A.I., Meaning Crisis, and Memory | Dr. John Vervaeke and Bishop Maximus | Q&A | Part 1

study in the way you're going to be tested study in the way you're going to be tested if it's multiple choice make multiple choice questions this is the worst thing to I'll review my notes that's called rehearsal rehearsal works but it is the worst strategy it is like taking a canoe to Europe you could get there but wow [Laughter] [Music] yeah all right John it's great to be back together again yes continuing our our conversations which have been both recorded and conversations off camera what we have today are questions that were submitted um some of them are submitted by students and some of them were submitted by some other people online anyways there's a number of interesting questions most of them are more directed towards you than towards me but that's fine because um we're taking advantage of you being here in order to pick your brain a little bit [Laughter] [Music] given the rapid advances and seemingly unlimited potential for AI and giving your work and experience both as a cognitive scientist and philosopher to you one expect governments and Military there is to apply their considerable resources to quote-unquote cracking the neural code and two succeed succeed in being able someday soon to read minds so this is an excellent question and I want to go through it a little bit step by step the first is the Inc the Advent of the beginnings of AGI which means artificial general intelligence not this not the very siled intelligence AI we've had up until now um and there's you know I think the MIT research paper is right there's we're seeing Sparks of that in this these machines and then coupled with some adjacent Technologies um like um the Deep fake uh both Visual and audit auditory um Technologies are going to prepare the way for the concern of the two questions so let me just um and this is an argument uh that I owe to Jonathan pajo but his work and mine is convergent on this area uh very very soon by the end of this year um because I don't know if any of you caught it but there was a presentation on the senate floor a senator that played a recording of his voice and then he said he in fact did not do the recording it was AI generated deep fake auditory they just took samples from he's given speeches and the AI was able to generate a new speech that was indistinguishable from him talking the video on that is very close so there'll be audio video and so if somebody takes a dislike to you they can post you giving a video looks indistinguishable from you sounds indistinguishable for you saying heinous things that you would never say in order to bespurge your meditate your reputation destroy your career Etc that's by the end of this year for everybody yeah we're that close and so I think Jonathan's right somebody's going to have to step in and be the official authenticating entity that will just tell if this is a true or false and we know who's going to take that role that's going to be the government the government's going to say that's our job we're going to take that role and that means they're going to start being have a kind of control over your life that is not being exercised now so imagine a government that makes itself the authenticator of what's real or not do you want the government to have that power and what if the government doesn't like you and decides that certain of these videos should be deemed real because they don't like you that's all around the corner and so what's going to happen is more and more people are going to find that the state is invasive into their life in a way that has not been the case up until now in other words not only telling you what you can and can't do but telling you what is real and what is not real yes and also and and those are going to slide between each other because in order to authenticate that it's really you you're going to have to give up all kinds of evidence of your that is normally private so that they will be able to say yes you were in fact here at this time and not there at that time and you in fact said this and not that and you can imagine how that's going to already start to blur the boundaries between the purview of the state and your own lives and so next stage uh is in other words forgive me for oh please uh just um uh summing up as I understand it basically in order to have the possibility of authenticating anything that you've done or said or not done or said you have to forfeit all of your privacy that's right basically and you you are you are no longer the author you are no longer the person that authorizes your reality which up until now you've always been right next stage and then I want to address the two questions directly the next stage is the cyborg stage and Andy Clark we are natural born cyborgs for those of you who don't know the term cyborg is an entity that is a mixture of a human being and machine and Clark's point is we've since human beings became associated with technology we've always I'm a cyborg we forget this is technology I'm not born with this you're not born with this is all technology I'm all I'm like except for my naked body in the atmosphere in this room this is all technology right um and what you can show and you're probably aware of this when you're driving a car or if you're playing tennis with your racket or if you do martial art with a sword your brain actually extends and wraps its model of your body around the tool the tool gets included in it this is why somebody you you can feel the corners of your car you know what I'm talking about right and so we we that's the kind of beings we are because we are both cultural and biological and so what's been happening for quite a while is computer human interface which is to try and make the tool that is interfacing with the human brain be a computer now originally um there's two sides to this but the first side is originally they thought this was going to be really really hard because the brain is very complex and we'd have to sort of crack all of its code and everything um and it turned out to not be the case because the brain rewires itself to interface with the technology so you don't need to get a full capacity to crack the neural code to get the cyborg phase coming and so imagine some of you may have seen videos where that's already happening right now it's all enormously beneficial at least the ones that were told about publicly people who have you know been paralyzed and get it get the ability to recover movement and and things like that so of course there's a huge positive pressure to advance this technology and and of course the military is probably doing something nefarious with it that we don't know about um then the next stage after that is to make the link not only between the computer and the a particular brain but link brains together and this was Elon musk's neural link now that that has actually failed so far just uh because the science that he was running the technology off of recently failed to replicate in a huge way and I was I was on the inside of one of these companies that was building like a something you wore while you were meditating I was in the middle of this I'm saying this you don't have any good science for what you're claiming and they basically told me that my services were no longer needed and then I should go to go away which I did that's fine right so right now we're at the the the the computer human interface is going quite rapidly the neural link thing has stalled and it stalled for some very important reasons um one of the most important reasons is and this goes to the really important work of Michael Anderson we're coming to the his book after phrenology is is really important we're coming to the end of the idea that certain functions are located in certain areas of the brain um uh cognitive functions instead what happens is it's called circuit reuse or neural reuse one area of the brain will be used for multiple different things depending on how it connects up with other areas of the brain so for example this area Broca's area right I'm using it for the syntax of my speech but it also controls find motor movement in my hands and then there's theories about why that overlap happens and I won't get into that so it's not like you can sort that's why it's called after phrenology it's not like you can sort of track this area and track a particular function let alone a particular thought there's been there had been some success about you know you could read very complex patterns and you if you if you did enough crunched enough data with a neural network you could get like the person's thinking of an apple or they're thinking of an orange um the problem with that is it it it it's stuck at the level of concrete sort of nouns you can't track oh the person is thinking that Justice is not primarily fairness you can't track something like that it's because of the as soon as you start to get more abstract the problem I talked about the thing I mentioned a few minutes ago comes more and more into play so it's even the case that that same thought may not be reliably replicated in the same kind of brain state every time you're having it so it's it's a it's a much more difficult problem um now so that means the mind reading is Parts if you mean by mind reading you'll be able to put a computer on me and the computer in my brain will talk to each other and sort of wire together so that I can remotely move objects by sending radio signals that's pretty soon that's pretty soon if you mean you can put something on and read it whether or not I believe the or you know Eastern Orthodox Church is a good form of Christianity that that's a long time that's further away uh and it's not quite foreseeable how we'll get there given some of the issues the neural link thing is also stalled um mind control that's a little different okay um so I I'm sorry I can't give you a single simple answer because it's not a single simple phenomena although I I imagine that if you asked me what a cup was I'd also give you a very complex answer so but um so there's a very hard problem we use to study Insight that aha moment in in cognitive psychology cognitive science called the nine dot problem it's joining all nine dots with four straight lines some of you probably seen this online and it it it doesn't require sophisticated knowledge or memory but many people find it very hard and it has to do with this framing issue that I've talked a lot about so the spontaneous solution rate for the nine dot problem meaning the solution rate when there's no manipulation to try and improve the chances for human beings is around it's it's indistinguishable statistically from zero so it's a very hard problem in that way so keep that in mind please now we've we've been doing work on what happens in the brain when Insight um and there's a lot of evidence there's all as always there's some counter evidence but the preponderative evidence says that when you're when you have a moment of insight activity switches between predominantly in the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere especially around here and then back and this has to do with you think you've framed the question right you realize you don't you go over here to explore for a new framing you find one and you bring it back right now there is a technology called transcranial direct current stimulation basically you take a nine volt battery you put two electrodes on and for reasons that aren't clear but the evidence that it can do this is quite there's a lot of studies it will it will shift brain activity and so it's it can it can help with depression and other things like this so the way you put the electrodes is called a montage and there's a montage you can put on that will increase the chances that the brain will make that shift from the left to right hemisphere does that make that make sense so you give people the nine dot problem and you have right you have some people have the real montage and you have a control group that has sham sham is the electrodes aren't in the right place electricity comes on for a few seconds and then nothing so there's sham so that's your control group so you have a controlled experiment people compared to the Sham the people who had this Montage on when they were given the nine dot problem the spontaneous solution rate went from zero percent to 40 percent the chances of that happening by chance are one in a billion now um there needs to be more work done about this but let's say it's reasonable to conclude that there's something really happening there which means we have the capacity to put things on and inducing people Insight or potentially the Flow State and then the US military is already exploring this I mentioned that the other night but here's the thing if they can make an Insight increasing machine they can make an Insight decreasing machine and as I decrease your capacity for insight I I decrease your capacity for critically evaluating information I enhance your self-deception and when I enhance your self-deception I correspondingly enhance my capacity to deceive you and get you to fall in line so corporations and governments are this far away from a machine that could do that to people and of course we have we usually figure out how right now it's all by wire and the history has been we eventually figure anything that's done by wire we figure out how to do it wirelessly so it's conceivable that we could have a wireless device that could make people's capacity for insight go down their their proneness to self-deception and external manipulation go up so it wouldn't be mind control in the sense of I make you believe certain things but it would be mind control in the sense of significantly reducing your cognitive capacity to process reality in uh in in a rational and insightful manner so that's sort of the it isn't a there isn't a homogeneous answer but that's sort of trying to touch on many of the dimensions as I can so uh when I usually teach this when I teach the class on this and I teach them where we've made this breakthrough we think we understand what's going on in this I think their eyes light up and they're all happy and then I teach them all about this and then they get very afraid um so a bit of admits back I don't think they'll be able to like I say to read your propositional thoughts maybe ever certainly not for some long time there needs to be a significant theoretical breakthrough for that I think um the the computer human info interface individual cyborgging that's very close that's very close and you start to integrate that cyborging with a chat GPT machine you can see all kinds of dehumanizing and dystopic possibilities that are just around the corner about that and the mind control again not specific I can't make you sort of have specific beliefs but I can alter the the resolution the Acuity the rationality of your processing plausibly very soon of course to a certain extent we we can already do uh something very similar in both directions with drugs yes but the thing about drugs is that drugs tend to be a very low resolution uh uh intervention whereas these would be much more precise thank you sorry I wish I could have given you better news like no it's all impossible um so let's go to the next question please [Laughter] [Music] you have mentioned the growing problem of cognitive bias yes and possible therapeutic tools that could ameliorate the phenomenon um by something like bias recognition yes could you speak about your work on this issue offering us some practical illustrations both of how the problem might present and how it might be remediate yes so let's start off with something that I've already presented but just to remind you the issue of relevance realization there's way too much information out there way too much information in there you have to zero in on the relative relevant information that makes you prone to ignoring information that might actually turn out to be relevant that okay so one of the ways your brain deals with this your mind is I won't I won't I'm not proposing Cartesian dualism so I won't make any strong distinctions right now between mind and brain um uh I'm not claiming an identity Theory either that the mind is reducible to the brain or anything like that I just want to be able to speak freely is all I'm saying um so the way your mind deals with this one important way is you use what are called heuristics what heuristics do is they bias where you look for the information so let me give you two concrete examples of this and how it shows up in your behavior and how it's liable to show up in Behavior tomorrow specifically tomorrow okay for some of you so judging the probability of an event by taking account of all the real world variables and trying to do probability calculation Bayesian is combinatorial explosive you can't do it it's overwhelming it's too vast you can only do it in very very short limited context within what's called a small world in the large real world you can't do it so what your brain does is it relies on two heuristics for judging how probable an event is one is called the availability heuristic the more easily you can imagine or remember a similar event the more probable you think it is and this is actually a good heuristic because the more often you've seen an event the more easily you can remember it so it's a pretty good tracking but it but it's not the calculation of the probability it uses this fast and dirty shortcut to say oh well how easily can you imagine it how easily can you remember it that's how probable it is that's called the availability heuristic another one is the representativeness heuristic how much does it stand out as prototypical for that category because generally people make the Prototype something that is found frequently in the category okay so and it'll mislead you like you ask people what do you think is the what's the like what's the probability of uh they're like What's what percentage of the population of birds are robins and people will often give a much more inflated answer than is really the case because a robin is a pretty prototypical bird now let me let me give you a concrete example of this so you take your friend to the airport and you think about this huge thing of metal in the sky and the availability heuristic tells you I can easily imagine that crashing I really can and then you think the and then the representative heuristic what happens when a plane crash it's a disaster the news and pictures so the availability heuristic says oh this is quite probable it's a representative heuristic says oh this is quite probable and then they agree and they reinforce each other so you say to your friend have a safe flight these are all euphemisms so don't die please don't die have a safe flight text me when you're there because you know if you're going to crash and you say wait I have to text my friend the plane immediately writes itself right so we do all this stuff because um and then without a second thought we turn around and get in the North American death machine called the automobile that's an example of how the biases work now here's what here's the issue the problem you face you can't get rid of the biases because their only biases when they're not working they're heuristics when they're working you need them because again you can't go back and do the raw calculation of all the probability so what do you do what do you do you practice what's called active open-mindedness this was developed by Jonathan Barron and other people like key stanovic at the University also at the University of Toronto because yes indeed all important work is right now coming out of the University of Toronto so active open-mindedness is learn about the biases that have been scientifically studied that we have good evidence for by the way none of this research suffers the replication crisis all of this research robustly replicates again and again and again and so what you can do is you can learn about a particular bias learn about it and then practice don't don't try and do all the biases because you can't pick one by us a day or for a week and practice trying to note it carry a notebook around I've done this note when note when you've done the bias I get my students to do this in one of my courses they have to do a cognitive bias report and then at the end of the day review your the bias how it showed up what was going on and there and you slowly will sensitize yourself to the bias that's that's sort of a core basic practice then what you can do is you can situate that practice within a wider practice of what's called cognitive behavioral therapy which teach you reframing practices uh how you can step back and become aware of how you're framing the situation and how that framing might reflect the bias so one of the things you you can practice doing is step back and seeing how much is my framing of that person due to the fundamental attribution error and the fundamental attribution error is this if they've done something well it's because of circumstances if they've done something poorly it's because of their character and there's a reverse bias for you by the way if I've done something well it's because of my character and if I've done something bad it's because of circumstances and this is a very pervasive bias and but so you can step back and try to become aware of it and then the idea as you as you first just try to become aware of these biases and the possibilities of reframing and then you start to practice the reframing you start to practice doing the opposite that's the active part of the open-mindedness so you notice I'm only Gathering evidence that supports my proposal confirmation bias I'm going to do the opposite I'm going to do an honest search or in fact ask somebody else to join me in an honest search for evidence that might contradict my proposal or under my proposal so you learn about the biases you sensitize yourself to them you practice reframing you practice counterbalancing them and then if you wish you can situate that into an even broader framework the framework that CVT came from which is a stoic framework in which you can practice some very powerful practices like the view from above practice or the premeditated premeditarial practice the objective seeing practice because these work with entire sets of biases at the same time I would recommend doing it in that progression and this is a way to reliably make a difference in how rational you are especially in the domain of your judgments about other people and the kind of Judge inferences you're making about your beliefs and I would note that most of those stock practices which you mentioned were taken up into the Orthodox monastic and spiritual tradition and are formed very much part of Orthodox the Orthodox spiritual life even even today um so I I would say that if a if a person is being or attempting to be a good Orthodox Christian they are going to be uh engaging in the in these practices which are going to be helping them to avoid some of these biases perhaps what the science can help is uh giving more precise articulation to some biases right right yeah yeah I agree um I would I would note maybe extending it that idea a little bit um in in the Orthodox spiritual life we are trying to use those practices not so specifically in order to avoid coming to a wrong conclusion about some phenomenon about a fact of this world another effect about the material world um but but more about uh our own states of virtual Vice and uh in so far as we relate to to other people their how we understand them and trying to understand this as the I can say the set of relations as being with under the Providence of God and so we would we would give thanks to God and we would in fact glorify God um for for the circumstances so this would be kind of a um a Transfiguration of of the of the stoic practice in other words directing it uh further upwards yeah can I can I speak to that sure so McNamara on uh the cognitive Neuroscience of religious experience and related and this has overlaps with some of the work I do on ritual has talked about the importance of taking that perspective um of perspective taking so let's build to it um so it there there's ways of sort of measuring wisdom putting people into wisdom tests and I won't go into the details of that if people want to ask me about that I'm happy to talk about it because I want to stay on this point um but if you allow somebody to talk uh about the task um they will they'll do better on the wisdom task what's interesting is that's indistinguishable from them imagining talking to somebody else other than themselves um and I'm not saying that it's imaginary when you're addressing God I'm not making that's not the comparison I'm making because the next step in the in the research was you're a Grossman in what he called the Solomon effect and it goes like this ask somebody to tell you a terrific problem they're facing and they will automatically do it from a bias that they're not realizing it they will tell you it from a first person perspective and then you say great could you now redescribe the same problem from a third person perspective a perspective that a good friend might have on your problem when they redescribe it from the third person perspective they get insight into the problem that they previously couldn't see this is called de-centering so when you get people to decenter and this is this means that there are biases that are a perspectival biases not propositional biases when you get people to de-center right that can have a powerful effect on helping them notice bias I'm not being reductive here but I'm saying I mean I I if you if you are seeing if you are attempting to realize this from God's perspective to whatever degree which you're doing when you're giving thanks right you're saying the way I see it but right there's a there's a more encompassing that can decenter you in a powerful way just that act right that will help you get insight into a problem or difficulty you're facing um that you might not was probably not available this this in fact um this is part of the non-propositional way in which ritual can be so transformative for human beings [Laughter] [Music] all right so go to the next question which is you have spoken about how solving the meaning crisis or maybe you wouldn't make such a complete claim yeah ameliorating it yeah yeah Awakening from the meaning crisis yeah will help address The Meta crisis yes you're gonna have to explain what that is yes um what role does do you see monasticism having in this effort right um so first of all what the metacrifice what is the what is the meta crisis and of course I I would just note here with respect to monasticism of course um monasticism existed uh as a greater part of society before these crises um yes came into into being um but I'll let you address that as you go on sure although I mean it there is overlap with the crisis of late Antiquity so um I understand what you're saying monasticism didn't just arise as a response to crisis so first of all the meta crisis The Meta crisis is an idea that many people have converged upon with good reason which is we're facing a series of crises ecological energy economic uh political and now ai that are not independent from each other they they drive each other they push each other they afford each other they exacerbate each other in powerful ways and so they they tend to complexify very rapidly Beyond sort of human ability human ability to get a quick enough grasp on them so that we can intervene in them that's the sense of the meta crisis but you're you're distinguishing The Meta crisis from from the more personal crises of you know loneliness yes yes you know all so and here's here's my proposal about them which is for many of these um we no matter what I say I can hear people on the left and the right yelling at me but for many of these crises because some of the people deny the crisis et cetera I'm just gonna keep going for many of these crisis crises we we we know sort of what we should do or or we know we should at least do something and yet we're not doing very much and very often we're doing nothing or we pretend to do something and we're not it's it's in in many of these uh issues uh it's maybe not um coming to a perfect resolution but it would seem to be actually very easy within just sitting down the two of us within 15 minutes coming to a series of of um Solutions or policies which would at least be better than what it is right now yes and it's very hard to move on this now part of it is ignorance and part of it is the complexity um so what I'm going to say I'm not I'm not claiming it's the sole Factor but I I I propose as a hypothesis hypothesis that um the meaning crisis the the fact that many people across the board think their lives are much less meaningful often approaching meaningless and this is exactly this shows up in all kinds of different symptoms and I won't review all those symptoms um and then for me what that means is we we have trapped people in exactly the opposite mental framework they need to engage in so let me let me let me try and we need let me try and Pull Apart three things that have been reduced and then meaning has been reduced to them and I'm not I'm not a crypto Marxist or anything we've confused meaning with subjective well-being and subjective well-being with wealth so wealth you know what that is I don't have to Define it subjective well-being is how how sort of contented you are with your life how good you feel sort of about your life like yeah things are going well right right and then I'll and then I'll talk about what meaning in life is in a second now the thing about wealth is that wealth is initially very highly correlated with subjective well-being so initial increases in wealth that lift people out of poverty have huge impact on subjective well-being but the problem is you you can't stay there on the graph so once people get to a certain level huge increases in wealth only make very small differences in subjective well-being so I want to say this very clearly after a certain degree of wealth it is actually irrational to pursue wealth as a way of increasing subjective well-being but our culture tells us exactly the opposite the next thing is our culture equates meaning in life with subjective well-being well if you feel sort of contented and good that's all you need and the the answer is that's actually false the two are related but they can move in opposite directions and so my prototypical example and some of you have heard this before I'm sorry but um having a child is a disaster for subjective well-being just so you know so having a child is like being in a Shiprock everything is breaking down there everything's wet apparently for unknown reasons right everything is wet you don't eat properly you're not sleeping properly there is an alarm an emergency alarm going off because you're just trying to keep this entity alive like it's just right uh and so and your relationship to your partner is degrading because and they do measurements on this each you ask how much are you contributing to the child's 70 and the other partner says 70 so inevitable inevitable Clash there uh your finances are degrading and you're getting sick all the time so by every measure that contributes to subjective well-being having a child makes it go down disastrously why do people do it part of it is people are in cautious and they fall into it but let's say why do people choose to do it and you can ask them that they do it because it is one of the most powerful increasers of meaning in life so remember I said when you're when you're when you want to know what what your meaning in life what do you want to exist even if you don't and how much of a difference do you make to it children really Max that out you really want your child to live even you'll you'll die for your child and you make a huge difference for a very long time so meaning in life goes up dramatically so do you see we we collapse meaning of life into subjective well-being and subjective well-being into wealth and then people are starving for meaning and they're trying to get it out of wealth broadly construed wealth Fame power and all of those things I'm just lumping them all together right because money is basically power and influence right when people are starving for meaning and they're in that they're in that conflated reduced frame they can't make the changes they need to make to their lifestyle in order to address the meta crisis they are starving and they'll be very they'll have a lot of inflexibility now we do know if people are put into other frames such that you promised them your wealth will be harmed to some degree your subjective well-being will go down but your meaning in life will go up tremendously people will make that move if they believe the promise look at what happened in World War II and rationing and all kinds of things like that because people thought they were making a difference to something that they want that really mattered they were willing to get let their wealth be reduced and their subjective well-being bearded see so I'm making an argument based on historical evidence and based on on the cognitive psychology we need to be able to shift people so that they see that it is viable to take the hit to their wealth and their subjective well-being in order to get more meaningful lives in order to be part of more meaningful lives I needed all of that prep for the point point I'm going to now make to my understanding and I've observed both Zen Buddhist monastic life and now very wonderfully and gratefully Eastern Orthodox monastic wife I think the monastic life is a clear Exemplar of being able to make exactly that trade I know you're doing it for things beyond that but I think you would agree that that is at least one of the things that is happening in the monastic life it's like the commitment to wealth and to subjective well-being is reduced because you are given a promise that you trust that you will get a more meaningful life in return and it works it works I mean because I can say that it works because because I live it yes and I've witnessed it and we make how you say the the trade-off in subjective well-being or or at least the potential trade-off it doesn't always actually no you're not suffering all day long or anything like that um you know these are uh these are formulated in the the classic vows of monasticism poverty Chastity in obedience yeah um people who did not um have a higher objective in in mind which uh lent a great deal of meaning or at least possibility of meaning would never voluntarily uh devote themselves to Poverty give up give up wealth give up their own property not have anything devote themselves to Chastity to entirely um avoiding any sort of sexual life not to mention um family children not to mention other extensions from that like you know like entertainment um and obedience where you're not getting to do what you want uh you have to you have to do what you are told within the context of the of the monastery so um those subjective those objective the uh the measures of subjective well-being definitely are voluntarily for forfeited um but you show that it works it it works yes yes yes it works so it is attractive I keep saying this is a wonderful place to be it's an attractive I get it not attractive by sort of Standards but if you come here in good faith right it there's an attractive you there's an attraction to you see like like I've said to you multiple times good people lead up living good lives and and you see it works and that there's meaning uh uh and so I think monasticism can have a very important role to exemplify and provide living proof that the trade uh that we need in order to ameliorate the meaning crisis and be able to liberate the resources for addressing the medic crisis that trade can be made it can happen a lot of times what people people need to see uh something an example of something in its most extreme form uh in order for the truth of it to resonate with them yes and uh that's a good point I hadn't thought about that that's a good point and of course the majority of people are never going to become monks um you know in in any religion in any context even in the most religious Society that's ever existed and yeah all of human history most people are not going to do that um but the fact that it is present the and the fact that people know that that exists um uh provides a kind of inspiration for them um which uh which the user language makes Salient um precisely this this idea of of you being willing to trade subjective well-being for for meaning in life and I I would then dare say that to the extent that um that this most extreme example of that is prominent within Society it orients Society in precisely that direction exactly exactly it's an exemplification that can reorient Society yes I'd also like to address the issue about you have a seminary here as well and um I won't repeat the argument that I made at length in the the video essay about Ai and the follow-up essay I did with uh Ryan Barton video it's on my YouTube channel and also the discussion I had with Jordan Hall which is on his channel but those parts of our Humanity that have to do with the spiritual somatic access are going to become more and more important for our sense of who we are as distinct from the emerging AI and how that is puts us into relationship what with what is Ultimate is also going to become more important because of the things that people have prided themselves on as being the Hallmarks of human uniqueness are going to be eroded um and I think this has the real possibility I don't know what probability to assign to it because there's all kinds of nefarious things that work around AI so I want to be very cautious but I think it's reasonable to say there is the possibility that and a lot of people are going to be aghast I just want to say this but there's a real possibility that theology will become extremely important again a discourse about the spiritual and embodied in relationship to what is Ultimate um is going to be really really important for two reasons um I think there's going to be a tremendous pressure on spirituality for the reasons I've given but a a nebulous spiritual but not religious is going to be insufficient for for the sort of precise power these machines are going to exercise we're going to need a much more articulated disciplined and developed sense of spirituality that's if like that is is putting us into sort of clearly recognizable relationship to what is Ultimate as a way of trying to vote say vouch safe our sense of our human identity our Humanity so um uh I think let's see uh theological work especially when it's embedded into um a monastic we're related to in a monastic way of life and embedded in a very comprehensive sapiential framework I think will be there's a real possibility that at least a significant proportion of the population is going to turn in that direction well um I guess we'll we'll see how that happened how that plays out yes um I I think that uh of course I have a bias here right yeah um but the I think what you said about the the question of of the the articulation of of it you're being able to hold a an articulated theological position as opposed to Simply a vague yes sense of something exactly or or the most General propositions possible yeah um is going to become the the value of that is going to become increasingly more apparent I think we already see that happening right now with the fact that the um the only religions that are either maintaining uh that their numbers stable or that are growing are precisely those religions which have a greater articulation and a greater level of commitment and those religions which are um allowing themselves to either you could say to dilute uh a a a religious tradition or to um reduce the level of commitment or to express them Express that commitment in the most General and therefore the vagus terms possible the numbers of of those are declining precipitously and insofar as we see the the rise of the nuns we see that hap we see that the attrition is primarily from from those churches that that lack that that level of articulation and and commitment you know it's like nobody thinks themselves well I'm going to be a Unitarian you know that's you know that's not what's um because it doesn't provide much much of an answer yes um and then in so far as we are moving forward we are going to be dealing with this whole question of artificial intelligence uh and which is going to bring to the Forefront of public consciousness uh no well no pun intended the whole question of of Consciousness the whole the whole question of of uh rationality these issues right the issues that you talked about about of of wisdom and and uh and to the extent that um the developers of artificial intelligence do not address those issues in an explicit manner we are most likely going to suffer uh negative result from that yes we're going to be moving into or it seems like we'll be moving into a landscape very shortly uh where these questions that are traditionally um both philosophical and Theological in nature are going to be highlighted uh in the sharpest and most direct practical sense yes you you made the argument better than I did that was very well articulated I would make a request since I'm here that the Seminary rise to the challenge that you just mentioned I I expect you will but here's two dangers one danger is a kind of fundamentalist Retreat into nostalgia about theological issues or another one is a utopic you know program but I think really wrestling with how the this the Advent of this reality is going to throw up very powerful problems that have a philosophical profundity at the same time that they have a very pressing practical presence that that needs to be addressed that really needs to be addressed uh well I I hope we we can put in our widow's mites into that conversation and um I think you you had uh given uh some thoughts which I thought were very apropos um and with respect to the to the necessity necessity really of of wisdom uh which is something that uh certainly is intended to be cultivated at the Seminary and generally within the you know the context of the church I I would find it hard to overstate the importance of of Institutions which are consciously uh and deliberately attempting to promote that yes I wholeheartedly agree [Music] [Laughter] [Music] okay so this question is um Dr viveki is there a way to help strengthen my memory yes this is from a student who who probably has uh yep um so let's talk a little bit about what memory is and isn't and what we're actually talking about when we're talking about improving memory because we have to get away from a lot of misconceptions about memory and if we're going to really open ourselves up to cultivating the habits and skills that and the art the art that improves memory first of all your memory is the common idea of what your memory is is your memory is like a library and what you do when you want to remember things is you search through the library and you find the missing thing and then you bring it back and pass it to Consciousness oh all right and that's not the case because you rapidly know when you don't know something so please tell me Queen Elizabeth oh sorry King Charles King Charles telephone number I don't know it you know you don't go through all your telephone numbers is that Prince Charles nope is that Prince no no you know you rapidly know when you don't know something in the library if the green book is very close to the brown book it's also close to the yellow book which is close to the brown book so if I ask you to give me a word that rhymes with blue you'll tell me grew or new and if I ask you to tell me a color like blue you'll tell me red so do you find red and grew close to each other when I say red do you think yeah grew you don't so memory doesn't work that way it's not organized that way next thing your memory is not designed I'm putting it in quotes like this to be an accurate recorder of the past your memory is designed to be an intelligent predictor of the future which means your memory will do all kinds of falsification if it improves your chance of dealing with a future situation so I I think I mentioned this you give people a bunch of random Dot pictures you take you show them four you take it away and you say I'm going to show you some ones and I'm going to ask you if you've seen this before what I do is I make a mathematical average of the previous four which is nothing like the previous four but it's a mathematical average and I hold it up and people say that yeah I saw that one for sure because the memory has not been trying to accurately record the past it's been doing a kind of data compression predicting what the next dot pattern is likely to be and the average is a good good estimation so your brain goes yeah 49 of eyewitness testimony turns out to be false confident eyewitness testimony whatever your moral arguments are I think it's very hard to support capital punishment on the back of the fact that we are that inaccurate about confident okay let me give you an example of this this happened case woman was watching a TV show somebody broke in a male and assaulted her laughed she called the police and she was able to give a really accurate description of the assailant it was the person that was on TV and that was a live broadcast so they couldn't possibly have been the assailant but the brain said face meaningful to me Salient human being attacking me must have been that person this is called reconstructive memory it's massive and it's pervasive and your memory is just another example the person who discovered this phenomena at least put a lot of not discovered it gave a lot of experimental evidence for it she got into some really hot water about it Elizabeth Loftus she tells this story one of her cherished family memories is the family was driving somewhere the car broke down thought and the dad went to get some gas was going to be quite a while but by happenstance they broke down near an ice cream shop so the family went to the ice cream shop they had a wonder and it was just a clear example of how the family and you know circumstance could turn something horrible into a wonderful cherished memory and she loves this memory and she said and then she related she was telling the memory uh she told it she should tell her friends and people she met and then she told us about in the presence of her family and they all laughed and she said why are you laughing why are you besmirching one of my cherished childhood's memory and they said that happened five years years before you were born she had heard this story growing up and her memory had reconstructed that she because she liked the story so much she must have been in the story so you're probably wondering if your mother really loved you um so the thing you have to do is you have to instead of trying to work against that what you have to do is try and work with it and then okay namely try and help your brain be an intelligent predictor as opposed to being an accurate recorder and there's one more thing to know about this which is you have well you have multiple kinds of memory but the two that are important for us right here now is long-term memory this is all that information you store unconsciously right like Napoleon lost at Waterloo you're not thinking that all day long Napoleon lost the water right and what's called working memory working memory is what you can actually hold in mind it's where you go when I ask you to do mental arithmetic like what's 24 times 32 right you're trying to do that you hold it in mind and the thing is you can hold four chunks of information in there so I sometimes do this with people I wish I had a whiteboard here or a Blackboard I could show it to you but I what I'll do is I'll buy I'll put up a bunch of letters very long I'll show that for a few seconds and ask people and I'll put my and I'll say turn away right and they say what what are the letters you saw and they get two or three of the letters it's wrong then I rewrite exactly the same letters but they spell the words dog pig cow cat and now I show the same letters and I say now tell me all the letters and they can do it all because the information has been chunked the the what what a chunk means is different things have been made relevant to each other because of how they're relevant to you so the way you improve memory is by chunking because remember what remember the nine dots sorry remember the dot your brain is looking not for the specific information what it's looking for is the meaningful integration from which it can reconstruct what it needs for the current situation so when you chunk information the brain goes right and if you Chuck it so that it's relevant to you so first of all you want to chunk your information then you want to chunk it in a way that shows What's called transfer appropriate processing because your brain want is trying to predict the future your brain is not just storing the information it's storing how the information is being processed yeah what that means concretely for example if you're studying and you know that how you're going to be tested is you're going to be asked to answer a long essay study the information chunk it by practicing writing in a long essay don't review this is the worst thing to I'll review my notes that's called rehearsal rehearsal works but it is the worst strategy it is like taking a canoe to Europe okay you could get there but wow the way the reason why people like rehearsal and cramming is because it alleviates anxiety because it's an easy strategy to use and they confuse anxiety reduction with memory improvement so you want now what if the test is going to be short answers make up for yourself the more you generate the questions make up short answer questions and practice answering them get a bunch of people and make up short answer questions for each other study in the way you're going to be tested study in the way you're going to be tested if it's multiple choice make multiple choice questions that's transfer appropriate processing you want to do context dependence too sometimes knowing that it's encoding specificity so here's the here's an example of the experimental data this is based on you give you put a whole group of people in a room where they're learned they have to learn something word list or something you send them away for a week you ask them to come back you divide them into two group group a gets to go in the same room that it learned the list Group B goes in in another room regardless of all the differences of IQ and study habits group a will do better than Group B about 30 better because your brain is also trying to store the context in which the information so the brain doesn't just the brain does not store information it stores chunks of information that are relevant to you it stores how you're learning the information and it tries to it needs the how you're studying has to be relevant to how you're going to use it and then it also stores the context in which so what you need to do is try to study as if you can't study in the place where you're going to be tested go to the room I kid you not try to form a mental image and while you're studying form a mental image of the room again and again and again if you have a particularly difficult thing you're trying to remember right right play a piece of music for that and then when you're in your test situation remember the music first and it'll help you call back the information study with the pen that you're going to write with in the exam there is a whole host of things you have to do that do not seem to make sense I should be putting as much information in my head by reviewing my notes okay everything I'm saying to you is counter intuitive but it's only counterintuitive because you have that incorrect model of what memory is once you have the correct memory model of how memory actually works that it's largely about attention so that you can intelligently prepare for the future then all of these strategies which are called mnemonic strategies work so you chunk and then you chunk your chunks get chunks and then put the figure out how to put them in a chunk you do transfer appropriate processing you're doing coding specificity these are the ways to reliably improve your memory I hope that's helpful of course if everybody does it then the mean just moves I would be perfectly happy if all the students got better grades because because they understood the material and remembered the material better yes yes yes and if that means that the mean is in a then you can do that here you can I can't do that at U of T I haven't been told otherwise well you're good uh we we can't don't want to give anybody any ideas in the administration there but as part of the strategy of resisting Mark inflation we can't we we're only allowed to give a certain proportion of AIDS excuse as as you go up right like you can get more and more as you go out but yeah so it doesn't matter if even if theoretically every person was brilliant it was brilliant and give the best possible answer to every question I have to somehow Define some way of this person used red ink so something like that right yeah it's not that bad I'm being you I'm being humorous foreign [Music] you think you see all the phone and you never do because there are so many aspects to the phone you can't possibly see them all you would have to take all possible perspectives on all possible aspects do you understand like really just pause on this you don't speaking at a purely physiological level you don't see all the phone but you believe you do right

Channel: Saint Photios Orthodox Theological Seminary

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Id: Zq1IxGtFfDs

Length: 70min 56sec (4256 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023