I, scientist with Balazs Kegl

One of the conversations I enjoyed the most, where we explored AI, hardware, Platonic patterns, and nested agency in a free flow, and got somewhere together, with Glen Reuschling, a retired electronics engineer with whom I often converse here on X. Related episodes: Michael Levin: https://youtu.be/3zqI0iG428c Mark Solms: Mark Solms: https://youtu.be/Rltfm-vWvgM Kevin Mitchell: https://youtu.be/nqx...

My second conversation with Mike Levin, the developmental biologist from Tufts University, where we explore his ontology, the structure of the world. Are we biological interfaces to Platonic minds, or bodies and minds co-create or realize each other? Is ChatGPT conscious? Are machines more organismic than we thought? How should we get ready to communicate with minds who are very different from us?...

Another mind-blowing conversation, this time with Mark Solms, the neuropsychoanalist from the University of Cape Town, about his feeling-based theory of consciousness, how competing homeostatic needs lead to prioritization of responding to feelings, expressing these needs internally. At about the one hour mark, we go beyond and discuss how feelings can be understood as messages between hierarchica...

My fourth conversation with the philosopher Alexander Bard, on his new book project on mysticism, bliss, the importance of phenomenology, the philosophy of time, transcendence, and transformation. Related episodes: https://youtu.be/Y8cuqy6y0fo Alexander Bard part 1: sex, Zoroastrianism, embodied philosophy https://youtu.be/eASbv9WA-TQ Alexander Bard part 2: tantric sex, sex and spirituality, men's...

My conversation with Kevin Mitchell, neuroscientist and geneticist at Trinity College Dublin, on free agency and randomness, nested selves, mental causation and the tension between free choice and control, and artificial agents. Kevin's books: Free Agents: https://www.amazon.com/Free-Agents-Evolution-Gave-Will/dp/0691226237/ Innate: https://www.amazon.com/Innate-How-Wiring-Brains-Shapes/dp/0691204...

My first conversation with Michael Levin, a developmental biologist revolutionizing how we think about cellular collective, agency, and life in general. One of those conversations where I feel we dive deep and only scratch the surface, at the same time: nested agents, birth, aging, and death, third person and first person science. Related episodes: Embodied AI: https://youtu.be/JZ8GTucClpM Alexand...

Meet my two wonderful colleagues with whom we wrote a position paper last year "A Call for Embodied AI". We talk about the limits of the current "internet AI" paradigm. We agree that singularity, if even a thing, is very far, LLMs will not lead there, but that social media AI is already an embodied AI that is seamlessly rewiring us. Paper: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/paolo24a.html Related e...

This is the brainiest of my three episodes with Alexander Bard. The deepest analysis I know of the US election, from a centrist/neutral point of view, from the psychoanalytical to the anthropological. A look at AI from an anthropological angle. AI cannot do abduction, lacks emotional intelligence thus creativity. Hallucinations, Wikipedia, and the St Tropez nude beach. Dreams and the psychoanalysi...

We get deep into identity and death. If you are fascinated by Michael Levin and Jonathan Pageau, this conversation is for you. Fascinating discussion where we go beyond the Free Energy Principle, and even Levin's cognitive cones, and postulate that crucial internal structures, a subset of me, are what define identity. If they get damaged, I lose my identity. Deep self-transformation may also ruptu...

This is my second conversation with the philosopher Alexander Bard. Yoga and alignment, downwards in the body and upwards in the sociont. Archetypology and rituals. Tantric sex and the sex/religion/spirituality triad. The masculine drive towards the project. Collective purpose and men's work. The first part of our conversation: https://youtu.be/Y8cuqy6y0fo Process and Event seminar series on Paral...

This is my first and definitely not the last encounter with the philosopher Alexander Bard. We discuss his grand oeuvre of metaphysics: Process and Event. Why should you only trust a philosopher with a great sex life? Shit happens: a philosophy that starts in the here and now. Boy pharaohs and pillar saints: the two faces of Gnosticism. Our issues with Christianity: lack of embodiment, lack of mat...

Dan Shipper (http://danshipper.com/)is an entrepreneur, writer, and the CEO and co-founder of Every (https://every.to/@danshipper), a daily newsletter on business, AI, and personal development read by nearly 75,000 founders, operators, and investors. He writes a weekly column at Every called Chain of Thought, where he covers topics like AI, tools for thought, and the psychology of work. I contacte...

Csaba Szepesvári is a prominent figure in machine learning and artificial intelligence, particularly known for his contributions to reinforcement learning. He is a professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta and a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Our goal in life: keep eating Yann Lecun's cherry (inside joke, ask GPT). This was a wide-reaching c...

Yogi Jaeger is a philosopher at the University of Vienna, specializing in the philosophy of science and biology in particular. Are we rushing ahead into the unknown, scaring people, while also producing fake shelters for them to retreat into artificial small worlds? Are we losing our grip on the world or realizing our humanness in the mirror of AI? Will AI take our agency away? Are we willingly gi...

Baudouin Saintyves is an artist, physicist, and roboticist, inventor of Granulobots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnbdneho78M https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03125 Research: https://voices.uchicago.edu/bsaintyveslab/ Art: https://www.shapesofemergence.com/ Fascinating conversation, starting with an intro of soft and swarm robotics and his work on designing Granulobots, self organizing aggregates of...

Why are LLMs so alien? Is it because they lack goal-oriented behavior? Or because they are designed to please humans, which can be unsettling? Join me and Laura in this new episode where we discuss her paper "Active inference goes to school", AI and 4E cognitive science, active inference and child development, and AI in the classroom. My notes on Laura's paper: https://balazskegl.substack.com/p/ac...

What, if anything, differentiates us from machines? Is cognition computational? Can self-preservation be externally imposed? How do you feel in your body when you hear the word "singularity"? Join us in a thought-provoking conversation with Anna Riedl, a distinguished cognitive scientist from Vienna, known for her work on rationality. We dive deep into psychology, cognitive science, and artificial...

Jakob Nordin is an observational astrophysicist from the Humboldt University, Berlin, member of the LSST collaboration building the Vera Rubin Observatory and the informational infrastructure to manage the immense data it will collect. Real-time astronomy & LSST: We discuss the intriguing potential of real-time astronomy, focusing on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), its technology a...

The second hour is really just two guys trying to make sense of what's going on in the world as a reaction to AI and the meaning crisis, explored through the works of John Vervaeke. I'm sure the insights from this conversation will resonate with many educators and technologists alike. If you like it, please help the channel by signing up! 00:00:00 Intro 00:06:53 Path to teaching writing. 00:15:36...

00:00:00 Intro. 00:03:18 Stories. Why do they fascinate us? Mechanism of emotional manipulation. 00:06:45 True to life vs realistic. Startrek. Dramatic real stories are rarely good. 00:10:08 GPT and stories. How to build stories word-by-word. What is creativity? Information and meaning. Saturation in the story space. Alignment of living and writing. 00:19:25 Yellowstone. What makes a story good? L...

00:00:00 Intro. Why philosophy of mind is important for AI and for me as a human. 00:04:53 Schools on consciousness, a historical perspective. Conscious person and conscious mental state, thought, experience, or perception 00:13:16 Qualia and the hard problem. The objective/subjective divide. 00:20:40 Some options: physicalism, dualism, panpsychism, illusionism. 00:24:14 My reaction to the world "...

00:00:00 Intro: empirical vs armchair philosopher. Visual vs tactile understanding. 00:06:08 How subjective experience rises from physical matter. Entering wine into your body vs seeing a tomato. Perception of color, pain, interoception. 00:14:09 Consciousness is not a thing, but conscious is an adjective. 00:18:24 Brain is (part of) the body. The developmental biology view. 00:21:23 Immune system...

00:00:00 Intro: Mark's journey from undergrad physics to psychology, philosophy, and theology. 00:05:17 Philosophy: "Who you are is directly related to what you know". 00:06:25 The psychology of being a scientist. Lived dualism. 00:07:49 Becoming a scientist is to become a certain kind of person, and this very much shapes the scientific worldview. 00:08:46 AI is leaked from the lab and becoming a...

00:00:00 Intro. Gaels's journey from physics to AI through coding, then health and social science applications. 00:06:17 Looking for impact. Are we using our energy to solve the best problems? How to estimate future impact? 00:12:18 How did the interacting with a wide variety of sciences changes you as an AI researcher? Out-of-the box. Empirical research. 00:13:19 Benchmarks. How they incorporate...

00:00:00 Intro 00:04:20 The LHCb experiment. Fundamental particle physics. Why isn't there as much antimatter as matter? Timescales. 00:17:18 Shortcomings of the Standard Model. Dark matter. The LHC. 00:22:24 The LHCb collaboration. Organization of a scientific experiment beyond the Dunbar number. Carrier development in academia and physics. 00:27:03 The skills and day job of an LHC physicist. The...