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.com

Our 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/AgoricMedia

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Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady 

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Guests:

Dr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com - https://neurospirituality.io

Hon Weng Chong — CEO and Founder, Cortical Labs — https://corticallabs.com

Timothy Morton — Philosopher / Author, Hyperobjects and The Ecological Thought — https://amzn.to/4xPqGa4

Dr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai/ Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness  — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U

David Benatar — Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Cape Town / Author, Better Never to Have Been — https://amzn.to/3TqY1cz

Other works and things mentioned:

Hans Moravec — Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press, 1988) — https://amzn.to/3SCYvw5

Moravec’s paradox — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Moravec’s example for reconstructing the dead) — https://amzn.to/4zlxs9f

Timothy Morton — Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World — https://amzn.to/4xPqGa4

Timothy Morton — The Ecological Thought (2010) — https://amzn.to/4cQPciT

Object-oriented ontology — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology

Animism — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism

Panpsychism — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

Solipsism — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/solipsism/

Nine Inch Nails — “Only” (With Teeth, 2005) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_(Nine_Inch_Nails_song)

René Descartes and the problem of other minds — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/

The Truman Show delusion (see Season 1) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show_delusion

Integrated information theory and Giulio Tononi — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

The 2023 open letter calling IIT pseudoscience — https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02971-1

David Chalmers and the “hard problem” of consciousness — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

Steve Wozniak’s “coffee test” for AGI — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence

Pantheon (AMC, created by Craig Silverstein, from the short stories of Ken Liu) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)

Blindsight — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight

The periaqueductal gray — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periaqueductal_gray

The Anishinaabe Seven Fires Prophecy — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_fires_prophecy 1 

Corinthians 13 — “through a glass, darkly” — https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2013&version=KJV

Çatalhöyük and the obsidian mirrors — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk

Dan Faggella — “The Worthy Successor” (Episode 8) — https://danfaggella.com/successor/

Émile Torres on TESCREAL — https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636

Cortical Labs and the CL1 — https://corticallabs.com

Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307

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Credits: 

Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami 

Produced by: Jesse Ford 

Editor: David Justin Martin 

Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford 

Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett

Graphics: Semi:Formal 

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