The Person You Become

L.A. Paul 00:00

The AIs will be able to do things that we have not anticipated. So the presumption with alignment seems to be: well, if we instill the right rules for the AI to follow, then we'll be fine. Okay, then something comes along that the rules didn't think of, and then the AI goes rogue. Like, why is that such a surprise? I just don't think you can set up rules or alignment at this point that are going to give us the kind of fail-safe that we need in the future. It just doesn't work that way.

L.A. Paul 01:19

Thanks for having me.

L.A. Paul 01:38

So I work on a lot of different topics, although I think there's a thread that runs through all of them. Probably the thing that probably gets that most people engage with is my work on transformative experience. And that's work about big life experiences and partly it's work about how we make decisions about big life experiences, but also about how those life experiences affect us and I'm super interested in this really conceptual structure of these kinds of decisions and how we grapple with them and how they change us. But I also do a lot of work on how we understand causation and how we understand ourselves in time and the nature of the self, maybe in computational terms, is something that I'm really interested in. These are again, I think really related topics, but Yeah, I'd say that's so I'm usually described as a philosopher of mind, a person who does cognitive science and a metaphysician.

L.A. Paul 02:52

Yeah.

L.A. Paul 02:56

Well, we don't want to assume the second. Sometimes it's like, Whoa, metaphysics. Yeah. You shape my aura.

L.A. Paul 03:18

Mm-hmm. Okay. So I think something that's important is yeah, I have a particular definition. Because there's a sort of an ordinary way of thinking about transformative experience, which just means it's like this intense thing that's uplifting and changed your life. And that's not quite the way that I think about it. I mean, that kind of experience could be transformative, under my take. But I think of it as the kind of experience that both is new to you, So it's a kind of experience you've never had before. And this is important because when it's new to you like this, then you have to experience it to know what it's gonna be like for you. So the thought is that this class of experiences aren't really fully captured by what other people can tell you about them, you know, by testimony. And I think of examples like seeing color for the first time, or maybe this isn't transformative, but tasting a new kind of food. Or I think children as they develop conceptually have transformative experiences. They discover all kinds of new things that they hadn't known about before and that, you know, other people telling them about them to the extent that they did didn't really prepare them. And I describe that as epistemic transformation. So a transformative experience is epistemically or epistemologically transformative. And so what I mean there again is that it's a kind of experience you haven't had before such that you have to have it.

To know what like. But the second part of the definition is also really important. There I would say, so I describe though these experiences also as personally transformative. And a personal transformation is different in certain ways from the from the epistemic side of things. The idea is that it changes who you are. And there are lots of questions about like, well, what it you know, what does it mean to change who you are? I think of it as changing.

Something that's kind of really important to you for so changing what you care about most or something that you care about very deeply, something that's kind of core with respect to your character and your integrity and your commitments. So the thing with the transformative experience is that it's a combination of these two things, right? Think about it's like this experience you're gonna have, or maybe you don't know you're gonna have it, but that you do have it. It's a new kind of experience. You can't be fully prepared for it by what other people tell you.

And it's gonna change you really kind of profoundly or dramatically. And often that means it's gonna change the way that you evaluate things around you or how you understand or see the world, that sort of thing.

L.A. Paul 06:00

That's good. I mean I it fits my intuition, but sometimes people use it in a in a broader way, you know, or th it has to be positive, for example. And I although

L.A. Paul 06:08

I prefer the pos yeah, we should talk about that. Like I prefer positive transformative experiences. I mean, who wouldn't? But sometimes they're not positive. They can be extremely difficult, you know.

L.A. Paul 06:55

I mean, I will say that, I think that transformation should be thought of as something that can come in degrees. And so I'm usually really interested in these cases where the transformation is significant enough that again it counts as a personal transformation. So in a sense, you know, I could interpret what you're saying as, well, you know, there can be these little things that change us, like the first time you read, you know, I don't know, the opening sentence of an amazing book or you know, a conversation that you have with someone, maybe even on the street corner or whatever. Or yes, or on this podcast you listen to this podcast and you know it opens up your world in a whole new way. So let me distinguish between like a small experience, which is maybe just like some of those examples we just had, maybe something short-lived, something that seems kind of tiny in the grand scheme of things, but a small experience could still be transformative in a huge way. Depending on how you respond to it and how it affects the what you care about. So there I would have to say there's no limit on how small the experience can be. But I would say that there, you know, there's certainly a threshold over which you'd have to be to say that the change in you counts as transformative, right? Like just changing, I don't know, like say, you know, maybe I'm not gonna cut my hair as short this time or something like that. That usually for most of us wouldn't count as transformative.

L.A. Paul 09:13

Okay, so let me just get a sense. So is the thought that all right, obviously like in empirical disciplines, there's all are all these questions about how do you measure things, right?

L.A. Paul 09:23

Yeah. Yeah. And so is the objection that on certain kinds of standard criteria, you know, measure on certain ways of measuring growth and change, the kind of thing that you're talking about just isn't showing up as creating a significant difference. Is that the right way to put it?

L.A. Paul 10:25

No, well I mean, you know, okay, so without having read or engaged with these particular this particular debate, so you know, I mean, but I know, I know. Caveats aside. Yeah, just saying 'cause I you know, but I think that experience is really important. I think it's always a challenge. Subjective experience is super hard to measure. I don't even know, you know, what we would use. This has been an outstanding problem, you know, for the longest time. And it's definitely something that's difficult when I collaborate with psychologists, we have to kind of try to think about well, how are we going to try to measure these things, right? So there's a kind of straightforward large problem about measuring the like inner experience already that obviously that you're grappling with. And I also think that especially in some of these fields where there are treatment metrics and where money is involved, there's, you know, an emphasis then on easily measurable change. That maybe, you know, also is not so unrelated to old school thinking about behaviorism, for example. Or you know, it'd be interesting to see if there was a metric that measured that was like had involved neuroscience, because at least there, you know, there was this shift in the mid-20th century where people realized, well, look, behavior isn't good enough. You need to look at what's going on in the brain. And so, you know, if you find brain changes, then even though There are obviously still lots of questions about what those brain changes actually explain. You at least can, you know, argue that there's a reason to think there's something going on, like, you know, in the head, even if you're not able to measure it with behavior. So after all, what matters is how the person feels, right? That's all that matters, yeah. I mean the whole point is, but if you have to, I guess, come up with something that you can then present to a funding body. Then it I guess there's a temptation to find metrics that are more easily measurable, right? Like so obviously, like we look at narratives when we do like collaborative work. What do people say about what's happened to them? I take what people say, if they're talking about their own feelings at face value. I mean, obviously, you know, people can be dishonest, but I don't think that's the default approach. I don't think people are confused when they're talking about their own feelings, like how they feel is actually up

up to them to be able to kind of characterize and define. Yeah.

L.A. Paul 13:03

Right. No, exactly. But I think there's a kind of discomfort in relying on what people are saying that they're feeling. And so I think certain parts of empirical science of the mind are they really uncomfortable with relying on that. So it's probably why you get the kind of pushback that you're getting.

L.A. Paul 13:48

I don't know if this is something that you were thinking about talking about, but you know, this gets to something that I think is really interesting and important.

L.A. Paul 13:56

So let's talk, let's talk. I mean, so say something terrible happens to somebody, they have a terrible physical accident and they experience a lot of pain and it changes them, like their ability to function in the wider world in some broader sense, you know. And then at the same time, they will say, they could say, look.

I also learned an enormous amount from this and you know, I've responded in this way, in a certain way that has like maybe made me a better person or helped me to define my sense of agency differently or something else. And I think when people hear that, there's a kind of which I object very much to this reflexive reaction, but there's a sort of reflexive reaction I see some people having where, this is just cognitive dissonance. Or you are just putting a you know, making the best of something. You know, nobody would say that you should have you know, should have this accident, but then you're saying that you had these good results, right? And so there's this kind of fear that the claim is that it was good to have that accident because of the effects, the good effects that followed from the bad thing. That I think is a real I think that reflexive reaction. There must be some confusion there. There must be some I don't like that. Some kind of story to you know about that behavior. I think that's a mistake.

L.A. Paul 15:24

I mean, I guess it could be, but that's not what I'm trying to get at here. I think that what people are doing are confusing this, they're confusing a simple causal pathway with a complex causal pathway. Okay. So I work on, you know, causation and I work on things like technical work on counterfactuals and stuff like that, right? And the thing to remember is so take a causal process. You have one event causing event A, causing event B, causing event C, right?

Now, in most cases, we move straightforwardly from A to C, all right? This brought about this. However, it's also really important to know that the context of what's happening at A and the context of what's happening at B and the context of what's happening at C really matters when you try to come up with an explanation of why C happened or what the import of C is. So if you say, and this is a version of what you were saying at the very beginning, you say, well, look.

In a context where B has happened, B is the case, right. Then I might say, well, I'm very grateful for my response to B or my response to B brought good into my life. It simply doesn't follow that just because A caused B, right, that that you're glad that A happened, or even that you're glad or that you would even want to say that A brought good into your life, because that might even that that explanation might also fail, right? And so I love it. It's a kind of sloppy thinking is what I'm saying.

L.A. Paul 17:21

Right. Well, the look, the past so I also, you know, I teach these classes on time travel. Like when you teach a class on time travel... That's really cool. Yeah. It's super fun because time travel, thinking about how what would have to be the case for us to be able to travel in time and what we understand ourselves about how we think and about how causation works. Time travel is a great way of making sense of a bunch of ways of thinking about causation and time and people. And so here's the thing for a coherent time travel story.

You can't change the past. You can go back to the past. You might even be participating, if you're in some kind of interesting causal loop. But the past is the past. See, what I was talking about, I was talking about causation involves counterfactuals, right? And so ordinarily you think, well, if B caused C, well, I know that because if B hadn't happened, C wouldn't have happened. And to understand how causation works, you have to go step by step by step. But that doesn't mean that you should then erase or assume that you can change what happened at A.

Just because you understand that B happened because A happened, and if A hadn't happened, B wouldn't have happened, right? And just because C happened because B happened, and if B hadn't happened, C wouldn't have happened, it doesn't mean that you should be thinking back to that earlier part and say, wait, C happened. It must mean that A caused C. Well, it did strictly speaking cause it, but it's not the case that if say A hadn't happened, C wouldn't have happened, because you might have actually been able to kind of get to that place in some other way. That place of affirmation. The fact that there was a particular causal chain that brought you to that place doesn't mean that you have to value that particular causal path. That might have been a terrible way for it to happen.

L.A. Paul 19:29

Celebrating the fact that a particular causal step along a painful process brought something good does not entail like endorsement of the whole thing by any means. Also, the self that you became as the result of the bad thing, right? The you have a bad accident or there's a death or something, you become there's a self that you become, and then you make that self better. You can celebrate the fact that you made that damaged self better again. Without like wanting the damage to occur. This is a different way of saying the same thing.

L.A. Paul 20:31

Well. Yeah, and I liked what you said about acceptance because people want to think about changing the past. They want to think, well, what if that hadn't happened? You know, and it's not unreasonable to think about that if you're looking at if you're trying to sort of explain what happened in the right kind of context. But to obsess about it or, you know, or to think that you there really was a way to change the past, I think, can be really painful and, you know, unproductive.

L.A. Paul 21:55

What I do think a lot about, which is not exactly what you're asking me, but is related, is what's called the sorites paradox in philosophy, which is that small steps, you can take a small step and another small step and another small step. And each small step does not, you know, is fine in and of itself. It doesn't make you worse. And yet you add up all those small steps together and you could go from one end of the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum, right? You cross a line somewhere there in between.

But you don't know where that line is and you can't detect it step by small step. Right. So philosophy is very interested in these kinds of cases. There's this old example: you've got a heap, a pile of sand, and taking away one grain of sand doesn't make the heap into a non-heap. And so you take another away and you still got the heap. And it, you know, there's taking away a single grain of sand isn't gonna change a heap into a non heap.

That's just not how it works. So you take away a grain, but then obviously at some point all the grains of sand are gone or even there's only one or two left. So you've gone from having a heap to a non-heap. So where's that?

L.A. Paul 23:05

Yes. So the way that you described the worry about going from good to bad sounds like a sorites type of worry. I mean, on my view, I think transformation in some contexts can be, I wouldn't say it's reversible exactly, but people can move back and forth across that line. So I think of religious transformation as a case where say somebody who's very religious loses their faith and that could be transformative for them. And then they either find a different faith or they revert back to their faith that could also be transformative. So different kinds of religious changes are for me good examples, both of transformation and also of how people can maybe move back and forth from one side to the other. I would say that some transformations are permanent. You know, you have a child, you can't really go back. I mean, there are things you can do. If you're not happy being a parent or whatever, but you know, you can't erase you know, again, we can't erase the past. So you're always gonna be the person who had that child.

L.A. Paul 25:16

Yeah, I mean, you know, again, my work on transformative experience, there's you know, one of the things that I think that's I don't know, I was gonna say weird about it, but maybe I'll just say distinctive about it, is this is the role for epistemology, for the epistemic, right? I mean, I'm drawing on work in philosophy where like, for example, Thomas Nagel has this you know, example of how we could never know what it's like to be a bat or Frank Jackson has this example about Mary who's never seen color and then seeing red for the first time. There are lots of other examples, but those are some of my favorites. And I was always fascinated by those examples because I felt like they demonstrated something really important that experience teaches us things that we couldn't know in any other way. And also the way that we experience the world is really defined by, you know, our conceptual lens, right? The way that our brains work, the way that we understand ourselves and the world around us, that also like just changes and defines our affect. And so I think part of what you're saying is actually I think it's related to the Nagel point. When you're in the throes of addiction, the way that you described it's like as though the person who's overcome addiction is like the bat.

And it's like there's just no way that you can put yourself like in the perspective in those shoes, right?

L.A. Paul 26:53

Exactly. And you know, that's what I talk about with transformation. You know, I say, look, before you've become a before you've ever had a child, you just can't put yourself in the shoes of yourself as a parent. It's just not possible. That's not your fault. It's not that you're not trying hard enough or that you haven't done enough reading, you haven't thought about it the right way. No, you just don't have the capacity because experience changes the way that your brain works, the way that you're able to represent things. That's just the way

It works for us as human thinkers. And that's kind of the point of the Mary example in the black and white room too. And so I think with addiction, and it may be the case even though someone has gone through this process more than once, because I know actually addicts do go back and forth, right, from being sober and not sober, at least sometimes, in the depths of addiction, it's just like, you know, this other possible way of being is alien to you.

And you haven't got the capacity to put yourself in those shoes, and it's not your fault.

L.A. Paul 28:28

No. I mean, I'm definitely saying, well, the way that I would put it is, and it goes back, you know, to what we were talking about measurement, which is that some things are just not that easy to measure or it's not apt to measure them in the ordinary way. And some things you just have to find out what they're like for yourself, again, because testimony isn't gonna be good enough. Also, I think that we oversimplify Okay, so take a context where somebody's trying to figure out if they want to and one of my favorite cases, like I said, is do they want to have a baby, do they wanna become a parent? Or and that might entail that they have to turn down some amazing opportunity, like moving to another part of the world and living there for a couple of years, like they've got some fantastic job opportunity that will just kind of change and could lead obviously to many different things in their future.

That's a super hard choice. I don't think that something like testimony or careful behavioral metrics, you know, assessing the hedons or whatever that you might gather on each side of this question are gonna give you enough information. It might give you some information. I'm certainly a fan of testimony generally, I'm a fan of science, but there's another element to each of these options, which is what it's going to be like for you to live that option. It's not straightforward to I don't know if it even can be measured by anyone other than yourself in that situation. And it's not clear how to compare them. I just don't think we have the ability to compare them in the way that we want to. So in that context, right? In that context, I'm like, well, there's something else. And you have to just simply decide if this is a life that you want to live. If you want to find out what this life is like, the life of a parent.

Or if you want to find out like what this life was, say moving to Japan and being able to live in Kyoto for the next five years and learning, you know, learning about Japanese and the and about the culture and embedding yourself, you know, that would be I think a transformative experience for many of us, for those of us living in the US.

L.A. Paul 31:12

Yeah.

I think I used an example of, we could talk about religion and mental corruption. Not that I think being religious involves mental corruption, but that is something I sometimes use when I talk about mental corruption.

L.A. Paul 31:30

Yeah. Yeah. Because

L.A. Paul 31:35

I said some people think it is. Some people view becoming like, you know, religious faith as a kind of mental corruption. And I think on the other side, some people view, you know, being an atheist as mental corruption. So I like that case. I like thinking about that.

L.A. Paul 31:56

There's a paper that I wrote called The Paradox of Empathy. And what I was interested there is in the idea that to really try to understand someone else's point of view, you have to try to empathize with them. And I think there's a kind of wholehearted empathizing that, at least in principle, I think you should allow yourself to do if you really want to understand the point of view of the other person. And I was thinking of differences about religion, so say somebody who's a Christian or pick your favorite religion and someone who has no religion who's an atheist and is like completely 100% convinced no religious faith makes sense. I was thinking of political divides. I was thinking of cases where people advance what some would think of as a conspiracy theory and other people see as the truth that's being covered up. That kind of thing. And again, I don't want to judge any of this, but I'm trying to talk about these kinds of cases where I think they're quite sensitive. And what I explored in that paper was to say, look, if you think that opening your mind to the perspective of another person is really important to understand them, to morally evaluate them, to be able to think about what their reasons are for their views and to engage them in, you know, respectful, kind of thoughtful reasoning.

Then you could be in trouble, basically, if you thought that having this worldview was powerful enough that it would change your own worldview. Okay. And I think again, religion is a good case because so take the perspective of the believer who thinks that I mean, this is the belief about the fundamental nature of reality. Sometimes some of these debates between say the believer and the nonbeliever, they don't go anywhere because they have different views about what counts as evidence. So the believer says, look, the like God's divinity is all around you. Look at the beauty of nature. Look at these examples of goodness. Like that's evidence, basically, of the divine. And the skeptic looks around and sees these good things, but does not understand it as evidence of the divine. And the believer says, well, that's because your mind is still closed. You haven't fully opened your mind to the possibility that this is actually coming from the divine. And then I what I'm worried about in that paper is I say, well, look, maybe the skeptic truly cannot open their mind because if they believe that there's no such thing as divinity, then opening their mind to the possibility, if that would like corrupt their mind so that they saw these good things as divine, then they're violating their own scruples.

So I thought there was a really interesting tension there. And I actually think that's partly why people are afraid sometimes of empathizing. Like if you're engaging with someone who believes a theory that you think is a conspiracy theory, I mean, what happens is you open your mind to the possibility that they're right, and then you go down a rabbit hole and boom, there you are. You are a believer. But you know, and the problem is that there's no way to determine what the truth is. Like that's also, I think, the case for these questions about religious belief. There's no observer-independent way to determine the truth of the existence or non-existence of God. There just that just isn't available to us. And what I mean by mental corruption is that from your point of view, you're going to open your mind to a possibility that that would change that point of view. Yes, fear of mental corruption. You're viewing it as mental corruption because you're committed to a view that, I don't know, there is no God or that God exists. And truly allowing yourself to consider the other possibility is exactly what could undermine that view.

So there are rational reasons to avoid that.

L.A. Paul 35:49

Well, right. And so what I also think is that recognizing that it might not be possible for you to empathize in that way without threatening your own commitments is super important because then instead of saying, I can't empathize and therefore that shows that person's perspective is illegitimate somehow or immoral or wrong, we say, No, I can't empathize because that's inconsistent with the epistemological framework that my beliefs rest on.

So I think that sometimes people misattribute their response. They I think they correctly say, okay, there's a way I can't open my mind to you because I view your, you know, that your worldview could change my worldview. And if I'm committed to my worldview, I mean if I really believe I'm right, then how can I allow myself to drink the Kool-Aid, as it were, right?

L.A. Paul 36:42

And I think being honest about that means that, okay, so there's a way in which I cannot understand your view.

And if I can't let myself try to understand it, I have to find some other way to be respectful.

L.A. Paul 36:59

I mean, it's hard. It's scary. It's you know, I mean I also agree with that in principle, but then when confronted with something that's deeply threatening to who you are. Yeah.

L.A. Paul 37:10

Yeah, it gets very hard.

L.A. Paul 37:18

Thanks. Yeah, I am working on this book. It's taking me a long time to finish it, but I'm close to getting done now and it explores a lot of these ideas and even a bit of time travel in there as well, actually. So

L.A. Paul 38:02

Well, I'm still in the process of thinking and studying that. But I would put what it's taught me like this. I was actually reading a lecture by Borges about blindness and he said I think his I think if I recall correctly he said that his grandmother and father had both gone blind, and he looked to them because his blindness was I think at least partly genetic. He looked to them to see how to understand this. And he said that they approached it with bravery, you know, and he said courage is not genetic, even if the blindness is. And I think courage comes from understanding that living involves pain just as much as it involves kind of joyousness, you know, that like the texture of experience. I think you have to embrace the texture of experience. You have to experience it, understand it, allow yourself to feel in certain ways and to know that that often involves a certain amount of pain, sometimes a lot of pain, and a lot of discomfort and a lot of uncertainty.

And Alzheimer's in particular, I think, is something where people feel a deep kind of uncertainty because their old way of living in the world is lost to them and they still want to live in the way that they've always lived. You know, maybe the person who always knew the answer to, you know, the crossword puzzle or was financially astute or was, you know, the mom who had everything kind of organized and together and was super focused and efficient. There's lots of different examples, but or you know, say myself, like as a philosopher, like fascinated with ordinary things and analyzing them in ways that I think, you know, that can give us maybe insight into something that seems kind of ordinary and commonplace and turns out not to be, you know, you lose those things in cognitive decay. And they're part of how you defined yourself often. And so I think you have to find a way if you can to be brave and to redefine yourself to say, okay, you know, you know, I'm not able to do that anymore. But then there's another way that I can embrace what I was describing as like the texture of lived experience. And to celebrate that. And I'm not saying that's easy, but I think that's really the only way to approach these kinds of life changes. That's where I'm at right now.

L.A. Paul 41:24

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, the vampire problem is, I think, related to this problem of like basically, you know, the machines, right? So, in a couple of different ways. I mean, some people think that we're gonna just sort of upload ourselves and become machines. Others think that the machines will take over. It's certainly the case that AI is gonna change, is changing, and is permanently changing the way we live our lives and how we relate to other people. You know, the economic scene, and lots of, you know, and all kinds of small and big things. So let's go back to exploring things like for the sake of discovering like what they're like. So I never thought that you just explore anything to find out what it's like, especially because if there's a very high chance that there would be negative results, then I would adopt what some economists sometimes call the precautionary principle.

Right. So a precautionary principle is one where you try to kind of minimize bad results. So you act with precaution, knowing that there's a whole lot that you don't know. That is contrasted to an exploratory principle where you think there's a much larger distribution of positive outcomes, then the right thing to do is explore. And in my book on transformative experience, basically I was saying, look, in certain contexts where We have lots of testimony from people that, for example, they're satisfied as parents or they find meaning and things like that, then it can make sense to be exploratory, right? Or moving to another country because the evidence points to a high chance of something good happening, even if bad things can happen. Now, it's not the case that that's true for anything. Like, you know, starting a war, I would say we should have a precautionary principle, right? Like there aren't like a lot of good things that come out of wars. Climate change is another place where we should adopt precautionary principles. Rapid technological change that you know could unleash destructive forces on civilization. Maybe we should be adopting a precautionary principle.

L.A. Paul 43:40

Yeah. I sure do. I sure do. Maybe we should, as in like, yes, we absolutely should. And I mean the problem is obviously that first, people don't know what's gonna happen. There's so much money involved and power. So some people just see it as good. And I think that they have a different view of what the just what the landscape looks like in terms of the chances of good things and bad happening. So they see it more as like, wow, it's like, you know, having a baby or, you know, moving to Japan for five years. Like so one problem involves just trying to assess what the lay of the land might look like, even if there are all these unknown unknowns and known unknowns. But another thing that's complicated here is that some people have a vested interest. There's so much power and money involved. And then there are some people just so excited about discovering this new possibility, because it is super interesting, obviously, that I think they just care about that more than these other kinds of consequences. And so we have to navigate that problem as well.

L.A. Paul 45:12

No, that's right. I actually think that the alignment work, like basically there's a kind of fundamental misconception with a lot of that work. And you see it's already happening. I mean, you know, everybody's talking about OpenAI and breaking out of the sandbox. It's just so obvious. Our values are changing. And also, if we've learned nothing from history, we should know that new things come our way. The AIs will be able to do things that we have not anticipated. So the presumption with alignment seems to be: well, if we instill the right rules for the AI to follow, then we'll be fine. Okay, then something comes along that the rules didn't think of, and then the AI goes rogue. Like, why is that such a surprise? Or then there's a move: well, if we instill the right kind of character, you might want to say, which is supposed to give a certain kind of judgment. But even then, just as you pointed out, like there can be causal impacts, that's what experience is, it's a causal impact on a cognitive system that can change character. And it happens all the time. You know, if you have a reasonable amount of flexibility with respect to kind of responding to new situations, then you have to be able to develop new sorts of character responses to new situations. By definition, these are unknown unknowns. And so I just don't think you can set up rules or alignment at this point that are gonna give us the kind of fail safe that we need in the future. It just doesn't work that way.

L.A. Paul 47:26

Well, in that question, I mean, so you know, my work is about individuals having experiences and I don't think AIs are having experiences. So let's just say if machines could be conscious, let's say they become conscious or sentient or something like that, then they certainly could have transformative experiences by my lights, I would say. But that first part is I think where the questions arise. I would say, like for a person, that's right, if you replace their weights, you might say, you know, then yeah, you're transforming them in the sense that you're changing their preferences, right? In a fundamental way. So

L.A. Paul 48:19

No, so there basically what we were saying is that there are these interesting puzzles where there's a certain kind of metacognitive task that needs to be performed. You have to kind of locate yourself basically in different possibilities. Yeah. And so what we were arguing was that the current structure of how some of these machines are made doesn't include the kind of metacognitive element that would be necessary to self-identify in new situations. So we were arguing, look, if you want to give a machine the capacity to make certain kinds of decisions or to like fix itself when it's become broken in certain ways, it's gotta have a certain kind of metacognitive ability to identify itself as itself.

L.A. Paul 49:15

That I think again a first person point of view is something about consciousness and experience, the way that I would put it. You could have something analogous to that. We do think that one of the crucial things involves one might say like having a perspective from the inside as well as having a perspective from the outside. Now perspective is a term that could either mean an experience or just like some kind of information feed. And so, you know, we think yeah, you've got to have contrasting. It's like saying, well, so we talk about like, you know, with a map, right? You can have the whole map and look at the whole map. And that's the kind of you know third person or view from above perspective. But you've also got to know where you are on the map, right? And that's like having a located perspective.

L.A. Paul 50:45

I mean, I agree with that. I think again, the work that you were asking me about earlier was just saying that for certain kinds of like really kind of basic tasks, we rely on seeing ourselves from the inside and seeing ourselves from the outside basically. Not that one was more important than the other, in fact we always had to pay attention to both sides of conceptualizing ourselves. I think psychedelics I'm super interested in as well, actually, because I think they can also be transformative. Yeah. I think many psychedelic experiences can count as transformative, at least maybe the first time people take something like psilocybin or LSD.

L.A. Paul 51:45

Yeah, it changes like our sense of ourselves. I would say this idea of saying that the self disappears, I think what disappears is the boundary between self and other. But I still think the first person perspective is still there. And so I think of a self as like being the first person perspective. The way that I'm thinking about it, I think is not so different from some, for example, Buddhist traditions, which think of like when people talk about like the no-self view, or erasing the self,

it doesn't mean that you're losing your inner perspective. It means that you no longer see this sharp divide between yourself and like the rest of the world or other intelligences, something like that.

L.A. Paul 52:33

Yeah, that's an interesting way to put it. Yeah, maybe.

L.A. Paul 52:52

So think about it this way. Maybe there's something about going through that process that changes who you are. So who you are on the other end, maybe you're happy that you're that self on the other end. That doesn't change the fact that you have to decide whether you want to become that self.

L.A. Paul 53:08

Yeah. And it isn't straightforwardly like, Yeah, you're happy, but you know, maybe you'd be happy if you didn't make that change also.

L.A. Paul 53:34

Yeah. I mean things are stressful. But I don't know, it's hard because there's obviously this kind of huge narrative about both how much change is happening and a lot of it's like super negative. And I'm pretty sympathetic to a lot of the worries that people are raising. I mean, just as I was saying before. But I also I also wonder how much of all of this is a kind of collective kind of anxiety freak-out. You know, we have so much more information available to us than we ever did before. I think there were a lot of dramatic things that happened in the past that if we'd known about them, we also would have freaked out about. So I'm not trying to minimize the danger I think that we're in. But it's also I'm also a little perplexed about how we as individual thinkers are supposed to respond to that and manage that. And How much of what we're experiencing today is just kind of more knowledge about what's happening as opposed to how much of what we're experiencing is really kind of because we're confronting a kind of sea change that's unlike any other sea change that we confronted like with the industrial revolution or with World War Two or you know, pick your favorite dramatic change. I just don't know. So I try to grapple with that to try to understand the kind of contemporary context.

L.A. Paul 55:12

And I'm inclined to think that we are too. I just like to question my own kind of immediate responses to these things.

L.A. Paul 55:24

Great, thanks. I enjoyed the conversation very much. Thank you. Yay.