Monthly Archives: February 2023

Currents 083: Joscha Bach on Synthetic Intelligence

February 28, 2023Jim Rutt Show PodcastsAndrew Blevins

Jim talks with Joscha Bach about current and future developments in the generative AI space. They discuss the skepticism of the press, small productive applications, questions about intellectual property rights, confabulation in human thinking, nanny rails, 3 approaches to AI alignment, Aquinas’s 7 virtues, issues of consciousness-like agency, love as an answer to the alignment problem, the difficulty with fairness, serving shared sacredness, dealing with entropy, integrated information theory & its incompatibility with the Church-Turing thesis, neural Darwinism, a point where extrapolation & interpolation become the same, building an AI artist, free will, the capacity of human memory, consciousness as a conductor, the scaling hypothesis in AGI, making the system learn from its own thoughts, computation as a rewrite system, neurons as animals, and much more.

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist working for MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He earned his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and has built computational models of motivated decision making, perception, categorization, and concept-formation. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.

EP 179 Gregg Henriques Part 3: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap

February 24, 2023Jim Rutt Show PodcastsAndrew Blevins

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Jim talks with Gregg Henriques in the third and final part of a series on his book A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. They discuss the concept of justification, replacing “justice” with “justification,” behavioral investment theory, John Vervaeke’s recursive relevance realization, 6 principles of animal mindedness, making a living, animals as functional behavioral investors, evolution of mental behavior in 4 stages, the P − M => E learning control theory, emotion vs valence, framing an architecture of human mind, layers of working memory, 3 types of mind, what it is like to be, the 2-step model of consciousness, the Aristotelian soul, integrated information theory, global worskpace theory, the unknown mechanisms of neurocognitive causation, Unified Theory of Knowledge, the influence matrix, Vervaeke’s 4P/3R meta-theory, integrating independent meta-theories, Timothy Leary’s interpersonal circumplex, the origin of gender roles, the 5-part map of mind, what a person is, JII (justification, influence, influence) dynamics & the unconscious, 4 functional contexts of justification, bullshit as a problem of social epistemology, evolution of the culture-person plane, whether post-modernism is really an epoch, the entire structure in recap, and much more.

Listeners may be interested to know that Gregg is organizing a conference. Consistent with his book, it is called Consilience: Unifying Knowledge and Orienting Toward a Wisdom Commons. It will be held online March 17 and 18th. It is a Zoom event, and free to the public. Jim will be talking about Game B, and will be joined by Jordan Hall. John Vervaeke will give the keynote. And there will be over 40 presentations by many folks who have been featured on the Jim Rutt Show. Links below:

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Dr. Gregg Henriques is Professor of Graduate Psychology at James Madison University in the Combined Doctoral Program in Clinical and School Psychology. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Vermont and did his post-doctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a theoretical psychologist and has developed the “Unified Theory of Knowledge,” which is a consilient scientific humanistic worldview to unify psychology. He is the author of A New Unified Theory of Psychology (Springer, 2011), and A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap (Palgrave McMillian, November 2022). His scholarly work has been published in the field’s best journals, and he has developed a popular blog on Psychology Today, Theory of Knowledge, which has received over eight million views. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the 2022 President of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration, and founded the Theory of Knowledge academic society.

Currents 082: Dan Shipper on Practical Applications of GPT-3

February 22, 2023Jim Rutt Show PodcastsAndrew Blevins

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Jim talks with Dan Shipper about practical uses of GPT-3 and ChatGPT at the personal scale. They discuss how Dan started playing with these tools, the feeling of new generative AIs, GPT-3 vs ChatGPT, writing a screenplay using ChatGPT, using GPT-3 to analyze journal entries, circumventing the context window limitation, GPT-3 as a journaling tool, how ChatGPT does embedding, the coming market for chatbot personas, the value of guardrails, the monetary cost of using GPT-3, solving the organizational problems of note-taking, Stephen Reid’s knowledge-graph of this podcast, the invention of the graphic web browser & the frozen accidents of HTTP & HTML, meta-prompts & data pipelines, how Yohei Nakajima eliminates repetitive tasks using LLMs, and much more.

Dan Shipper is the CEO and co-founder of Every, a daily newsletter on business, AI, and personal development read by almost 75,000 founders, operators, and investors. Previously he was the CEO and co-founder of Firefly, an enterprise software company that he sold to Pegasystems. He writes a weekly at column at Every called Chain of Thought where he covers AI, tools for thought, and the psychology of work.

EP 178 Anil Seth on A New Science of Consciousness

February 20, 2023Jim Rutt Show PodcastsAndrew Blevins

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Jim talks with Anil Seth about his book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. They discuss the curious non-experience of general anesthesia, defining consciousness, the difference between consciousness & intelligence, experiential vs functional aspects, the hard problem vs the real problem, measuring consciousness, consciousness vs wakefulness, Lempel-Ziv complexity, zap & zip, consciousness as multidimensional, psychedelic states of consciousness, integrated information theory & phi, Scott Aaronson’s expander grids, quantum IIT, accounting for conscious contents, the Bayesian brain, paying attention, Adelson’s checkerboard, the perception census, prediction error minimization, active inference, the two bridges experiment, aspects of self, the rubber hand illusion, somatoparaphrenia, separating self from personal identity, whether advanced mammals have personal identity, being a beast machine, and much more.

Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program on Brain, Mind and Consciousness, a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Investigator, and Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Neuroscience of Consciousness (Oxford University Press). With more than two decades of research and outreach experience, Anil’s mission is to advance the science of consciousness and to use its insights for the benefit of society, technology and medicine. An internationally leading researcher, Anil is also a renowned public speaker, best-selling author, and sought-after collaborator on high-profile art-science projects.

EP 177 Gregg Henriques Part 2: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap

February 16, 2023Jim Rutt Show PodcastsAndrew Blevins

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Jim talks with Gregg Henriques in part two of a series on his book A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. They discuss limitations of the standard natural science perspective, the enlightenment gap, BM3, mental behaviorism, justification systems theory, discovering the tree of knowledge system, the evolution of complexification, the emergence of mindedness, resolving a contradiction between Freud & Skinner, the periodic table of behavior, 3 branches of psychology, the history of information processing, the unworkability of Cartesian dualism, top-down causation, Lawrence Cahoone’s systematic metaphysics, distinguishing physicalism & naturalism, behavior as the central concept of the natural sciences, complicated vs complex, Chalmers’s hard problem, cybernetics & the cognitive science revolution, 4E cognitive science, internal talk & individual variation, and much more.

Episode Links:

EP 176 Gregg Henriques Part 1: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap

February 14, 2023Jim Rutt Show PodcastsAndrew Blevins

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Jim talks with Gregg Henriques about his book A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. They discuss the book’s audacious attempt to explain the universe, definitions of metaphysics & whether it’s needed, 4 bins for the history of the universe, the tree of knowledge system, psychology’s ontological confusion, the Enlightenment gap, one-world naturalism & the mind-body problem, scientific knowledge’s relationship with subjective knowledge, the metamodernist synthesis, psychology’s disagreement about its own building blocks, the absence of a meta-paradigm, John Vervaeke’s recursive relevance realization, definitions of mind, empiricism, mapping the internal/external relationship, the unified theory of knowledge, the meaning of biopsychosocial, 3 meanings of mind, Global Workspace Theory, justification systems theory, question-answer dynamics, positive & negative space in communication, justification dynamics, motivated reasoning, and much more.

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EP 175 Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater on The Language Game

February 9, 2023Jim Rutt Show PodcastsAndrew Blevins

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Jim talks with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater about their new book The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World. They discuss the game of charades & its relevance to the evolution of language, the false myth of a pure language, language as self-organizing system, Captain Cook’s encounter with indigenous South Americans, pidgins & creoles, gesture & vocalization, language & tool construction, the communication iceberg metaphor, misunderstandings in relationships, the now-or-never bottleneck, language understanding vs language production, genetic capacity for sequence-action-sequence tasks, chaotic improvisation as the core, the complaint that the young are ruining the language, the unbearable lightness of meaning, the miracle of sloppiness, order & disorder, word order & frozen accidents, language evolution without biological evolution, ChatGPT as a demonstration of how far learning from experience can get you, a poetry Turing test, and much more.

The Language Game has been featured on Behavioral Scientist’s Notable Books of 2022. Morten and Nick’s previous co-authored book Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing (MIT Press 2016) was named the Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2017.

Morten H. Christiansen is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, Professor in Cognitive Science of Language at the School of Communication and Culture and the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark, as well as a Senior Scientist at the Haskins Labs. His research focuses on the interaction of biological and environmental constraints in the evolution, acquisition and processing of language. He was awarded the Cognitive Psychology Section Award from the British Psychological Society in 2013 and a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2006. Christiansen was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, as well as elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of the Cognitive Science Society. Christiansen is the author of over 250 scientific papers and has edited four books and authored two monographs.

Nick Chater is a Professor of Behavioral Science at Warwick Business School. His research focuses on the cognitive and social foundations of rationality, with applications to business and public policy. He has (co-)written more than two hundred research papers and six books. His research has won awards including the British Psychological Society’s Spearman Medal (1996); the Experimental Psychology Society Prize (1997); and the Cognitive Science Society’s life-time achievement award, the David E Rumelhart Prize (to be awarded in 2023). His book, The Mind is Flat, won the American Association of Publishers PROSE Award in 2019, for Best book in Clinical Psychology. Nick is a fellow of the British Academy, the Cognitive Science Society and the Association for Psychological Science. He is a co-founder of the research consultancy Decision Technology; has served on the advisory board of the Behavioural Insight Team (popularly known as the ‘Nudge Unit’); and been a member of the UK government’s Climate Change Committee. He co-created, and was resident scientist on, eight series of the BBC Radio 4 show The Human Zoo.

EP 174 Fred Beuttler and Mark Stahlman on Trivium University

February 3, 2023Jim Rutt Show PodcastsAndrew Blevins

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Jim talks with Fred Beuttler and Mark Stahlman about their new online graduate program, Trivium University. They discuss the trivium & the quadrivium, instilling a better sense of grammar, the current digital paradigm, five paradigms in communication technology, the outsourcing of memory, retrieving scribal ways of thinking, why we need another university, re-centering professor-student interaction, cost disease in higher education, three spheres in geopolitics (East, West, and digital), the replacement of globalism, shaping a new generation of leaders, alphabetic vs logographic thinking, the Ukraine War as conflict between 3 spheres, what it means to be human, averting the geopolitical dangers of the Davos attitude, Net Assessment, setting Great Conversation over Great Books, averting World War III, and much more.

Mark Stahlman is a biologist, computer architect and ex-Wall Street technology strategist. He is the President of the not-for-profit Center for the Study of Digital Life (CSDL, 501(c)3, digitallife.center) and its educational project Trivium University (Triv U, trivium.university). He is also CEO of Exogenous, Inc. (EXO, exogenousinc.com), a strategic risk analysis group and on the editorial staff of its publication, the Three Spheres Newsletter (TSN). He studied for but did not complete advanced degrees in Theology (UofChicago) and Molecular Biology (UW-Mad). He has been widely interviewed and published, including teaching online courses (available on YouTube via 52 Living Ideas).

Fred W. Beuttler, Ph.D. is a fellow at the Center for the Study of Digital Life (CSDL), as well as one of the founding administrators of CSDL’s new Trivium University. He also teaches history at the University of Chicago’s Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. From 2015 to 2019 he was the Associate Dean of Liberal Arts Programs at the Graham School, overseeing a masters in liberal arts, the “great books” certificate program for adults, and the Fortnight in Oxford. From 2010 to 2015 he was Director of General Education at Carroll University, in Wisconsin. In 2012 and 2013 he was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Germany, where he taught American political history. Prior to his return to academia, he was Deputy Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Washington, DC, from 2005 to 2010, where he coauthored and edited a number of histories of House committees. He received a BA at the University of Illinois, an MA from Trinity International University, and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, with a dissertation entitled, “Organizing an American Conscience: The Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, 1940-1968.”

Currents 081: Layman Pascal Interviews Jim Rutt on Twitter as Collective Intelligence

February 2, 2023Jim Rutt Show PodcastsAndrew Blevins

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Layman Pascal interviews Jim about the principles and strategies that could transform Twitter into infrastructure for collective intelligence. They discuss Jim’s motivation in engaging the topic, Musk’s current lack of strategic intent, the least bad unfairness, avoiding point of view moderation, distinguishing between style and content, decorum, user-controlled filters, GameB’s erroneous ban from Facebook, principles of fair enforcement, setting thresholds between private & public domains, whether Twitter is a public utility, advantages & risks of open-sourcing Twitter’s code, two kinds of censorship, culpability around links, replacing the ad model with a subscription service, a connection with liquid democracy, issues with de-platforming, modulating viscosity, social media choices as socially consequential, adding groups, risks of the downvote, gradient rating systems, emergent engineering & why no one’s using it, identity authentication, likely near-future problems, automating sophisticated moderation, experimenting with character limits, wild-card content, a community disinformation immune system, optimizing for time well spent, and much more.

Layman Pascal is a public speaker, nondual theologian and yoga & meditation teacher based in Victoria, British Columbia. His family has lived in the coastal islands for five generations. He is a writer on themes of cultural philosophy, shamanism and organic spiritual development.