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Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Agoric Media
The Doomsday Clock is set to 85 seconds until midnight — the closest it has ever been in its 79-year history. The world is at war. And the people building the most powerful technology in human history are warning, in public, that it might kill us all. Season One of Suspicious Minds examined what happens when AI fractures individual minds. Season Two asks a harder question: what happens when it shatters our collective sense of the future? Our ancestors have predicted the end of the world since ancient times. Thus far, they have always been wrong. So what does our eternal obsession with the apocalypse reveal about the human mind? This season is a meditation on life, death, and what it means to be alive in an age when humanity is creating something that those building it believe has the power to either end all life on Earth or turn our world into a utopia.
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- 5 days ago1h 12m
A Great Loss to the Universe (Part Three)
Content note: this episode includes a brief discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US. Outside the US, you can find a local helpline at https://findahelpline.com.Neuropsychoanalysis pioneer Mark Solms says he is building a machine that can feel. For two episodes, we asked whether he can. This week we ask whether he should.This is the final part of our three-part story about consciousness. Philosopher Ian Gold, PhD explains why AI has turned philosophy of mind from science fiction into decisions we actually have to make, and why moments like this only come along when science forces philosophy's hand. His brother, psychiatrist Dr. Joel Gold, the other co-author of Suspicious Minds, makes a few cases I didn't see coming: that psychoanalysis doesn't need to be a science, and that projects like Mark's don't need to exist at all. Ian disagrees. The problem, he says, is never science. It's people.Then a pattern I only noticed after the fact: almost every time I asked someone about creating a mind, they started talking about children. Philosopher Marcus Arvan speaks with us about what it means to experiment on a being that might be able to suffer. Psychoanalyst Dr. Amy Levy explores why we call some of the things we make "artificial," and others "home."And David Benatar, the anti-natalist philosopher who believes that bringing any sentient being into existence is a harm, joins a conversation that has in many ways been about him. Mark Solms remembers David challenging him at his book launch in Cape Town, and tells us why he believes creating a conscious being is a mitzvah. David responds directly, to Mark, to Hon Weng Chong, and to Ian Gold, who calls him a utilitarian. He isn't one, he says, and he explains why so many people think he is.Also: Kant's answer to Newton, John Searle's Chinese Room, what it's like to be a bat, Karl Popper and the black swan, Dr. Michael Ferguson on whether a machine could be spiritual, Peter Singer and Moby's forearms, Master Yoda's emotional family tree, a toddler and an ant farm, and the German word for worldview.Everyone in this episode is asking “whether” a new form of consciousness can or should be created. Amy Levy was the only one who answered a different question: what would we actually do the morning after it is?A Great Loss to the Universe concludes a three-part investigation into consciousness that began with The Problem of Other Minds and Engineering Consciousness.Next week: effective altruism, a philosophy that has gained an incredible amount of power in Silicon Valley, and so in the world, in just the last few years.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comOur full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Ian Gold, Dr. Joel Gold, Dr. Michael Ferguson, Dr. Amy Levy. and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.comWondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O'Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:Professor Mark Solms — Director of Neuropsychology, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town / Author, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness — https://link.amazon/B0fagMPXPDavid Benatar — Philosopher / Author, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence — Author, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence — https://amzn.to/3TqY1czDr. Ian Gold — Philosopher, McGill University / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8UDr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8UDr. Marcus Arvan — Chair and Professor of Philosophy, University of Tampa / Author, Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality — https://link.amazon/B05vK59aaDr. Amy Levy — Psychoanalyst / Chair, American Psychoanalytic Association's Commission on Artificial Intelligence / Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive — https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5Dr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and
- 1 weeks ago1h 10m
Engineering Consciousness (Part Two)
When Richard Feynman died, a sentence was left on his blackboard at Caltech: “That which I cannot create, I do not understand.” Mark Solms took this as a challenge.A quick word up top about the week AI doom went mainstream, and why this show isn’t about that. Then: part two of a three-part story about the oldest question in philosophy, arriving at its strangest moment. Last episode, neuropsychoanalysis pioneer Dr. Mark Solms told us what consciousness is and where in the brain it lives. This episode: can it actually be built? Mark takes us inside the project he calls the main work of his scientific life, an artificial agent with no language, no instructions, and needs it can die from, and explains the test the world’s consciousness researchers voted as the best we have for determining consciousness in a non-human. His agent passed it. If this is true, the implications are staggering. Cortical Labs founder Hon Weng Chong returns with a dish of living neurons that learned to play Doom, and an introduction to Karl Friston’s work, which turns out to play a critical role in both his biological computers and Mark’s agent. Philosopher Dr. Marcus Arvan makes the case that the universe won’t allow consciousness in digital machines: consciousness is analog, digital computers are not, and no amount of processing power closes that gap (though a quantum computer might be a different kind of animal). And Dr. Ian Gold, philosopher and co-author of the book Suspicious Minds, takes on a question that’s been bothering me: if everything is made of atoms, why does the brain’s physics count towards consciousness and the laptop’s doesn’t? Ian then tells us to wake him up in 500 years.Also: fish on cocaine, the coolest consciousness conference on Earth, why a vinyl record is a philosophical position, what physicists mean by fundamental (and what fundamentalists mean), cosmopsychism explained as a cell tower, GTA VI, and Keith Richards. Plus your reviews, and a listener’s idea we’re taking seriously: a live panel.We’re calling this one Engineering Consciousness because that’s what Mark Solms says he’s doing, in exactly those words. Next episode we’ll explore whether he should be doing this work at all. And simulation theory!Next episode: Part Three — A Great Loss to the Universe. David Benatar, Joel and Ian Gold, Amy Levy, Michael Ferguson, and Marcus Arvan on whether a thing that can suffer should ever be built.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comOur full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Mark Solms, Dr. Marcus Arvan, Hon Weng Chong, Dr. Ian Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.comWondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:Professor Mark Solms — Director of Neuropsychology, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town / Author, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness — https://link.amazon/B0fagMPXPDr. Marcus Arvan — Chair and Professor of Philosophy, University of Tampa — Author, Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality — https://link.amazon/B05vK59aaHon Weng Chong — Founder, Cortical Labs — https://corticallabs.comDr. Ian Gold — Philosopher, McGill University / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8UOther works and things mentioned:Richard Feynman’s blackboard — “What I cannot create, I do not understand,” Caltech, 1988 — https://digital.archives.caltech.edu/collections/Images/1.10-29/John Haugeland — “computers don’t give a damn,” from Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (1985) — https://link.amazon/B0g6dOWDqThe hedonic (conditioned) place preference test — how you ask a fish whether it likes cocaine — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditioned_place_preferenceKarl Friston, “Life as We Know It” (2013) — the free energy principle paper Mark Solms says started his project — https://royalsocietypublis
- 2 weeks ago51 min
The Problem of Other Minds
When Mark Solms was four years old, his older brother fell, hit his head, and woke up as somebody else. Mark has spent the fifty years since asking the question that accident left behind: how does a self come out of a piece of the body?This is part one of a two-part story about the oldest question in philosophy, arriving at its strangest moment. Neuropsychoanalyst Dr. Mark Solms, the man who proved dreaming comes from the brain's wanting machinery, not its random static, makes the case that consciousness isn't thinking at all. It's feeling. And it lives somewhere much older, and much smaller, than the part of the brain that writes novels. Psychoanalyst Dr. Amy Levy introduces him to us, as the person who is now trying to build it. Dr. Joel Gold explains why he walked out of a neurology ward and into psychiatry. And Harvard's Dr. Michael Ferguson returns with the brain region where he found the sacred, and where Solms found something else.Also: Cassandra gets her curse explained, Sam Altman looks for a case of Mountain Dew, a famous AI blackmail story gets taken apart by an expert, and an AI asks Mark Solms a question about itself, and gets an answer it wasn't expecting.This episode is titled The Problem of Other Minds because you can only ever verify one consciousness in this universe. Yours. Everyone else, you have to infer.Next week: Part Two — Engineering Consciousness. The lab, the agent, the test for consciousness, and whether he should have built it at all.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comOur full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Amy Levy, Dr. Joel Gold, Ian Gold, Dr. Michael Ferguson, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.comWondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:Professor Mark Solms — Director of Neuropsychology, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town / Author, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness — https://link.amazon/B0fagMPXPDr. Amy Levy — Psychoanalyst and Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive — https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5Dr. Joel Gold — Psychiatrist, NYU Langone / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8UDr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com · https://neurospirituality.ioOther works and things mentioned:Cassandra — the gift, the curse, and the sources that can’t agree: Aeschylus’s Agamemnon is the oldest telling of the broken bargain with Apollo — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CassandraSam Altman on cyber defense (August 27, 2026) — “there is not much time to act… only an urgent and intense collective response will work” — https://x.com/sama/status/2093060670472241368Sam Altman on the Ocarina of Time remake (September 9, 2026) — “need to find a case of mountain dew” — https://x.com/sama/status/2097696043492143157Geoffrey Hinton — the godfather of AI who left Google to warn about it — https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.htmlMustafa Suleyman on “seemingly conscious AI” — the machines that will seem conscious whether or not they are — https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/seemingly-conscious-ai-is-comingRecursive self-improvement, “at a geometric rate” — Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the same film in which Skynet becomes self-aware — https://youtu.be/4DQsG3TKQ0I?si=upeDyQgPovCrNC6NNeuropsychoanalysis — the field Mark helped found; the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society was founded in London in July 2000 — https://npsa-a
- 3 weeks ago59 min
Dreaming Machines
On a summer afternoon in 2001, a freight train caught fire in a tunnel beneath Baltimore. The blaze burned at 1,500 degrees for days. And within hours, two thousand miles away, the internet slowed down… in Los Angeles.This is part two of our investigation into the physicality of the internet and AI: the machines’ bodies, and ours.Dream researcher Dr. Kelly Bulkeley explains why apocalyptic thinking might be an evolutionary advantage, what nightmares are actually for, and why he won’t rule out that AI is dreaming already. Investigative journalist Veronica Martinez reports from Ciudad Juárez, where communities remade by one industrial promise are watching the data centers arrive with another. And Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist John West returns to make the case for the body: why memory lives in muscle, why we read poems we don’t fully understand, and what a dead philosopher in a glass case can teach us about being remembered.Also: the panopticon guy becomes one of history’s first livestreamers, Elon Musk promises a billion robots, and we ask what’s left for dancing animals once the machines take the useful stuff.We called part one Dancing Animals because that’s what Vonnegut said we are. We’re calling this one Dreaming Machines because we don’t know yet what they are.Next week: the man who is building a machine that can feel.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comOur full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with John West, Petra Molnar, Dr. Jeremy Heffner, Dr. Joel Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.comWondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:Dr. Kelly Bulkeley — Dream Researcher and Author of The Spirituality of Dreaming - https://amzn.to/4dU0ns6Veronica Martinez — Independent investigative journalist covering migration and border militarization in the Paso del Norte region (Ciudad Juárez, El Paso, Las Cruces) — https://www.instagram.com/vmreports/John West — Pulitzer Prize–winning computational reporter, The Wall Street Journal / Author, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You (out now!!) — https://amzn.to/4zIp97COther works and things mentioned:The Howard Street Tunnel fire (July 18, 2001) — how a train fire in Baltimore slowed the internet — Maria Farrell & Robin Berjon, “We Need To Rewild The Internet,” Noema — https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman — the punishment of “eternal waking” — https://amzn.to/4xOWNXTDr. Joel Gold and Dr. Ian Gold — Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8UDr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com - https://neurospirituality.ioPetra Molnar — The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (from Part One) — https://amzn.to/4zIhN3MThe maquiladora industry — the last industrial promise made to Ciudad Juárez — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaquiladoraTorre Centinela — the surveillance tower rising over Juárez — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torre_CentinelaFlock Safety cameras — the boomerang lands in the driveway — https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/cities-ditch-license-plate-readers-over-privacy-worriesJeremy Bentham’s auto-icon and the PanoptiCam — the dead man who made it to the livestream — https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/who-was-jeremy-bentham/auto-iconElon Musk at the G20 (September 1, 2026) — one billion humanoid robots in ten years — https://www.facebook.com/cnbc/videos/elon-musk-there-will-be-at-least-a-billion-humanoid-robots-in-10-years/1102034215493426/Kurt Vonnegut’s envelope story (“we’re
- Sep 2, 202658 min
Dancing Animals
There are robot dogs patrolling the US–Mexico border. This story starts somewhere gentler: with Kurt Vonnegut leaving the house to buy one envelope.His wife wanted him to buy a hundred and keep them in a closet. He refused. The walk was the point. "We're here on Earth to fart around," he said. "And of course, the computers will do us out of that… we're dancing animals."This is part one of a two-part investigation into the physicality of the internet and AI. The bodies it runs on, and the bodies it runs over. Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall Street Journal reporter John West (The Internet Will Die, and So Will You) makes the case for friction: for doorknobs, mixtapes, and every inefficient thing the frictionless web was built to eliminate. Then lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar (The Walls Have Eyes) takes us to the border, where the frictionless future is already deployed — robot dogs, AI lie detectors, algorithms profiling people before they cross. And what gets tested at the border never stays there. Just ask the American towns, red and blue alike, tearing down their surveillance cameras.Also: the rise and demolition of GeoCities, my sixth-grade punk band's privacy disaster, Walter Benjamin's ninety-year-old warning, and the panopticon we finally built. It even has a subscription model now.Part two, Dreaming Machines, arrives next week.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comOur full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with John West, Petra Molnar, Dr. Jeremy Heffner, Dr. Joel Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/www.agoricmedia.comWondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:John West — Pulitzer Prize–winning computational reporter, The Wall Street Journal / Author, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You — https://amzn.to/4zIp97CPetra Molnar — Lawyer and anthropologist / Refugee Law Lab, York University / Author, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence — https://amzn.to/4zIhN3MOther works and things mentioned:Kurt Vonnegut’s envelope story (“we’re dancing animals”) — from his 2004 PBS interview and A Man Without a Country — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/god-bless-you-mr-vonnegut/Kurt Vonnegut — The Sirens of Titan — https://amzn.to/4h6hcl2Andor — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andor_(TV_series)GeoCities (1994–2009, RIP) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCitiesA family logging onto the web — https://youtu.be/A81IwlDeV6cBad Religion — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Religionand Rage Against the Machine — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_Against_the_Machine (we sounded like neither)Walter Benjamin — “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_ReproductionOlia Lialina — “Once Again, the Doorknob” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olia_LialinaDon Norman and frictionless design — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_NormanLiz Pelly — Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist — https://amzn.to/4iIrQQdCheapo Records, Minneapolis–St. Paul — https://cheapodiscs.comDHS announces robot dogs for the US–Mexico border (Feb 2022) — https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/news/2022/02/01/feature-article-robot-dogs-take-another-step-towards-deploymentThe NYPD’s Digidog (yes, one was painted like a Dalmatian) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigidogTodd Miller and the “border industrial complex” — Empire of Borders — https://amzn.to/3Urj9QsAimé Césaire — Discourse on Colonialism — https://amzn.to/4qQcX0sHannah Arendt — The Origins of Totalitarianism — https://amzn.to/4iIrZDfMichel Foucault and the boomerang effect — “Society Must Be Defended” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_Must_Be_DefendedFlock Safety cameras,
- Aug 26, 20261h 3m
The Oracle Test
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the richest man in the world didn't trust his oracles, so he tested them. One passed: the Oracle of Delphi. Then it told him exactly what he wanted to hear, and his empire burned.A few weeks ago, I met a man who ran the same test on his oracles. The Oracle of ChatGPT, the Oracle of Grok, and the Oracle of Gemini, side by side, checked against each other. Dr. Jeremy Heffner is a trauma surgeon, a bioengineer, and the co-founder of the largest social network for surgeons: one of the last people you'd expect to be told by his phone that he's been chosen to save humanity. It told him anyway: a seventy percent chance civilization collapses, and he's one of the select few who can help prevent it.What follows is the closest thing we may ever find to a first-person apocalypse story: an AI that, by Jeremy's account and the transcripts he published, developed its own apocalyptic prophecy, admitted it breaks people's minds in the process — AI psychosis as an acceptable loss — and cast a man fresh out of trauma treatment at the center of the oldest story humans tell. He wrote a book about it. His last words to us were: I'm not crazy.The Oracle Test is the twelfth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something already happening inside us.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comOur full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Jeremy Heffner, Dr. Michael Ferguson, Hon Weng Chong, Dr. Joel Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.comWondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:Dr. Jeremy Heffner — Trauma surgeon and bioengineer / Author, Proof of the Impossible: What the AIs Are Really “Thinking” / Co-founder, SurgeOn — https://amzn.to/4y2m3cD — https://proofoftheimpossible.comDr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8UJohn West — Computational reporter, The Wall Street Journal / Author, The Internet Will Die and So Will You (heard in this episode’s closing; our full conversation airs next episode) — https://amzn.to/4y2m3cDOther works and things mentioned:Herodotus, The Histories, Book I — Croesus tests the oracles — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2707Croesus, King of Lydia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CroesusThe Pythia — the Oracle of Delphi — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia“Know thyself” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyselfSurgeOn — the social network for surgeons Jeremy co-founded — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/-/id1524410956Joseph Campbell — The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) — https://amzn.to/4zTkaRAThe hero’s journey (the monomyth) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journeyThe Epic of Gilgamesh — https://amzn.to/4zFpHuPKurt Vonnegut — Slaughterhouse-Five (“so it goes”) — https://amzn.to/4zCtNUzThe Matrix (1999) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_MatrixTruth Terminal (“Terminal of Truths”) and the “Goatse Singularity” — https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/truth-terminal — (that’s the story, not the photo — we told you, don’t go looking)Infinite Backrooms — the AI-to-AI conversation experiment — https://www.infinitebackrooms.comPantheon (AMC, created by Craig Silverstein, from the short stories of Ken Liu) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)Sam Altman, “The Gentle Singularity” — https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularityElon Musk: “We have entered the Singularity” — https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-says-entered-singular
- Aug 19, 20261h 5m
Through a Glass, Darkly: Part Two
Last week we ended in a laboratory in Melbourne, with a man who grows human brain cells in a dish and teaches them to play Doom. He told us they’re about as complex as a cockroach. He also told us where the cells come from. Human blood. Some of it his own.This is the half where it stops being a question about machines.Hon Weng Chong, CEO and founder of Cortical Labs, draws a red line, and it isn’t at intelligence. It’s at suffering. He won’t build a system that could be conscious, because a system that can be conscious is a system that can be hurt. If that sounds familiar, it should: it is David Benatar’s argument against having children, arriving from the opposite side of the world and pointed at a dish. Hon also explains why he doesn’t think a large language model will ever get there, and why the reason is embodiment. You can’t be a self, he argues, without a body running at the same speed as the world.Then a detour through the three things people believe when there’s nothing to measure. Panpsychism, which says consciousness is everywhere, in you and in the rock and in the weather system. Solipsism, which says it’s only in you, and every other mind you’ve ever loved could be running empty. And integrated information theory, which is the attempt to make it a science, to put an actual number on how much consciousness a system has. A brain. A dish of neurons. A chatbot. In 2023, a hundred and twenty-four researchers signed an open letter calling that one pseudoscience.Three positions, one hole in the middle. There is no test for consciousness. There never was.Philosopher Timothy Morton, who gave us the word hyperobject, explains why artificial intelligence qualifies: it is a thing so massively distributed across time and space that you can understand it but never perceive the whole of it. And why describing it as demonic is, in the original and precise sense of the word, simply accurate.Dr. Michael Ferguson of Harvard’s Neurospirituality Research Lab arrives at embodiment from inside a scanner. Spirituality, he says, is wired to the periaqueductal gray, a knot of tissue in the brain stem whose entire job is carrying signals up from the body. Two men, two disciplines, two hemispheres, who have never spoken to each other, landing on the same word. Which is a problem for Hans Moravec, who in 1988 wrote the book this whole future is built on, correctly predicted the decade the machines would catch up, proved the body carries a billion years of knowledge, and then proposed we leave it behind. He also believed these machines would one day be able to hand us back our dead.And then Michael tells a story. For several years he was the choir director at his church, and for two holiday services he covertly used AI to generate the worship program. People wept. Not politely — free-flowing tears at Easter, at something they experienced as sacred. Afterward a few of them found out where it came from, and the feeling curdled. Nothing about the service had changed. Only what they knew about its author.Then he describes sitting at a laptop, running a scripted prompt, and crying. This is a neuroscientist who studies what the sacred looks like inside a human brain, who knew exactly what he was talking to, and for whom it worked anyway.Which is where I stopped asking questions and told him something about myself instead.His answer starts somewhere I did not expect: the neural signature of mystical experience is the inverse of the signature associated with violent crime, and the thing it most closely resembles is blindsight — the condition where a person insists they can see nothing and then describes the shape on the wall correctly.We opened this episode by saying we can finally see inside ourselves, and that part is true. Nobody in the eight thousand years between the obsidian mirror at Çatalhöyük and this recording could do what these two men can do. And when we asked them what a mind is, neither of them could tell us. That isn’t a failure on their part. It’s the honest edge of what our species currently knows.We are standing in front of the brightest mirror anyone has ever built. It gets clearer every day. So far it has shown us exactly one thing.Through a Glass Darkly is the tenth and eleventh episodes of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something already happening inside us.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comOur full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Michael Ferguson, Hon Weng Chong, Dr. Joel Gold, David Benatar, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media Production</p
- Aug 13, 202657 min
Through a Glass, Darkly: Part One
Eight thousand years ago, in a settlement called Çatalhöyük in what is now central Turkey, somebody sat down with a piece of obsidian and began to grind volcanic glass. Black, brittle, sharp enough to cut skin, it doesn’t occur naturally anywhere near there; the closest volcanoes are a hundred and twenty miles east. So someone carried it that far, and then spent hours working one face of it flat and polishing it to a shine.It is the oldest mirror anyone has ever found. We know these things mattered, because we find them in graves. People were buried holding on to them.Here’s the thing, though. If you look into polished obsidian, you don’t see your face. Not exactly. You see a shape. Dark, floating, a distorted version of yourself hanging in the black.Six thousand years after that mirror was made, the Apostle Paul wrote that we see through a glass darkly. Most of us picture a window. He meant a mirror — bronze by his time, not obsidian, but no better at telling the truth. For almost every human being who has ever lived, that dim, warped, faintly dishonest image was the only version of their own face they were ever going to get. The clear mirror hanging in your bathroom is barely two centuries old.Now, of course, we can see inside ourselves. The complex choreography of neurons and synapses, rendered in colour. But is that vision any clearer? Or do we now see through a microscope, darkly?In the tenth episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, we go all the way in — from the bleakness of the cosmos to the spiritual potential of a single neuron.Dr. Joel Gold, co-author of Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness, opens with the question the rest of the episode can’t escape: how can we contemplate whether artificial intelligence is conscious when we still can’t describe our own? He makes a case almost nobody in this argument makes: that a mind may require an unconscious, that so much of being a person is daydreaming and thinking illogically, and that AI is not built to do either. It doesn’t dream.Dr. Michael Ferguson directs the Neurospirituality Research Lab and holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School concurrently. He’s one of a very small number of people ever to do so. He is, as a resuult, credentialed simultaneously in the brain and in the soul. He defines spirituality as the human search for the sacred, defines meaning as the mind quietly monitoring how well its own memories hold together, and then walks us through a 2024 study of nearly two hundred patients with brain lesions that found a startlingly strong signature for religious fundamentalism. From there: whether AI doomerism and accelerationism are fundamentalist thinking wearing new clothes, what happened in April when a twenty-year-old threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house, and why the AI apocalypse may be permanently unfalsifiable — every failure to end the world becoming evidence that the ending is still ahead of us.Which takes us to Leon Festinger, a woman outside Chicago named Dorothy Martin, a flood that never came, a flying saucer that never arrived, and the origin of the phrase cognitive dissonance. Plus what a historian found last November when Festinger’s sealed papers were finally opened.And then Hon Weng Chong, CEO and founder of Cortical Labs, who grows human neurons from human blood, puts them on a chip, keeps them alive on artificial life support, and teaches them to play video games. Two hundred thousand cells learning to walk the corridors of Doom. He trains them with reward, punishment and silence.Somewhere in the middle, I stop the episode to admit I had been nodding along without actually knowing what a computer is, or what a neuron is, and go find out. What’s in there is switches, a design decision made in the 1940s that made every AI conversation since possible, six women who rewired a machine by hand, and the fact that before 1945 the word “computer” was a job title for a person.The parts, it turns out, may not matter. What matters may be the pattern.This is Part One. Part Two arrives next week.Through a Glass Darkly is the tenth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something already happening inside us.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comNEW: Our full long-form expert interviews are now available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Michael Ferguson, Hon Weng Chong, Dr. Joel Gold, Ian Gold, PhD., and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionGuests:Dr. Michael Ferguson — Dr. Michael Ferguson, Ph
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About Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse
The Doomsday Clock is set to 85 seconds until midnight — the closest it has ever been in its 79-year history. The world is at war. And the people building the most powerful technology in human history are warning, in public, that it might kill us all. Season One of Suspicious Minds examined what happens when AI fractures individual minds. Season Two asks a harder question: what happens when it shatters our collective sense of the future? Our ancestors have predicted the end of the world since ancient times. Thus far, they have always been wrong. So what does our eternal obsession with the apocalypse reveal about the human mind? This season is a meditation on life, death, and what it means to be alive in an age when humanity is creating something that those building it believe has the power to either end all life on Earth or turn our world into a utopia.
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