AI Alignment and the Distributed Second Coming of Christ
Mutual Understanding · Ben Goldhaber
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Show Notes
Divia Eden and Ben Goldhaber of Mutuals interviewed me about what I’ve been thinking about over the last 5 years. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. (Link to audio on Youtube with clickable timestamps.)
Topics discussed include:
* what religion and spirituality might have to offer moral philosophy, AI alignment, and AI coordination
* Christopher Langan's theory-of-everything, the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe, and how it might provide coherent intellectual foundations for synthesizing the metaphysical claims found across religious and spiritual traditions
* speculations about non-naive interpretations of "the afterlife"
* my interpretation of the Second Coming of Christ as a potential self-fulfilling prophecy, along with speculations about what it might look like
* what embodied cognition means to me, and why it's led me to have longer AGI timelines
Table of contents
[2:54] Tenuous metaphysical assumptions behind the is-ought problem
[4:43] Alex's AI alignment journey
[8:30] Healing infant trauma – Alex's first formative spiritual experience
[10:25] The relevance of spiritual experiences for moral philosophy
[12:34] Convergent philosophical views among religious and spiritual traditions
[14:43] Alex’s take on Buddhism
[16:19] Mathematical formalizations of truth, goodness, and beauty might essentially coincide
[18:21] Alex’s take on Christ’s crucifixion
[20:14] Alex’s first "direct experience of God"
[22:23] Psychological distortions as a central problem in AI alignment and AI coordination
[25:18] A secular lens on spirituality – addressing psychological distortions
[28:53] Introducing Chris Langan and the CTMU
[29:41] How Alex got interested in the CTMU
[32:48] Alex attempts to summarize core ideas of the CTMU
[35:25] Alex’s ITT-passing habit
[37:15] On Chris Langan’s political views
[39:08] Metaethics from UDT and the CTMU, pt 1 – acting from behind the universal veil of ignorance
[40:03] Logical time and the "lazy evaluation" of reality
[41:31] Spirituality vs the orthogonality thesis
[46:19] Metaethics from UDT and the CTMU, pt 2 – elaborations on "ethics as self-interest"
[48:15] Speedrunning the AI "danger zone"?
[49:20] Metaethics from UDT and the CTMU, pt 3 – "we are all one"
[50:52] "Reincarnation" and "the afterlife"
[54:53] How might information get transferred across lifetimes?
[59:18] "Reincarnation" and "souls"
[1:06:47] Overt physicalist vs subtle physicalist vs non-physicalist explanations
[1:07:36] Cross-lightcone effects of prayer via influencing wave function collapse
[1:10:18] The physicalism null hypothesis, pt 1
[1:11:19] Cross-hemisphere remote healing with ayahuasca?
[1:12:13] Learning from "plant spirits"
[1:17:22] The physicalism null hypothesis, pt 2
[1:19:45] "The afterlife" as already happening, but occluded by psychological distortions
[1:23:37] The CTMU as an articulation of the metaphysical a priori
[1:24:54] CTMU vs Tegmark IV vs ultrafinitism
[1:26:19] The Distributed Second Coming as a self-fulfilling prophecy
[1:30:26] Synthesizing the world religions with each other, and with science
[1:31:35] AI coordination – the Second Coming as the prevailing of the "Schelling coalition"
[1:33:31] AI peacemakers, for empowering human peacemakers
[1:35:24] Cellular intelligence, "embodied cognition", and AI timelines
[1:42:05] Transformative AIs may not outcompete humans at everything
[1:43:04] Is the "AI" part of "AI alignment" a red herring?
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Show notes
Double-crux: a conversational technique for arriving at mutual understanding
Paul Dirac on truth and beauty: “If one is working from the point of view of getting beauty into one's equation, ... one is on a sure line of progress.”
Eliezer’s LessWrong comment about a superintelligence stably believing that 51 is prime: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Djs38EWYZG8o7JMWY/paul-s-research-agenda-faq#:~:text=E.g.%3A%20Eliezer,ounce%20of%20understanding
Reincarnation book that Alex recommended to Divia: https://www.amazon.com/Lifecycles-Reincarnation-Life-Christopher-Bache/dp/1557786453
Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/
Ayahuasca retreat centers where Alex "interfaced with plant spirits": https://templeofthewayoflight.org/ and https://niweraoxobo.com/
Metareligion as the Human Singularity: https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/694
Michael Levin interview excerpt about cellular robustness, from 1:25:15 -1:27:08:
[0:00] Introducing Alex
Divia: Today we're here with Alex Zhu, whom I've known for a long time. I think I met you almost a decade ago?
Alex: That sounds about right.
Divia: Yeah, Alex is currently working full time. You have an institute now, you just said?
Alex: Yes.
Divia: What's it called?
Alex: The Mathematical Metaphysics Institute.
Divia: Okay, the Mathematical Metaphysics Institute, which makes sense, because Alex has been interested in AI safety for a long time, but then it seemed like part of where you ended up with that was that the insights that the different religions and spiritual people had seemed super relevant to AI safety.
Alex: That's right.
Divia: And sort of diving into that, and… your views have evolved and changed, certainly over the time I've known you, and now you have an organization there.
Alex: That's right.
Divia: And you certainly have a really strong background in math as well. I don't know to what extent you've been formalizing things recently, but I imagine that as always something that's on your mind.
Alex: I was very good at math competitions. I am not very good at creating new formalisms, but I am good at learning existing ones and trying to synthesize them, and taking vague, handwavy ideas and expressing them in these formalisms.
Divia: Cool. I’ve wanted to have you on the podcast for a long time, because I feel like we tend to have conversations that I find really interesting, and you haven't written a lot of it up, so I was hoping that maybe more people could hear some of what's been on your mind.
Alex: Thanks! I appreciate that.
Divia: And we're here with Ben too. As a little bit of context for our listeners, I recently moved and had a baby, which is why we haven't had a podcast recently, but we're hoping to get back into putting them out somewhat more regularly than we were.
Ben: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm very excited that we're chatting with Alex, who – for context for our listeners – I know far less about his work than Divia does, which is also very exciting (A) for me to learn, and (B) for me to play the role of the audience when I get to ask stupid questions.
[1:51] What is metaphysics?
Ben: Like for instance, when we talk about metaphysics, I have some idea of what this might mean, but is there a good definition? How do you operate with this?
Alex: I used to think it meant abstract nonsense philosophy that is fake and completely irrelevant for everything. I now think of it as – there are a bunch of very, very basic questions, like "What is an object? What is an observer? What is existence?" that are basically bottlenecking the other fields of philosophy, like epistemology and metaethics. And that there are real and important questions here that are also tractable.
Ben: One of our previous guests, I think it was Ben Weinstein-Raun, talked a little bit about metaethics. And the way I think about this is like deciding which ethical framework you're going to follow. Is that what you mean by it, when you talk about how metaphysics interacts with metaethics?
Alex: I was thinking of it more as, how do you ground ethics? If there are a bunch of different ethical frameworks, how do you pick one over the other?
[2:54] Tenuous metaphysical assumptions behind the is-ought problem
Alex: Like, the is-ought problem is considered super fundamental. And the way I think about it now is: actually, our default intuitive conception of "is" has a bunch of metaphysical assumptions baked into it, that like, if you take them out, the is-ought problem as it naively appears isn't actually nearly as strong of a force as it might seem.
Divia: Can you name some of the assumptions?
Alex: Yeah, like that there is such a thing as an "is" that's independent of any observer.
Divia: Right, I see what you're saying.
Alex: And so if you take the view that all "is"s are part of observation, and all observations are part of conscious beings, and all conscious beings by necessity have some implicit "ought"s that are related to their existence at all, then…
Divia: Interesting. I like that. What I thought philosophers meant by the is-ought problem was that they didn't see a way to derive an "ought" from an "is". Like, you can say a bunch of things about "is", but then, how could that ever possibly imply anything about what's good?
Ben: Ah, okay, okay.
Alex: It's the strongest argument for moral anti-realism that I'm aware of.
Divia: Yeah. And maybe we discussed this with Ben Weinstein-Raun on our podcast too, but I'm often not quite sure what people mean by moral realism and moral anti-realism, not because I haven't read the definitions and googled about it. I think I basically am familiar with the definitions, but I often get the sense when I have conversations with people that there's something I'm missing about what they mean, which kind of reminds me of what you're saying.
Alex: I share that view, by the way. I cringe a little bit when I call myself a moral realist for basically this reason. Like, if someone asked "Do you believe in God?" I would cringe for a similar reason because there's just so much that's loaded in that word.
Divia: Right.
Ben: Right.
[4:43] Alex's AI alignment journey
Divia: Okay. Can we take that as a jumping off point? I mentioned this in the introduction, but can you maybe say in your own words what your path has been in terms of caring about AI safety and then looking to different spiritual traditions for insights and how you've related to that, especially recently?
Alex: Sure. When I was 14, I was thinking about what I wanted to do when I grew up. And I just listed a bunch of big ambitious things, and on that list was building superhumanly intelligent AI. And then I noticed that if I did that one, I could do all the other things on that list. That was when AI first became interesting to me.
I think AI alignment first became interesting to me when I went to SPARC, the Summer Program for Applied Rationality and Cognition, which was basically my first deep immersion in the ideas of the rationality community and AI alignment. I think I always thought of it as probably one of the most important problems out there, and something worth dedicating your life to, but also pretty far away.
I went to SPARC in 2012 and I basically held this view until about 2017, when people I trusted were like, "No, actually, maybe it might not be far away. It might be coming in 10 years." And I was like, "Wait a minute. These are smart people I respect. And I should be at least trying to figure out whether they're full of s**t, rather than just cordoning off what they're saying and just continuing to do what I'm doing."
So that was when I went full time into exploring the world of AI alignment. I spent a lot of time then trying to think about AI timelines and double-crux with people who had long timelines and short timelines to try to really understand where people's models were coming from.
And around this time I also went around trying to talk to all the leading AI safety researchers from the different research camps, like people at MIRI… I talked with Paul Christiano a lot, I talked with a bunch of the safety researchers at DeepMind… and a bunch of the people who were like, yeah, maybe we can actually get reasonable global coordination around AI, and here's how we're thinking about it.
And I felt like I got up to speed with what people were thinking about around then. This was like 2017, 2018. And I basically walked away with the conclusion that no one was really directly addressing any of the actual biggest, thorniest questions underneath either technical AI safety or AI coordination.
And, in parallel, I also started exploring, I don't even know how to describe it… "woo" / spirituality-type things…
Divia: Like circling?
Alex: Yeah. Circling, CT charting from Leverage… I talked to Leverage people about CT and learned…
Divia: Yeah. For our listeners who may not know, this is called connection theory. Geoff Anders came up with this, I think before he started Leverage actually, but it's a theory of psychology he has. There are parts of it that I end up referencing myself, for sure.
It includes such things as that people have a number of intrinsic goods that they care about for their own sake, and it's a constraint of the theory that people need to believe there's a path to achieving their intrinsic goods.
People could also look at some information online about it if they want to, but anyway, it's a psychological theory.
Alex: Yeah. For me, the object-level details don't even really matter that much. The thing that I got most from it was watching how people who believed the theory thought in terms of it, and were able to come up with explanations for things, and help me understand myself in ways that I wasn't previously able to.
I felt like I picked up a bunch of valuable tacit implicit models from their tacit implicit models, that were wrapped in this package they called connection theory.
But in any case, I was basically learning that psychology was a thing, and that I could refactor my psychology.
[8:30] Healing infant trauma – Alex's first formative spiritual experience
Alex: And… the first time I had a sense of, oh wait, maybe something in the reference class of spirituality might be crucial for thinking clearly about AI alignment and addressing the biggest problems there, was when I was working with a bodyworker, and I was just expressing to her that I felt small and I wanted to curl up into a little ball and cry.
And she suggested that I do that, which I found very surprising, but then I did that and she sat next to me and started holding me like a baby. And as she was holding me, I basically felt like I was a baby again. When I access memories of being a kindergartner, I have a sense of what it's like to feel smaller – my limbs are smaller and stuff. In that particular moment, I had a sense of being really, really tiny, with really tiny limbs. Basically, no conscious thoughts at all. I was just like a reflex bag, and there was this deep, deep, deep sadness that I was carrying that was coming out, that I felt like was being released.
When I regained consciousness, I had the sense that there was this weight I'd been carrying on my shoulders my whole life that I was no longer carrying. And, not literally my whole life, but definitely at least for as long as I've had episodic memory. And so, it expanded my concept of what conscious experience could be at all. Like, I just discovered that there were new degrees of freedom in what consciousness could be at all.
I also, in that same session, could suddenly feel my body a lot more, and suddenly just understood what people meant when they were like, "Alex, you're in your head all the time." And I'm like, "Ah, yeah, compared to what I'm feeling now, I was in my head all the time." And I also just started being able to emote more, and use hand gestures more, in social interactions afterwards.
[10:25] The relevance of spiritual experiences for moral philosophy
Alex: And so, the reason it felt relevant was because it seemed to me like any actual account of human values, or how to think clearly about ethics, would be incomplete if it didn't take into account that there were experiences like this.
I basically made the update of: people's endorsed values and ethical positions might rest on psychological wounds they've had before they developed episodic memory. And therefore, any complete account of what the good is, or what it is that humans ultimately value, must also take into account that there might be distortions of our judgments of those things that were laid in place from before we were conscious.
And so I was like, wow, very interesting! This seemed like such a huge, massively important fact about the world that seemed basically almost completely unknown by most of the intellectual elite that I'd encountered before.
And then I remember talking to a meditation coach [Michael Taft], and I was just like, man, this just happened to me. And he was like, oh yeah, that's a thing. The Buddhists have known about this for thousands of years. They didn't call it infant trauma because they didn't have a concept of trauma. They thought of it more as like evil spirits leaving your body, but this is really what they were referring to.
And I was like, "Very interesting!" And then I just talked to other people in my circles who thought it was a thing, and they were like, yeah, that's a thing. And all of these people were really into spirituality and thought there was something to religion.
I felt like I was graced with this surprising experience that almost nobody has – that, in particular, most of the intellectual elite don't have, that's clearly crucial for understanding a bunch of really important philosophical questions – that a bunch of people in spiritual traditions are familiar with, and furthermore, they tend to have, at least of the ones I talked to, fairly convergent philosophical views.
And so I'm like, okay, that's really interesting! Let me try to understand them. And, maybe the solution to all the biggest questions of AI alignment and AI coordination are actually just sitting under our nose, but just not legible to most people who haven't had these kinds of bizarre experiences.
[12:34] Convergent philosophical views among religious and spiritual traditions
Ben: What are some of these convergent philosophical views?
Alex: So, first I'll caveat that I'm filtering this through my understanding, and this isn't necessarily a good representation of what representatives from various different traditions actually think. But, one that I'd say is that the true and the good are actually the same thing, and to the extent that they [appear to] differ, it's actually because of psychological distortions we have [such as trapped priors, and ignorance of dependent origination].
Divia: Which is kind of the opposite of, like, you can't derive an ought from an is.
Alex: Yes.
Divia: So, having acknowledged that we think it's sort of a problematic term, that they were moral realists was a convergent philosophical position.
Alex: Yes. There's a way in which every religion is kind of moral realist – Follow God! And the prophets tell you how to follow God.
Divia: Right.
Alex: And there's a thing where everything that is, is God's will, and what is true is what is, and what is is God's will, and therefore it's good.
Ben: My immediate reaction to hearing this is thinking about the parallels to the famous physicists saying about, um, beauty and elegance being heuristics they use for figuring out whether or not a physics insight is true, or something around like… God I wish I remembered the actual quote, I'll find it and link it in the show notes, but like, that, and some deep appreciation for aesthetics, having insight or truth–
Divia: Truth, beauty, and goodness, those are the three, right? Am I right that that's Plato? I'm not actually sure. In my head it is.
Ben: I think so. Yeah.
Divia: Yeah. And I mean, certainly what comes to mind for me there, and this is a topic that I have, I've been pretty interested in over the past few years, like in contrast to, presumably, the orthogonality thesis. Which is something that comes up – there's a weak version and a strong version – but basically the idea that an AI could sort of have whatever values and that we shouldn't really assume that there would be much relationship between its capabilities, and its intelligence, and what it cares about.
Alex: Right.
[14:43] Alex’s take on Buddhism
Divia: Okay, so there are a bunch of different directions… I don’t know, I think I get, talking to you I’m like, ah, there are so many interesting things we could talk about. But one of them is, since I've known you, you've then gone and tried to investigate a bunch of different religions, and talk to leaders and practitioners of these religions and draw out a bunch of different insights. And it seems like you think that there are a bunch of convergent things, and that there are particular strengths of different religious traditions. Is there anything that you can maybe say about insights you've gotten from Christianity, Islam, Buddhism… and how they relate to each other?
Alex: Sure. I kind of think of them as different articulations of the same core message tailored to different cultures and time periods. And so the kinds of things they emphasize are different across each.
What I get most from Buddhism in particular is clear metaphysical views, metaphysical insight, and all their instructions on meditation. Buddhism as a religion is basically like, here are instructions for attaining mystical insight, and I'm like, yup, I'm really glad that exists.
Divia: Have you meditated a lot yourself?
Alex: Yes, but not that much in Buddhist traditions. But I have learned a lot talking to people from Buddhist traditions who really grok the metaphysical insights because they're part of a tradition that keeps it alive. I think the people I've talked to who seem to most deeply grok the metaphysical insights on an embodied level are hardcore Buddhists [like Soryu Forall from MAPLE].
Divia: Who have meditated a lot.
Alex: Yes.
Divia: Yeah, that makes sense.
Alex: And they're part of a continuous lineage from however long back.
[16:19] Mathematical formalizations of truth, goodness, and beauty might essentially coincide
Ben: Sorry, but I'm super curious about this now, as I'm trying to think through how I would relate to this… I guess I can think of things that I feel are beautiful, but not good, and I'm feeling like I'm probably missing something here, but I'm like, I don't know… some beautiful flower that's poisonous if I touch it, or something like that. This is such a naive take on my part, but can you just speak more on what you think of this relationship between true and good and beauty?
Alex: Yeah, I think my position is: if we were to ultimately understand what each of these concepts is really trying to point at, then we would see a convergence, but also, I think our everyday understandings and usages of these concepts are pretty far from what I'm calling the ultimate versions of these concepts.
Ben: Okay. And to tie this into your points on meditation, or something about Buddhists having it deep in themselves, is it some way in which when you sit with some of these ideas longer, they become less confused, and you're more able to orient to them correctly?
Alex: Yes. Although the way I would put it is like, if we were to ground them in as non-confused an ontology as possible – if we found a mathematical theory of metaphysics that was rigorous, in the way that calculus was rigorous and formalized the field of natural philosophy – I think the concepts of true, beauty, and good within this mathematical metaphysics would essentially coincide.
Divia: I don't know, my own take when I think about the flower that is beautiful but poisonous, is that there’s something that seems important about the context. Like I'm reminded of what Alex was saying about observers and their values, where I'm like, if what I saw is somebody about to eat the flower, is that still beautiful?
I don't know. I think I don't like it. But like if I saw it in some context where somebody got to look at it, but there was no danger, then it actually does seem more beautiful… also kind of a shallow treatment of the subject, but…
[18:21] Alex’s take on Christ’s crucifixion
Alex: I do appreciate that concretization, and I think a pretty good segue to what I get from Christianity. There's a way in which Christ is like, "Yeah, me getting crucified? That's good. I'm being tortured to death because I'm being scapegoated and publicly humiliated. And you know what? That’s good.
"I asked God [my deepest sense of truth and goodness] if there was any alternative to this, and God was like, nope, this is the thing you should be doing. And I was like, all right, I'm going to go do this and it's going to be really hard.
"But even while I'm doing it, I'm going to be radiating out in my consciousness that there's no resentment; I forgive everyone who's crucifying me. What's happening to me is a central example of what anyone would normally intuitively consider bad, evil, worthy of punishment, unworthy of acceptance or forgiveness. And I'm just going to totally upend that in my own consciousness, radiate that out to everyone in public, and have that reverberate for thousands of years for the rest of humanity."
That is my headcanon for what happened with Jesus. I do not actually know if he actually existed. Not a crux for me!
Divia: This is maybe a response to a conversation Alex and I have had a number of times, where I'm like… but do we even know for sure there was a historical Jesus? And you're like, that's not the point.
Alex: Yes.
Divia: Whether he did this or not, there's something about the archetype.
Alex: Yeah, I think there was definitely a meme that got created that is extremely powerful and captures extremely deep truths.
Divia: Right. And the sort of narrative account as described in the Bible of it happened exactly like this isn't the point. You think that, clearly, because Christianity has had the impact that it has, there was something archetypal that that got in there.
Alex: Yes. Jesus is an inspiration for me, especially for how I should show up in interpersonal relationships.
[20:14] Alex’s first "direct experience of God"
Divia: You weren't raised with much religion, right?
Alex: That's right. My parents were always like, this never made sense. I would talk to other kids at school, and I'd be like, this doesn't make much sense. At MIT, I would have interfaith dialogues where I'd be like, this doesn't make sense, here's why I think this doesn't make sense.
Divia: Interesting. I didn't know, I mean, I guess that tracks that you would have gone to the interfaith dialogues. That’s pretty cool to hear.
Ben: Was there a singular moment for you where this changed and it started to make sense, or was it more gradual?
Alex: In my… I think my second ever ayahuasca ceremony, I felt like I got a direct experience of God, whatever that means. What I can say was that it was awe-inspiring, and that when I looked at religious texts afterwards, their usage of the word "God" made a lot more sense to me.
Divia: Yeah, it's, I like that you put it that way, because it's sort of tricky, from my perspective, to operationalize what it even means when people talk about believing in God or not. But that's something concrete, where like, you can read the sentences with "God" in them, you can be like, oh, there's something about that that makes sense, whereas before you were like… what?
Alex: Yeah, before I was like, I have no idea what you could possibly be even trying to say with this, besides Interventionist Sky Father, which is clearly fake.
Divia: Right. And yeah, and it's not so much that you've updated your position about the Interventionist Sky Father.
Alex: Definitely not!
Divia: But that, now you're like, okay, I see what they could mean. And why someone might write these things and expect other people to have some experience that's worthwhile reading them, something like that.
Alex: Right. When Jesus was like, you need to leave your family for me, it just reads as super narcissistic. But after the experience, I was able to understand God as this hybrid of true and good that… I don't understand yet, but have some sense that maybe there is some way to actually understand in principle.
And if I hear Jesus instead as saying, "You need to put truth and goodness above all your familial relationships", I'm like, oh yes, of course, that makes perfect sense! That's not narcissistic at all! That's just straightforwardly true.
[22:23] Psychological distortions as a central problem in AI alignment and AI coordination
Divia: Yeah. And can you help tie this in again to how this relates to the AI stuff? Because I think I've heard you say a lot of things about, I don't know, the centrality of addressing cognitive distortions, and how spirituality from your perspective seems to be a lot about that.
Alex: Right now, I think the central problem in both AI alignment and AI coordination is: if someone is very distorted about what they actually want, and doesn't want to admit it, and is willing to fight with all their force to not admit it, how do you relate in that situation?
If an aligned AI can tell that their operator is acting from a deep psychological wound that they're covering up, that they're trying their best to not see, should the AI just go along with what the operator is doing, or should the AI actually help them recognize that they're misguided?
When I ask this question to mainstream AI alignment researchers, the answers I get are actually quite divided. A lot of them are like, the goal of the AI should be to satisfy the preferences and intentions of their operators, and if their apparent intention is to just continue with the distortion, then that's what the AI should do.
And others are like, that seems bad. That seems theoretically difficult, in that it seems plausible that there might exist a theoretical technical solution to, like, how do you get the AI to help a human get true beliefs and work through their distortions? And less likely that there might exist a theoretical technical solution to, like, how do you build the AI to help them arbitrarily maintain their lies or self-distortions in the future?
And the thing I find most compelling: it wouldn't be sufficient to end the problems in the world if we built AIs that were aligned with people's psychological distortions without healing them, because I think these psychological distortions are basically what's driving Moloch right now, and if we're building AIs that are just amplifying them, then we’re just amplifying Moloch.
Divia: So, I mean, would you say something stronger? Like you think that wouldn't be enough to solve the world's problems, but do you also expect it to even be good?
Alex: That feels a lot like asking, is having more powerful AIs around good?
Divia: Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious for your view on that, for sure.
Alex: I don't know. Many strong cases both ways.
Divia: Sure.
Alex: Like lots of people are like, yeah, maybe RLHF was bad. Because it accelerated capabilities, and I'm like, yeah, maybe you could say the same thing for intent alignment. But maybe it's good that capabilities are getting accelerated.
Divia: Yeah, you think it's hard to say.
Alex: Yeah. And I don't know how much I actually buy the argument about RLHF being bad because it accelerates capabilities, I'm just using it as a comparison.
Divia: Sure.
[25:18] A secular lens on spirituality – addressing psychological distortions
Alex: And so I think the question of, how do we relate with these deeply embedded psychological distortions that we try our utmost to not see, is sort of the central theme of what spirituality is all about, according to me.
On this lens, the practice of spirituality can basically be understood from a totally secular lens of, like, hey, you have a psychology! It's got a bunch of distortions in it. There are things you can do to address these distortions, that will cause you to have more true beliefs, and be more the person you actually are! Maybe you should consider trying something like that!
Ben: But you think that spirituality provides a more powerful or different frame than just a secular one, is what I'm picking up on here. There is more to this than just the secular conception of it as a useful mental trick.
Alex: Yes. In particular, I think that – again, caveating that when I say spirituality, this is Alex's steelman of spirituality that he endorses, and that there are many "spiritual" people who just drive me insane when I talk to them about how they think about things –
Divia: And you're not necessarily saying, I don't know, you take somebody who has difficulty in their human relationships because of distortions (almost everybody I assume), and then they start going to their local church every Sunday. You expect, like, you're not necessarily saying, oh, well, that'll for sure fix it.
Alex: Yeah, I'm definitely not saying that.
Divia: You're saying something more like, you think the actual wisdom seems to be there in the lineage of a bunch of different religions, and the people that know it best seem to have some embodied understanding of that, that they are attempting to pass on.
Alex: And that there's a rhyme and reason behind the kinds of things they say that are not present in Scientology, for example. And I think Leverage Research missed a lot of these things, and that's part of why they imploded, for example.
There's kind of a broad, high-level sense of what the end goal should be for clearing through psychological distortions, that I think is deep and subtle, and that I don't see from therapeutic traditions or cults like Scientology.
Divia: But it does seem convergent across the major religions that people would typically agree are religions.
Alex: Yes, I think especially among the mystic practitioners of the religions. I think the mainstream versions of all the main religions are also missing a bunch of the important stuff.
Divia: But the major religions all have mystical traditions within them that you think are more convergent. And in particular, convergent in terms of, like, how a mind ought to be? Or how a human mind ought to be?
Alex: Yeah, although I would frame it more as what the most relaxed, desirable, natural state of the mind is.
Divia: Okay. And, I think you've already done this, but if you could try again to say in your own words, what would that state of the mind be?
Alex: Basically, just embodying true equals good. Like, everything that comes up in your experience, you don't resist. Including, for example, if there's something you find aversive, not resisting the aversion either.
Divia: Yeah. Something in old… I think I got this from Michael Vassar many years ago… I think what he said was something like, I'm not supposed to have preferences over the current state of the world, only over future states of the world.
Alex: I have never thought of it like that. I think that resonates.
Divia: Okay. Maybe a little like that, maybe not.
Alex: Yeah.
[28:53] Introducing Chris Langan and the CTMU
Divia: Okay. So can I switch gears a little and ask you about something different, but related? Which is the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe. This is something else that we talked about some, I think I understand a little of it, but I don't really understand it, so yeah, can you tell the listeners what that is?
Alex: It's this theory of everything by this guy named Chris Langan, who was featured in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell as an example of someone who's very, very, very smart, but didn't have an upper-class background, didn't learn the ways of the elite, and therefore didn't find much success within his lifetime. He's also been on the news a couple of times, billed as "America's smartest man!", "Man with the world's highest IQ!", or something like that.
[29:41] How Alex got interested in the CTMU
Alex: And I was always curious about it when I heard it mentioned, and it never made any sense to me, until one day, three years ago, when I got high one night and looked at the website and noticed that some sentences made some amount of sense at all, and resonated with a bunch of the most inchoate, deepest, inarticulate metaphysical thoughts I had.
Divia: Interesting. Do you happen to remember which sentences?
Alex: I remember there was a particular diagram…
Divia: I mean, it's a hard question, because you said most inchoate, so…
Alex: Yeah. And Chris invented a lot of new terms and uses them liberally in ways that I now think are very defensible and very precise. But I still think they're extremely hard to understand for the uninitiated.
I remembered after that night I got high, I shared the website with a couple of friends to see what they thought. And different friends would light up at different portions of the website. And, so, I got even more curious about it.
And then I shared it with one particular friend who is much, much smarter than me technically, and who has read way more philosophy than me as well, and has explored esotericism much, much more than me. And he looked at it, and he was like, "Oh yeah, this generally makes sense. Like, I've seen a bunch of these ideas before. It sounds a lot like Neoplatonism."
And I was like, huh, maybe my friend here can actually understand Chris's work directly. And I asked him to review Chris's work, and he did, and he said, "That was a very dense read. It was challenging to comprehend, but I comprehend it. It's legit. It seemed very insightful, and I'm glad I read it."
And then I just googled how to contact Chris, and found his Patreon, and then gave him a donation so I could schedule a call with him. And then me, Chris, and my friend talked, and Chris basically vetted that my friend seemed to get it.
And then I was like… okay, this makes the CTMU even more interesting to me.
Divia: Yeah, it sort of passed a bunch of checksums. Where the original round was like, a bunch of it sort of resonating with stuff that was important that you hadn't known how to say. The next round was like, your friends had similar reactions, including to parts that were not the same as each other or the same as yours. And then the final one was this guy that you respected a lot understanding it, in