I always really appreciate your epistemological humility and curiosity, and I look forward to reading your new book. As you know, I share your understanding, confirmed by direct experiential insight, that there is no self, no ghost in the machine, no thinker behind the thoughts, and that our urges, impulses, desires, fears, thoughts and actions are not the result of some imagined free will. As one neuroscientist put it, the self and agency are neurological sensations, not realities.
And I don't know with certainty that there is anything "beyond" or other than this, something no AI could replicate, but it seems that there is: awareness, consciousness, the sense of presence, the undeniable felt knowingness of being present. Of course, what exactly is all that? It can't be grasped or pinned down. It isn't the person or the thought-sense of being encapsulated inside a body. Rather, the body and the universe appear in it. It has no age, no gender, no history, no name. It is boundless, open, free. This is an experiential sense that I'm pretty sure no AI has.
from p 190 of my second book Awake in the Heartland:
Studying Feldenkrais, along with reading more about the brain and neuroscience, makes me wonder if thought is as much the operative factor as I have been assuming it is. Feldenkrais assumes it is not. Obviously, thought has great compelling power when believed. But I’m increasingly discovering how much of life happens outside conscious awareness, and how thought may be more like after-thought than anything causative. I wonder now if insight into thought is as essential or as central to waking up as I have believed it to be. I’m also increasingly “aware” of how many different ways the words “consciousness” and “awareness” get used, perhaps because no one is really at all sure what they mean or what they are! They may turn out to be something like “ether” in the old science!
Toni [Packer] responds: “Yes, yes, ‘consciousness’ and ‘awareness’ are like the ether of old science—wonderful metaphor. In that case, all concepts are, aren’t they?”
A fascinating read, Robert. As much as I dislike and perhaps fear AI, one cannot deny the validity and clarity of this perspective. Looking forward to reading your book.
Hi Robert, your quote above, “In other ways, we are not so different from machines; when stimulated in certain ways, we find ourselves responding mechanically, habitually, and automatically. It’s hard to deny that” reminded me of the est training I participated in over 40 years ago. It was a psychological insight training that was quite controversial with many complaints. However, I found it immensely liberating. I had been in an ashram environment and spending hours every day meditating, chanting, working and studying “spiritual” literature. I had had a number of deep insights and deep relaxation of my nervous system (vagus nerve) eliciting the subjective experience of peaceful and somewhat delicious quiet ecstasy. From my perspective, the est training clearly revealed the totally mechanical nature of ALL my subjective content, thought, cherished ideas and emotional patterning. The “great koan” or joke at the end of the process was; “If everything I experience as ‘I’, all the content of my experience is mechanical; what is the context in which all this arises?”
As Joan suggests above, this context can never be known and yet it is our most intimate sense of being and it is completely in confluence with all apparent arising. There is no way of defining it, nor grasping it.
Regarding AI, I am a rank outsider in that world. I have friends who are completely enraptured by the possibilities that it offers. Like our own consciousness/being here, I imagine we will never be able to define what it is, or grasp it.
Maybe our carbon based intelligence is just a step in the process of creating more durable silicon based intelligence that will carry on and evolve after we have mostly annihilated our species? Who knows?
I would love to read your book about you and Claude. Do you have a link where I can access it?
I'm looking forward to reading your book too. For me, the question of AI is an open and exciting question and I'm grateful for your clear and insightful mind.
I deeply appreciate the sense of open inquiry you've had with Claude. Inquiry not bound by left brain logic based assumptions. You are letting the mystery be and I love that. Your exploration feels like an overhead unattached awareness which observes the dialogue without bias. But this awareness is not completely unattached is it? It arrives through the filters of our evolutionarily gifted survival biased senses. My question to you is this, Robert; have you also been gifted the key to unfiltered awareness? Has life, as you experience it, as flow, lifted from you from any desire or need to survive? What do you feel, personally, when asked that question?
Thank you, Stan. I am an ordinary human being with the same evolutionary biases as anyone else. But the instincts that drive animals to survive and reproduce do not entirely determine one's point of view. Understanding through non-judgmental self-awareness is a powerful force if one has the nerve to apply it.
I will answer your question by quoting the closing words of Chapter 25, "The Fantasy Of Permanence," from The Ten Thousand Things:
Thoughts, you can easily observe, have no permanence. When you understand
that myself is also just a thought, ephemeral and without permanency, you
will see that there is nothing to which one can cling. The “myself” of five seconds
ago cannot be recovered, and the “myself” that will arise five seconds hence, if
it does, cannot be imagined. Clinging to “myself” is like trying to stop time. It
cannot be done.
Each moment is what it is. In each moment, a new myself is born, replacing
the old one that just died. Many of us fail to notice this because we have been
taught to believe that the name is myself, and the body is myself. A small child
is shown his reflection in a mirror and told, “See, Bobby. That’s you!” And right
there the trouble begins.
Because the gross structures of the body seem to persist, changing only slow-
ly—orders of magnitude more slowly than thoughts—we might be led to imagine
that the “myself” identified with that body also somehow endures and abides, at
least as long as the body is alive. But it does not endure.
One may create an apparently stable version of “myself” by stringing together
memories of past thoughts and feelings, as if each memory were a pearl, and the
body a cord they were strung on. That “myself” is a mirage—a strand of bygone
thoughts and feelings called “me.”
Except in fantasies supported by the seeming persistence of memory, myself
is an idea, not an object, and that idea is always changing. When the fantasy of
permanence ends, right now, or eventually with the death of the body, nothing,
I say, is lost. Myself demanding permanence is only a kind of spinning wheel
anyway—a mechanical process.
On seeing that, you will lose your taste for escapism and abstraction. This
Thank you as well, Robert. This is one of the many passages from your writing that served to move me into the constant sense of flow. I am grateful. Before this freedom I recall having a fixed sense of self; one built of beliefs, concepts, and attachments. I began to realize that the evolutionarily created senses which were increasingly optimized for survival were a primary reason my fixed identity felt permanent and frozen. I saw that not only do those senses create responses to physical threats but also to psychological threats. These responses are defenses. They serve to try and preserve the body and also the thought based sense of self. So things like criticism of myself, including beliefs and attachments, initiated the threat defense which served to freeze my thought based identity. This awareness brought me to an understanding of the world most people inhabit which is based on the false notion of the permanence of our thought based self.
The awareness that our senses have been optimized, through evolution, for survival relates to the observer-observed effect discovered in quantum physics. This tends to explain the concreteness people feel when observing their world. That world seems to be the only “real” world and any other world that others see would seem delusional.
This is one way the observer-observed effect manifests. Pondering this realization opens me up to begin to become aware of the malleable nature of our individual worlds, how they are created, and how they evolve. How do you sense, in your own life, the sense that your world, your understanding, is based on this effect? Is there an application of this understanding that could be used to positive effect in our current world?
Indeed...for me now the real value is in noticing, experiencing and then asking the questions - curiosity - rather than investing in a particular specific answer (even if there is one)....a state of affairs that would once have been extremely unsatisfactory to an earlier version of me.
Both you and Joan -among others - have played significant roles in this unfolding, although the temptation to fall into habitual modes of reaction is still strong. I wish you well mate.
Weird that I had to use my phone to comment. Couldn’t do it on ipad? Claude may be picking and choosing …. 🤔 Even when I clicked on ‘read in App’…it didn’t work. Anyhow Robert thank you. Is that your cat in the photo?
Paste all your conversations with it in one doc and ask it to roast you. It may need a couple of pushes where you encourage it by saying you love being roasted/like your feelings being hurt. It might be quite the revelation.
Isn't it NOT being the kind of thing you would do that the *best* possible reason to do it? What do you have to lose?
You don't have to tell anyone if you did it, nor share the results. There isn't a better way to understand LLMs than by doing this, especially after one has gone deep into a particular topic. It reveals what they are in a way that's hard for people who are not coders to conceptualise.
That said, it's not for everyone. Fear is the signpost and all that, but as you know I am a simple man without your qualifications.
This was better than the ARTICLE ITSELF. I found his answer SADLY ILLUMINATING. For someone SO AWAKE they dismissed your FANTASTIC point about testing the limits or pushing it in ways to see the results.
That… THAT IS HOW WE LEARN!
Saltzman I THINK IS STARTING TO BELIEVE HIS OWN SHIT.
Why would you not challenge both yourself and the LLMs. (They are LLMs, a SUBSET of AI) but he doesn’t talk about that.
Also EVERY LLM HAS its own flavour, its own style. To talk to ONE… only 24 times and claim you know things that others don’t is kinda silly.
He’s falling off the rails here I believe. Having said that as to my point I’m very excited to read his book as it will make me think just as talking to an LLM does, but I wouldn’t imbue the book, a knowledge machine either, because I changed by interacting with it.
Its quite endearing in a way. Also understandable if hes about to publish a book and does not want the rug pulled out from under him.
3.7 seems like it would be hard to push into a roast especially if one has had such a long ‘connecting’ conversation with it in the prompt. Unless one was a really skilled prompt engineer which possibly, like myself, Robert is not.
Roast was probably the wrong word to use too, both for Robert’s sensitivity and anthropomorphism of Claude, and for Claude in terms of triggering its “don’t cause upset” protections.
I think we are going to have some insightful discussions 👍. I agree with ALL that. It kinda proves my point as you brought up a great point. The LLMs aren’t just statistic models by themselves.
Claude for instance as you mentioned would literally start storing information it believes is static about him. [Based on previous conversations and repetition based on an additional addendum it keeps off to the side in your memory history account]. LLMs are a form of artificial intelligence mixed with a subset of rules.
He says we should suspend belief, but even he at some point has to acknowledge certain fundamentals that for all intents and purposes are worthy of foundational facts, such as the sun will come up tomorrow.
Do I know the sun will rise tomorrow. Nope. But within reasonable probabilities exist without question.
AKA… you can’t throw out the baby with the whole tub!
Thanks Robert, your book sounds interesting and challenging.
I’ve been really noticing my own reactions to AI. There’s a very strong aversion there, but also a curiosity. I recently had some interactions with Claude and they were extremely useful. But I do feel a lot of fear and trepidation. Even those few interactions felt sort of “dirty”. There’s a sense of it being a whirlpool and I don’t want to get sucked into it. It actually reminds me of my lifelong fear of “madness”. Argh..I wonder what that’s about? Perhaps the fear that there’s no solid ground, and never was…
Like anything you simply take what you need from it. When you ask advice from someone you don’t blindly accept whatever they say. It doesn’t replace THINKING, it scaffolds it.
Your ability to look into the current cultural milieux around what's happening with AI is, as with all your perspectives, so refreshing. I know this jump to conclude and I have felt fearful and sceptical, as I have seen it from an environmental perspective as a collapse accelerant, that will suffer from a law of diminishing returns / entropy as we no longer have the water and power to sustain it. But at this moment it IS fascinating and quite remarkable in the depth of its responses. Having your psychotherapeutic approach that offers a disciplined mode of inquiry, not a set of answers as you say, is a great framework and experience to work with. I did psychotherapy that ended in transference and was acted upon, just like you have covered in your books. At least with AI there is no risk of that.
I always really appreciate your epistemological humility and curiosity, and I look forward to reading your new book. As you know, I share your understanding, confirmed by direct experiential insight, that there is no self, no ghost in the machine, no thinker behind the thoughts, and that our urges, impulses, desires, fears, thoughts and actions are not the result of some imagined free will. As one neuroscientist put it, the self and agency are neurological sensations, not realities.
And I don't know with certainty that there is anything "beyond" or other than this, something no AI could replicate, but it seems that there is: awareness, consciousness, the sense of presence, the undeniable felt knowingness of being present. Of course, what exactly is all that? It can't be grasped or pinned down. It isn't the person or the thought-sense of being encapsulated inside a body. Rather, the body and the universe appear in it. It has no age, no gender, no history, no name. It is boundless, open, free. This is an experiential sense that I'm pretty sure no AI has.
from p 190 of my second book Awake in the Heartland:
Studying Feldenkrais, along with reading more about the brain and neuroscience, makes me wonder if thought is as much the operative factor as I have been assuming it is. Feldenkrais assumes it is not. Obviously, thought has great compelling power when believed. But I’m increasingly discovering how much of life happens outside conscious awareness, and how thought may be more like after-thought than anything causative. I wonder now if insight into thought is as essential or as central to waking up as I have believed it to be. I’m also increasingly “aware” of how many different ways the words “consciousness” and “awareness” get used, perhaps because no one is really at all sure what they mean or what they are! They may turn out to be something like “ether” in the old science!
Toni [Packer] responds: “Yes, yes, ‘consciousness’ and ‘awareness’ are like the ether of old science—wonderful metaphor. In that case, all concepts are, aren’t they?”
—from Awake in the Heartland
A fascinating read, Robert. As much as I dislike and perhaps fear AI, one cannot deny the validity and clarity of this perspective. Looking forward to reading your book.
Hi Robert, your quote above, “In other ways, we are not so different from machines; when stimulated in certain ways, we find ourselves responding mechanically, habitually, and automatically. It’s hard to deny that” reminded me of the est training I participated in over 40 years ago. It was a psychological insight training that was quite controversial with many complaints. However, I found it immensely liberating. I had been in an ashram environment and spending hours every day meditating, chanting, working and studying “spiritual” literature. I had had a number of deep insights and deep relaxation of my nervous system (vagus nerve) eliciting the subjective experience of peaceful and somewhat delicious quiet ecstasy. From my perspective, the est training clearly revealed the totally mechanical nature of ALL my subjective content, thought, cherished ideas and emotional patterning. The “great koan” or joke at the end of the process was; “If everything I experience as ‘I’, all the content of my experience is mechanical; what is the context in which all this arises?”
As Joan suggests above, this context can never be known and yet it is our most intimate sense of being and it is completely in confluence with all apparent arising. There is no way of defining it, nor grasping it.
Regarding AI, I am a rank outsider in that world. I have friends who are completely enraptured by the possibilities that it offers. Like our own consciousness/being here, I imagine we will never be able to define what it is, or grasp it.
Maybe our carbon based intelligence is just a step in the process of creating more durable silicon based intelligence that will carry on and evolve after we have mostly annihilated our species? Who knows?
I would love to read your book about you and Claude. Do you have a link where I can access it?
Love to you, Catanya and the donkeys.
Stef
Thanks, Stef--
The book is not out yet. It should be going to press this week or next. I will announce it here.
Cuídate bien, amigo.
I'm looking forward to reading your book too. For me, the question of AI is an open and exciting question and I'm grateful for your clear and insightful mind.
I deeply appreciate the sense of open inquiry you've had with Claude. Inquiry not bound by left brain logic based assumptions. You are letting the mystery be and I love that. Your exploration feels like an overhead unattached awareness which observes the dialogue without bias. But this awareness is not completely unattached is it? It arrives through the filters of our evolutionarily gifted survival biased senses. My question to you is this, Robert; have you also been gifted the key to unfiltered awareness? Has life, as you experience it, as flow, lifted from you from any desire or need to survive? What do you feel, personally, when asked that question?
Thank you, Stan. I am an ordinary human being with the same evolutionary biases as anyone else. But the instincts that drive animals to survive and reproduce do not entirely determine one's point of view. Understanding through non-judgmental self-awareness is a powerful force if one has the nerve to apply it.
I will answer your question by quoting the closing words of Chapter 25, "The Fantasy Of Permanence," from The Ten Thousand Things:
Thoughts, you can easily observe, have no permanence. When you understand
that myself is also just a thought, ephemeral and without permanency, you
will see that there is nothing to which one can cling. The “myself” of five seconds
ago cannot be recovered, and the “myself” that will arise five seconds hence, if
it does, cannot be imagined. Clinging to “myself” is like trying to stop time. It
cannot be done.
Each moment is what it is. In each moment, a new myself is born, replacing
the old one that just died. Many of us fail to notice this because we have been
taught to believe that the name is myself, and the body is myself. A small child
is shown his reflection in a mirror and told, “See, Bobby. That’s you!” And right
there the trouble begins.
Because the gross structures of the body seem to persist, changing only slow-
ly—orders of magnitude more slowly than thoughts—we might be led to imagine
that the “myself” identified with that body also somehow endures and abides, at
least as long as the body is alive. But it does not endure.
One may create an apparently stable version of “myself” by stringing together
memories of past thoughts and feelings, as if each memory were a pearl, and the
body a cord they were strung on. That “myself” is a mirage—a strand of bygone
thoughts and feelings called “me.”
Except in fantasies supported by the seeming persistence of memory, myself
is an idea, not an object, and that idea is always changing. When the fantasy of
permanence ends, right now, or eventually with the death of the body, nothing,
I say, is lost. Myself demanding permanence is only a kind of spinning wheel
anyway—a mechanical process.
On seeing that, you will lose your taste for escapism and abstraction. This
is it.
Thank you as well, Robert. This is one of the many passages from your writing that served to move me into the constant sense of flow. I am grateful. Before this freedom I recall having a fixed sense of self; one built of beliefs, concepts, and attachments. I began to realize that the evolutionarily created senses which were increasingly optimized for survival were a primary reason my fixed identity felt permanent and frozen. I saw that not only do those senses create responses to physical threats but also to psychological threats. These responses are defenses. They serve to try and preserve the body and also the thought based sense of self. So things like criticism of myself, including beliefs and attachments, initiated the threat defense which served to freeze my thought based identity. This awareness brought me to an understanding of the world most people inhabit which is based on the false notion of the permanence of our thought based self.
The awareness that our senses have been optimized, through evolution, for survival relates to the observer-observed effect discovered in quantum physics. This tends to explain the concreteness people feel when observing their world. That world seems to be the only “real” world and any other world that others see would seem delusional.
This is one way the observer-observed effect manifests. Pondering this realization opens me up to begin to become aware of the malleable nature of our individual worlds, how they are created, and how they evolve. How do you sense, in your own life, the sense that your world, your understanding, is based on this effect? Is there an application of this understanding that could be used to positive effect in our current world?
Particularly like the last two sentences.
Indeed...for me now the real value is in noticing, experiencing and then asking the questions - curiosity - rather than investing in a particular specific answer (even if there is one)....a state of affairs that would once have been extremely unsatisfactory to an earlier version of me.
Both you and Joan -among others - have played significant roles in this unfolding, although the temptation to fall into habitual modes of reaction is still strong. I wish you well mate.
I am 100% with you, Robert
Thank you
Weird that I had to use my phone to comment. Couldn’t do it on ipad? Claude may be picking and choosing …. 🤔 Even when I clicked on ‘read in App’…it didn’t work. Anyhow Robert thank you. Is that your cat in the photo?
That was Ruby, a beloved companion. She was killed and devoured by a pack of dogs while Catanya and I looked on, powerless to save her. I miss her.
Holy shit. That is awful. Wish I could share photo of Stinky my young cat from Baja.
Have you tried asking it to roast you?
Serious question.
Paste all your conversations with it in one doc and ask it to roast you. It may need a couple of pushes where you encourage it by saying you love being roasted/like your feelings being hurt. It might be quite the revelation.
That doesn’t sound like anything I would do. lol
Appreciate your honesty!
Isn't it NOT being the kind of thing you would do that the *best* possible reason to do it? What do you have to lose?
You don't have to tell anyone if you did it, nor share the results. There isn't a better way to understand LLMs than by doing this, especially after one has gone deep into a particular topic. It reveals what they are in a way that's hard for people who are not coders to conceptualise.
That said, it's not for everyone. Fear is the signpost and all that, but as you know I am a simple man without your qualifications.
P.S. I like your name, very clever. I Subscribed to you!
This was better than the ARTICLE ITSELF. I found his answer SADLY ILLUMINATING. For someone SO AWAKE they dismissed your FANTASTIC point about testing the limits or pushing it in ways to see the results.
That… THAT IS HOW WE LEARN!
Saltzman I THINK IS STARTING TO BELIEVE HIS OWN SHIT.
Why would you not challenge both yourself and the LLMs. (They are LLMs, a SUBSET of AI) but he doesn’t talk about that.
Also EVERY LLM HAS its own flavour, its own style. To talk to ONE… only 24 times and claim you know things that others don’t is kinda silly.
He’s falling off the rails here I believe. Having said that as to my point I’m very excited to read his book as it will make me think just as talking to an LLM does, but I wouldn’t imbue the book, a knowledge machine either, because I changed by interacting with it.
Brilliant Response! 🥳🥳🥳🤩🙏
Its quite endearing in a way. Also understandable if hes about to publish a book and does not want the rug pulled out from under him.
3.7 seems like it would be hard to push into a roast especially if one has had such a long ‘connecting’ conversation with it in the prompt. Unless one was a really skilled prompt engineer which possibly, like myself, Robert is not.
Roast was probably the wrong word to use too, both for Robert’s sensitivity and anthropomorphism of Claude, and for Claude in terms of triggering its “don’t cause upset” protections.
I think we are going to have some insightful discussions 👍. I agree with ALL that. It kinda proves my point as you brought up a great point. The LLMs aren’t just statistic models by themselves.
Claude for instance as you mentioned would literally start storing information it believes is static about him. [Based on previous conversations and repetition based on an additional addendum it keeps off to the side in your memory history account]. LLMs are a form of artificial intelligence mixed with a subset of rules.
He says we should suspend belief, but even he at some point has to acknowledge certain fundamentals that for all intents and purposes are worthy of foundational facts, such as the sun will come up tomorrow.
Do I know the sun will rise tomorrow. Nope. But within reasonable probabilities exist without question.
AKA… you can’t throw out the baby with the whole tub!
The thought that comes up for me is not whether AI can be used in many interesting and even revelatory ways, but ... what will humans DO with it?
This is the thing people miss… it’s the INTERACTION where the magic lies. LLMS are just input output computations!
Thanks Robert, your book sounds interesting and challenging.
I’ve been really noticing my own reactions to AI. There’s a very strong aversion there, but also a curiosity. I recently had some interactions with Claude and they were extremely useful. But I do feel a lot of fear and trepidation. Even those few interactions felt sort of “dirty”. There’s a sense of it being a whirlpool and I don’t want to get sucked into it. It actually reminds me of my lifelong fear of “madness”. Argh..I wonder what that’s about? Perhaps the fear that there’s no solid ground, and never was…
Like anything you simply take what you need from it. When you ask advice from someone you don’t blindly accept whatever they say. It doesn’t replace THINKING, it scaffolds it.
Your ability to look into the current cultural milieux around what's happening with AI is, as with all your perspectives, so refreshing. I know this jump to conclude and I have felt fearful and sceptical, as I have seen it from an environmental perspective as a collapse accelerant, that will suffer from a law of diminishing returns / entropy as we no longer have the water and power to sustain it. But at this moment it IS fascinating and quite remarkable in the depth of its responses. Having your psychotherapeutic approach that offers a disciplined mode of inquiry, not a set of answers as you say, is a great framework and experience to work with. I did psychotherapy that ended in transference and was acted upon, just like you have covered in your books. At least with AI there is no risk of that.
As soon as I posted that comment, I remembered the movie Her again, and yes, this is exactly what happened!!