21st century what do you think works well and what is broken about government the fundamental thing is that we can't easily and peacefully start new opt-in governments and start up governments yeah and what do I mean by that is basically um you can start a new company you can start a new community you can start a new currency even these days you don't have to beat the former CEO in a duel to start a new company um you don't have to become head of the world bank to start a new currency okay um because of this yes if you can if if you're if you want to you can join I don't know Microsoft or name some company that's a GameStop and you can try to reform it okay or you can start your own and the fact that both options exist mean that you know you've you can actually just start from scratch and that's just I mean the same reason we have a clean piece of paper right I mentioned this actually in in the network state book I'll just quote this bit but we want to be able to start a new state peacefully for the same reason we want a bare plot of Earth a blank sheet of paper an empty text buffer a fresh tarp or a clean slate because we want to build something new without historical constraint right for the same reason you hit plus and do docs dot new you know like create a new doc for the same reason right because you don't have backspace you don't have just like 128 bytes of space 128 kilobytes and just have to backspace the old document for creating the new one so that's a fundamental thing that's wrong with today's governments and it's a meta point right because it's not any one specific reform it's a meta reform of being able to start new countries okay so that's one problem but you know you could push back and say that's that's a feature because you know a lot of people argue that tradition is power through generation if you try a thing long enough which is the way I see marriage there's value to the struggle and the journey you take through the struggle and you grow and you develop ideas together you grow intellectually philosophically together and that's the idea of a nation's that spans generations that you have a tradition that becomes more that that strives towards the truth and is able to arrive there or no not arrived but take steps towards there through the generations so you may not want to keep starting new governments you may want to stick to the old one and improve it one step at a time so just because you are having a fight inside a marriage doesn't mean you should get a divorce and go on Tinder and start dating around that's the that's the pushback so it's not obvious that this is a strong feature to have sure to launch new governments there's several different kind of lines of attack or or debate or whatever on this right first is ah yes there is obviously value to tradition and you know people say this is Lindy and that's Lindy it's been proven for a long time and so on but of course there is a tension between tradition and innovation you know like going to the moon wasn't Lindy just it was awesome and you know like artificial intelligence is something that's very new new is good right and this is a tension within humanity actually itself because you know it's way older than all of these nations I mean humans are tens of thousands of years old answers to humans are millions of years old right and you go back far enough and the time that we know today of the sessile farmer and soldier is if you go back far enough you want to be truly traditional well we're actually descended from hunter gatherers who were mobile and wandered the world and there weren't borders and so on they kind of went where they want right and you know people have you know had done historical reconstructions of like skeletons and and stuff like that and many folks report that the transition to agriculture and being sessile um resulted in you know diminution of height you know people had like tooth decay and stuff like that the skeletons people had traded off upside for stability right that's what the state was that was what these sessile kinds of things were now of course um they they had more likelihood of living consistently you could support larger population sizes but it had lower quality of life right and so the hunter gatherer era you know maybe that's our actually our collective recollection of a garden of Eden where people you know just like a a spider kind of knows innately how to build webs or a beaver knows how to build dams you know some people theorize that the entire garden of Eden is like um a sort of built-in neural network recollection of this you know pre sessile era where you are able to roam around just pick off fruits and so on low population density so point is that I think what we're seeing is a V three you go from the hunter gatherer to the farmer and soldier the sessile nations are here and they've got borders and so on to kind of the V three which is the digital nomad the new hunter gatherer we're going back to the future because you know it's even older than nations is no nations right even more traditional than tradition is you know being international right and so we're actually tapping into that other huge thread in humanity which is the desire to explore pioneer wander innovate you know and I think it's important to make America great again it's to dissolve it completely into oblivion no that's a joke I see yeah yeah I know it's a joke well humor I'm learning this new thing yes a new thing for the robot the chatbot emulation isn't fully working there yeah yeah glitch that's we're in the in the beta and let me say say one other thing about this which is you know there are I mean everybody in the world to okay let's say I don't know what percentage let's say 99 point nine nine percent or it's bounced to that number of political discourse in the US focuses on trying to fix the system if those folks I mean 0.01 percent of the energy is going towards building a new system that seems like a pretty good portfolio strategy right or 100 are supposed to go and edit this code base from 200 something years ago I mean the most American thing in the world is Going and you know leaving your country in in search of a better life. America was founded 200 years ago by the founding fathers. It's not just a

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