Dr. Doug Matzke, Is AI Evil? |520|

Dr. Doug Matzke, AI has metaphysical implications, but are the ones pushing it evil?

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[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I’m placing you under arrest for future murder Sara Marks [unclear 00:02]

[00:00:03] Speaker 2: The future can be seen.

[00:00:08] Alex Tsakiris: That’s a short clip from the now almost 20-year-old movie minority report which keeps popping up because it’s really uncanny how that sci-fi seems to be playing out in our role. I mean, there’s no doubt this movie is portraying kind of worst case strong AI scenario that we’re exploring in the last episode with a AI expert from Google. Andrew Smart. Of course, that movie starring Tom Cruise from the Scientology mind control club, and was directed by Steven Spielberg, who, if you’re into this stuff is known to screen ET movies for presidents and seems to be plugged into a lot of culture shaping movies. But this clip is particularly relevant to today’s interviews with the very excellent Dr. Doug Matzke. Doug, if you remember last time, he has a PhD in quantum computing. And he’s really smart about AI and all the rest of this stuff. And even though Doug, and I don’t see everything the same way, as you’ll hear, in this clip,

[00:01:10] Doug Matzke: I see a common theme from you about people abusing their technology and power. And so I think that’s part of your concern about the big companies who have control over many facets of our life, the Microsoft’s and the Googles. So the question is, how do we take any technology and not abuse it? And that’s a concern. I hear that’s a concern for you. And it’s a concern for me, too.

[00:01:35] Alex Tsakiris: That’s not my concern.

[00:01:36] Doug Matzke: Whether it’s a concern you’re interested in that.

[00:01:39] Alex Tsakiris: I think this is why evil matters question. Because Google is in the social engineering business, whether they like it or not. But the question is, are they fucking evil? Are the people behind the AI evil? that’s ultimately what we want to know. So even though we don’t agree on everything, I do think we sync up on the deeper philosophical and really, spiritual questions about how we should understand and relate to this AI thing, which is very, very real and is happening right now. It is not that far off from a minority report kind of situation. Lots to cover. Here’s my interview with Dr. Doug Matzke. Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris. And today, we welcome Dr. Doug Matzke, back to Skeptiko. Doug is the author of Deep Reality: Why Source Science May Be the Key to Understanding Human Potential. And the last time Doug was on, I learned so much both preparing for the interview. And then in the actual interview with Doug that I’ve been dying to get him back. And then last episode, I ran across and felt very fortunate to get an interview with an AI, artificial intelligence guy from Google named Andrew Smart. And I just posted that interview. And I sent it to Doug, I kind of sent him the book beforehand and said, “Hey, what do you think about this?” He gave me some really interesting feedback before. And then I sent him a pre-release copy afterwards. And I just think that that can kind of take us in some new places in terms of this incredible, incredible work that he’s done. So Doug, welcome back to Skeptiko. Thanks for coming on.

[00:03:49] Doug Matzke: Thanks a lot. I was looking forward to it.

[00:03:52] Alex Tsakiris: So before we get started, remind people a little bit about your background, PhD in quantum computing, that ought to immediately send people on a little bit of a tutee. And then about this book, really, really quite amazing book, Deep Reality: Why Source Science May Be the Key to Understanding Human Potential.

[00:04:16] Doug Matzke: My background is regular computer science. And but I knew that metaphysics had something to say about science, back when I was in college, so almost 50 years ago. And so I go, well, maybe there’s some relationship between the science behind metaphysics and computer science. And so a lot of my career has been learning more about computer science to the point that I got a PhD in quantum computing, because quantum computing was like, different than all the other computing that we’ve known about. And this this was already 20-year-ago that I’ve had my PhD in quantum computing, which back then quantum computing was just starting the way it is now, compared to now. So but I’ve continued to hang out with mystics, remote viewers, people who are healers, people who are telepaths. And so I keep trying to look for the intersection of those two areas, if that makes sense. And so I call that whole area, I call it source science based on because most people call this like from a law of attraction language, they say, “Well, this is source energy, that’s the way they use it.” Now, I don’t like the word energy, because it’s mostly information. So I call it source science, because it’s the science of what’s the source of all of this, not only in quantum mechanics, but thought itself is, I believe, overlaps with that. So hopefully, that’s a good enough introduction.

[00:05:43] Alex Tsakiris: I mean, it isn’t, in that it’s a kind of, that’s the world, kind of, it’s the whole thing. But some of this will kind of repeat with some of the stuff we talked about. But that’s so okay, because it took me a lot of times through your background, your material in your book, to really kind of get this at a deeper and deeper level, because you are just a super, super smart guy. And I feel like you’re always working to kind of dumb this down to a level where we can all understand it. I want to return to this intuition you had about there being a deeper real connection between physics, computing, math, if you will, like geometric algebra. And just those three, and then we can make the leap to the metaphysics, which is kind of like a whole space shot thing.

[00:06:43] Doug Matzke: So, computing, we always turn out, people have been computing for a long time, because we had these ways of cataloging censuses with punched cards, since the 1800s. Okay, they’d had some way a catalog, and they had these ancient tech tabulating machines. So computing has been going on the abacus is really old people have been computing for a long time, it’s only when we the modern age of the invention of the transistor, where we could really start building computers that were really powerful. And in fact, they’re getting 50% faster and twice as fast and 50%, smaller every two years for the last 30 generations. So two to the 30th is a really small, more powerful computer than it was the original. That’s called Moore’s Law. So the question is, when you get down to the very bottom, you keep scaling and scaling, scaling. What do you get? Well, physicist had been thinking about that. Specifically, …

[00:07:42] Alex Tsakiris [00:07:42] Hold on, Doug, because you realize you just made a switch, I don’t know if was conscious or subconscious. But you made the switch from computing to physics. And you said, physics gets further and further down. And that’s what you’re really saying is because you could take you could take, and I’d like you to do it. You could take us through physics has been around for a long time, and that apple falling off the tree, but there was no intuition at that point that these two somehow came together.

[00:08:15] Doug Matzke: Yeah, absolutely. Some of the earliest people were like Fineman said, there’s he has a famous lecture where he says, “There’s a lot of room down there.” And essentially, if you’re a physicist, specifically people work in like on semiconductors, which we’ve known about, since the invention of the transistors in the late 40s. And early 50s, when they started building semiconductors, that he says there’s a lot of room down there, we could build computers smaller and smaller and smaller, down to the physical limits that we can with physics, like atoms and stuff like that. So people have been thinking about this for a long time. It’s just technology hadn’t caught up with their thoughts. Finally, in 1981, there was a fist comp conference where they were looking at the connection between physics and computing. And Fineman was the keynote speaker of that. And Tom Toughly ran that conference out of MIT. So that was really the, you can find those, those, that all those papers are in there, in the in a journal out there, so just realize that people have been talking about this for a long time. And then all of a sudden, Ralph land Auer came around and showed that if you erase information, you can’t ignore it. So that means you can’t just throw information away and expect it to be okay, because it violates entropy. And that was in the 60s. So people have been dodging around this, dancing around this, this story between physics and computing. And so finally, I had the other two [unclear 09:41] conferences in 92 and 94. And that sort of like, catapulted me in deeper understanding of that. And then I decided to work on my PhD in quantum computing in 97 through 2001. And so, it’s like, how do you learn about this, we have to figure out take opportunities to go get a PhD in it, which is paid for by Texas Instruments. Thank you very much right. So the point is computers keep getting smaller Moore’s Law. They’ve been warned…

[00:10:13] Alex Tsakiris: Hold on, even before you go back there because again I feel like you just kind of covered the world there. And we need to break it down. I’m just under slowing down so I can follow it, Doug. You’re not doing anything wrong. I just need to follow it. So when Fineman that is Richard Fineman, famous Caltech genius Nobel Prize winner worked on the atom bomb Fineman says, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” that is generally associated with nanotechnology. That’s how …

[00:10:50] Doug Matzke: Computing though too.

[00:10:52] Alex Tsakiris: That’s your insight, that is your brilliant insight. Because everyone listens to that Fineman quote, and they go, “Oh, he means we can make a Bucky balls and string stuff together down there at the bottom.” And they’re right to a certain extent. But what you’re pointing out is that Fineman’s intuition is that as we get further down, our frenemies, our colleagues over it computing, they start to be sounding a lot like us. And maybe, there’s this kind of deeper connection. And again, intuitively because we don’t do it. So Fineman is both this shut up and calculate guy like, just kind of do it. And he’s also this physicist, engineering guy, like, make all this nanotechnology stuff as you point out, at the same time, these guys are starting to see the computer connection, because computers are growing more and more powerful in what they can do with information and information theory. And all the rest of that stuff is getting to look. So they’re starting to see this. Now, the other thing that you added that puts you right in the middle of this is that these conferences where these genius people were meeting and having these brilliant insights, ran for a while, and then they kind of stopped. But you said, this is a way for things to move forward, we should reboot those conferences, and you did. And what came out of them was pretty amazing. And it also then puts you into, “Okay, I need to go and pursue a PhD to explore this intuition you had about this connection.”

[00:12:45] Doug Matzke: Absolutely. So just, I’m going to connect them one last thing about physics and computing. All computers have to use some kind of implementation, some kind of physical implementation. And they’ve been doing that for these 30 generations. The point is, is as you get so small, pretty soon, you can’t be a transistor anymore, because you have a gate, which is suddenly seven molecules stick stops acting like a gate, it’s just on all the time. So, you’re limited by what you can compute, based on the materials and the processes and the physics behind all that you can do. Wires are copper, there are copper bands running through the semiconductor, the current is supposed to flow on this, after you get them so small, the dielectric that keeps them from talking to each other, shorting each other out, becomes so thin, that they start talking to each other, like a tunneling. So quantum mechanics properties start happening at the macroscopic scale, because you can’t, so the point is physics and materials is part of this computing infrastructure. And the key to the genius of the Moore’s Law is that they said, “Well, they predicted it was going to die 10 years ago.” Now they’re for sure gonna die in the next 10 years because they’re down to two nanometers. Well, you can’t even use light anymore to mask [unclear 14:11]. You have to use near ultraviolet. And there none of your lenses work. None of your masking techniques. IBM is the first one that announced that they’re building a two nanometer. Well, they’re not going to go down to maybe they’ll go down to one, maybe they’ll go down to a half nanometer, but they’re not going to go any smaller. So the end of Moore’s Law at some point, by definition, because what is Moore’s Law say, “It’s the same process every two years.” Well, even if you can go one more generation, you’re not going to do it another two or three or four. So something has to give and that’s why I started working on quantum computing, because quantum computing sort of like escapes the classical box that we’re bound in so [unclear 14:54].

[00:14:54] Alex Tsakiris: Again, that’s great. There’s again, kind of a lot to kind of process there. At one thing I’d pick up on, it was a quote that from our last interview, you said, relativity works, whether you believe it or not, you also said I think by implication. These laws of quantum mechanics work, whether we believe in them or not. And I think that’s what your example just said. So if you put those wires together, then we start having these weird quantum effects, whether we like it or not. But the other part of that too, is what you’re saying is that our satellite communication works, because we’re following the quantum mechanical laws and that’s it. [unclear 15:45] Relativity and relativity, right, the thinking of the clocks, and that works, whether you it’s not a belief thing…

[00:15:49] Doug Matzke: It’s science.

[00:15:55] Alex Tsakiris: Well, we have this whole thing about science. And it’s not…

[00:15:59] Doug Matzke: Science that works, not just the political part of science, but science that’s the pragma. I’m an engineer, I’m pragmatic. I want to make things work. Well, how does the mind work? There’s my pragmatism coming to roost on that subject.

[00:16:14] Alex Tsakiris: Exactly! And that’s where I want to go next, because that’s where I think it gets interesting. So the key point here is, so you had this intuition. You saw it coming, physics computing, boom. And then you saw math to which math is important to you know, this whole thing of geometric algebra thing is brilliant people covered in the book, it’s way over my head and out of scope for this interview. But then we’re, this takes us into metaphysics. And that’s what I want to kind of talk about, because the last time you were on Skeptiko, I didn’t give you the full Skeptiko treatment.

[00:16:53] Doug Matzke: Is that good or bad?

[00:16:57] Alex Tsakiris: But I think we’re gonna have to go there this time. Because here’s the thing, like you threw out a phrase, law of attraction, not phrase, an idea, a concept. And the book kind of talks a lot about that, has a lot about to say even the title of the book. Is it the key to understanding our human potential? I think we think about that in different ways. So I want you to tell me how you think something like the law of attraction plays into this aspect of human potential that you’re talking about?

[00:17:33] Doug Matzke: You’ve probably had personally and I know other people will do to coincidences. That you go. I was thinking about somebody they called, I was thinking about, I was thinking, oh, there’s a cop up there. And sure enough, you slow down and there’s a cop up there. There’s just these intuitions coincidences, you can call coincidences, and call them intuitions. So those things were, those aren’t classical computing concepts at all. And so where did they come from? So I was interested in sort of, like, what is the infrastructure? That science would have to say something about metaphysics, right. That’s what you wanting me to connect science and metaphysics, right?

[00:18:18] Alex Tsakiris: So yeah, this whole category of stuff that we would call metaphysics, right?

[00:18:22] Doug Matzke: Yeah. Right. There’s a slide I have out there in my latest talk that I just gave the other day that and it’s out there and other talks, as well. I catalogue all of the kinds of metaphysics and what kind of phenomena they are a sense of information, spatial properties, temporal properties, and you realize that most metaphysics has nothing to do with energy. It has all to do with information. Do you have a near death experience? It’s like you’re visiting virtual reality like a movie theater. If you haven’t read astral projection, the same thing. If you have telepathy, you’re getting information. There’s no energy in any of that. Only time that energy shows up as if you have a psychokinesis experiment. And you’re actually changing something in the physical world, you go, “Well, how do you do that unless it’s energy?” Well, it turns out entropy is the key between those two, if you can change the entropy of a system, you’re changing its effective energy. Well, entropy is also an information concept. It turns out, even in a black hole, the surface area of a black hole is measured. Its surface area is called its entropy. And its units are bits. So at physics level, entropy, and bits are tied together. So that’s, that’s where information comes in entropy and information are tied to physics in that way through entropy. So it says okay, maybe the human is dealing with information at such a level that it can manipulate the entropy of a system and most computation is also entropy. In other words, computation works, even like due to Deland hours principle because entropy is involved with physical computing. And essentially, if you just let randomness completely happen all the time, we would have no answers, no computing would be done, everything would be random, and you would get no concrete focus. answer to your question, right. But that’s the opposite of entropy. It’s putting more order in the system. So that’s the question, how does the human mind create more order, especially in all this range of phenomena that we see in metaphysics, it’s all about order, instead of chaos.

[00:20:34] Alex Tsakiris: See, and that’s where I think we probably disagree a little bit. Because I think if we took what you’re saying, like, first of all, you’re making the leap that has to be made, has to be made from a science. Yes. So science as we know it materialistic, you are an illusion, because consciousness is an illusion. So just do what I say we have to get past that. So we have to try and figure out all these things that are, we’ve said, are on the fringe, but are really smacking us in the face. So whether it’s intuition, coincidence, near death experience, just smacks you in the face, after death communication smacks you in the face. So you’re trying to kind of wrestle those to the ground. But I think if we take what we know about science, that kind of science, I don’t think it fits in the models that you’re talking about, at least not at that point. I just sent you at the last minute, so you’ve probably barely had a chance to look at it. But Julia Moss Bridge is this woman, I think she’s at ions. Now, when I interviewed her, she was Dr. Julia Moss Bridge at Northwestern University. And she did this kind of clever experiment. And I titled it, men like to be right da. And her experiment is kind of taking up Dean Reagan’s famous pre sentiment experiment. If people remember that, Dean Reagan sets up a computer and the computer selects an image, and then he measures your reaction to it. And it turns out, your reaction is before, those are kind of funny terms, when we talk about space-time, your physical reaction, either your skin or your eye dilation, or any of those things can actually show to be before the image is actually even selected by the computer. But here’s the part that I guess, I think kind of throws a wrench in what you’re saying. Ross Bridge went one step further. And she got these people together. And since she’s kind of has a psychology background, treated them like a psychology experiment, and got the guys in one group in the girls in another group and said, “Hey, guys, I think I want to see who’s right, more than anyone else. And I’ll give you more money. If you’re right. Don’t you want to be right, here’s what you have to be right about, picking the image that’s gonna come up next.” And she found a statistical difference between men and women in terms of how the experiment was framed. Now, if I haven’t explained it, let me go back and recap one detail, there’s no way you can be right about this. It’s random. It’s randomly selected by the computer before you make your selection. So, there’s no way to be quote unquote. But the differences she found, I think, is the problem area, it’s not about, I mean, maybe you can speculate it’s about entropy, or it’s about all this other stuff. But what I think we all have an intuitive sense for, it’s about all the people stuff that we run into all the time, it’s about why we can’t always communicate as effectively as we want to with the people we really love, or why we are drawn to certain people and are not drawn to other people. It’s extremely messy. And as screwed up as psychology can be, they are pointing to something real that is way, way more complex at this point than anything we’re even close to understanding with physics or AI or anything like that. What are your thoughts about that, hypothesis?

[00:24:26] Doug Matzke: I’m not familiar with the details of this. I’m familiar with general presenting to experience that the Dean did, and other people did, I mean, obviously, it’s been replicated a whole bunch of places. But in general, if you have a pool, usually it’s a pool. That you have a targets that you’re targeting, the classic four cards and you want to pick which one of the four cards that the person is going to be picking, right? And they’re and they’re statistically higher, that they pick up somebody who’s telepathic or psychic or whatever. Can have a higher statistic than one out of four, which would be the random case. So anytime you have statistics, and you have abnormal statistics in any experiment, that means there’s usually some kind of mechanism supporting those statistics. That’s what Bell’s theorem was all about. That entanglement shows that you have statistics that are not possible, using regular classical statistics. And you can say, …

[00:25:28] Alex Tsakiris: Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. I’m not disagreeing with any of that. I’m saying, if you try and put that in an experiment, I can blow your experiment up just by doing what Julia Moss Bridge does just get all the bros together and say, “Hey, man, grab a beer. And I’ll tell you what you can do, here’s what you got to do.” Yeah, well, maybe it’s motivational. But maybe I can also go and look deeply into the people I love, I quote, unquote, love. And maybe that’ll blow up your experiment. So I can add all these human factor, human element kind of things that blow up your experiment in a way that you can’t pull that out, in, tease that out, you’re gonna have to just throw up your arms and go, “Oh, there’s people involved. So I get that you can get us to step one. But I don’t think you can get us to step two.”

[00:26:17] Doug Matzke: Actually, you can because you look at what they did with the Maharishi effect, where they have meditators going to town and it would lower the crime rate?

[00:26:26] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, I’m not sure I believe that. But okay.

[00:26:29] Doug Matzke: Group dynamics, amplifies the energy, the intention. And it’s the same thing with the… This isn’t my research, by the way, I’m just reporting it to you.

[00:26:41] Alex Tsakiris: You’re interpreting it, though, you’re interpreting it…

[00:26:44] Doug Matzke: I am interpreting.

[00:26:45] Alex Tsakiris: as well. So, here…

[00:26:47] Doug Matzke: Got the last point, group thing is, the random event generator, the world random event generators that they did for Princeton engineering anomaly Research Center, they had these 100 random event generators around the world. And they would measure how they were different from just statistics from random, under different world events. And two hours before 911 happen, all of the random number generators started going crazy. And they weren’t doing randomness anymore. Why? Because it was a global event that connected us all, mentally. And it started changing the randomness of these random event generators all over the world. And that was two hours before 911 before the first plane hits. So there’s an amplification effect of group energy, I just want to say that, how we interpret that there’s an effect there. And you want to include that in a model, which I’m trying to do. And I’m not saying, my model is right, but there’s an effect there. And we need to look at that.

[00:27:41] Alex Tsakiris: 1,000% agree with you. So that’s another Dean Reagan experiment, along with Roger Nelson and other people, but those are the two primary guys. Here’s my point on the law of attraction, I’m not sure, scotch taping a picture of a Range Rover to your refrigerator is going to get you any closer to God. And I’m not even sure that it won’t impede your progress in terms of getting closer to God. And I say that to be kind of provocative in a way, because I think we need to make a distinction between the physical, the metaphysical and the spiritual. Because a lot of people that I respect, who are in the spiritual camp are kind of jumping over the metaphysical, and saying, don’t get to Yeah, that’s real, but don’t get too hung up on it. And what I hear a lot out of law of attraction is, “Take the picture of the Range Rover to your refrigerator.” I don’t think that’s the point.

[00:28:44] Doug Matzke: Yeah. Right. Well, a lot of traction also has to do with what’s the call the emotional ladder. And most people are stuck in an area where they’re in the bottom half of labor, which we would consider the more negative energies, more negative emotions. And part of the story is, is they want to move you to the top of the ladder. So, part of the big picture of the law of attraction is, well, you have to choose what emotional state you are in. And that’s part of your focus. And as soon as you can start focusing, including meditation helps you gain focus, engineering and scientists are very focused because we have to stay very focused. So those are all focusing techniques, including meditation. So I would say law of attraction is about changing your focus so that you’re getting to a more positive emotional state. And by the way, if you have a positive emotional state, it can be very big. And that can affect and I have a whole chapter on that in my book, that amplifying a positive emotional state is the biggest thing that you can do to create a connection to like-minded things. Because think about the complexity of thought, without emotions versus with emotions. If you can amplify the emotional state, then you’re going to succeed in connecting. Here’s, I’m going to give you an example from pre sentience, if every time you made a choice, every time you made a choice, a decision about something, and then you say, “Oh, I should have done differently there, retrospectively.” But every time you do that and you think that, that was the right choice, you should celebrate. Why? Because when you’re making from a retro causation perspective, and pre sentience perspective, you can feel that success dance, that happy dance in the future, for the path that you took when you’re making the decision. So there is a concrete thing that you can test, you can say, amplify the positive emotions of the success choices I’ve made, and you can make better decisions every time you do that. It’s a retro causation, application of retro causation. And that’s law of attraction. That’s law of attraction.

[00:31:02] Alex Tsakiris: I’m not, I’m not convinced that. That’s right. You’d have to run a bunch of experiments and prove it to me. Another Skeptiko show that I sent you. And I really liked him Grimes, but his book, the joy of not thinking.

[00:31:20] Doug Matzke: I like that.

[00:31:20] Alex Tsakiris: He writes a lot about law of attraction. But his interpretation of law of attraction is a lot closer to mine. It’s a lot closer to the spiritual interpretation of it, which is the fundamental spiritual questions is, who am I? And the related question for us in a modern age is who have I become? What has that monkey mind that’s constantly racing around and being active and has this myth of progress mentality? What has that made me think I am. So for Tim, I think and me interpret of law of attraction is only go as far as your first point, Doug, which is that the science seems to be pointing to an ultimate reality to law of attraction. But we don’t have the foggiest frickin idea what that means. And to try and operationalize it at this point, to try and [unclear 32:16] at this point, to try and shut up and calculate at this point. We’re just not anywhere close to it. And as soon as we think we are, we have all these human factors that kind of get in the way.

[00:32:29] Doug Matzke: Well, this idea of stopping and thinking, I think, is really a critical idea. So I’m agreeing with this guy. And when I talk about meditation, a purpose of meditation, is to stop thinking. Most people don’t get there. In fact, I’m not very good at it. And the point is, if you meditate, and then all of a sudden, you realize that you haven’t been sleeping. Because you’re sitting up, you’re not sleeping, and all of a sudden hours gone. And you have no sense of time happening. You’ve actually kind of like stepped out of time, and you’re in a no thought zone. And a lot of ancient meditation techniques that they didn’t know anything about quantum computing, get to the place of the void, the no thought, perspective. And from that perspective, essentially, I guess, you’re like a God, because you’re not in time anymore. You’re touching everything at once. you’ve stepped out of space and time. And so thought, really, a lot of our thought is sequential. And if you step out of time, then you’re not thinking anymore, you’re in this no thought zone. And that is the state of being this, you would call it. But that beingness, I talked about it- in my book, I call it verb noun – that beingness is a noun, it’s the state that you are in. But it’s also a verb, in the sense that it can affect whatever state you’re in, can affect people around you and your reality, your sense of reality and who you are, it can. It does all those things. So you have to have a model of no thought as well as thought. And that’s part of the, maybe, it’s part of the system, part of my model that is least well defined. But no thought definitely has to do with not being in time. A lot of my model has to do with how do you step out of time, because that’s probably the real critical aspect of what I’m trying to do with this model is to look at temporal mechanics. And temporal mechanics is the key to all of this.

[00:34:44] Alex Tsakiris: I definitely applaud the fact that you’re pushing things in this direction. What I always kind of look out for though, is kind of the backdoor materialism. Now I got it. So let me turn it into something that I can engineer but I tell you what, this is kind of a really interesting point the interview for me because I think we’ve brought it up to the point where we’re ready to talk about Google, and their strong AI. And the interview I did with Andrew Smart and your input into that interview, which was to really sharpen our focus, because this is the topic now I think that people can start digging their teeth into because it’s hitting us, where we live kind of stuff, are robots gonna take over the world, are we living in a simulation? To what extent our freedoms being manipulated and socially engineered by what we search for what pops up in our ads, and all this other stuff? So I guess the question that I kind of hit Andrew with at one point, and that’s the Turing Test versus what I call the soul phone test. And then the third is what I’d call the God test. So I can expound on those more, but you’re smiling, like you already kind of get where I’m going with that. So why don’t you take over and tell me what you’re thinking?

[00:36:17] Doug Matzke: Well, AI, right, is trying to mimic the brain. And they say, “Well, the brain is classical computer.” So we should be able to build a computer that does the same thing. Well, if that’s a false assumption, then you have to say, “Well, what is AI doing? And how is what the brain is doing differently than that?” So, this is the first step of this discussion about, what about AI? Well, I believe that AI is simulating a high dimensional space. And it’s useful, it’s simulating it. But I believe that the human mind actually has a high dimensional space, a quantum high dimensional space. And anytime is, as Fineman has said, and other people have said that if you’re trying to simulate a quantum system, you need a quantum system to do it, you can’t simulate. That’s what this quantum supremacy thing is all about. As soon as you get to a certain size problem, you can’t simulate it anymore, you can only actually have a physical quantum system to do it. And the reason is, you actually have the quantum dimensions there in the quantum computer, where if otherwise, you’re simulating the quantum dimensions. There’s a big difference. And specifically, the same thing is true for AI, they’re simulating a high dimensional space, they don’t actually have one. So they would fail the Turing Test, about performance. The Turing Test, you could say, “Well, what kind of Turing Tests we’re talking about?” Well, in some simple thing that’s closed, hey, you can easily win it. But now, what was the guy Andrew said? Well, we’re going to put that Turing Test for LSD or the Turing Test for remote viewing, or the hearing test for near death experiences, you pick what level of Turing Tests you want to have. And so the point is, if you have a model that’s big enough to include all possible Turing tests that we can imagine, then you realize, well, then you can’t actually have a simulated consciousness, you actually have to have those dimensions there. And part of the book is going through that story in a more concise, step by step ways to get you to the point where you go, “Oh, if we really have high dimensional space and consciousness, and mind is really part of that high dimensional space. Well, no wonder we’re so smart.” And in fact, I can argue that we wouldn’t – evolutionary wise – we wouldn’t exist in this it did. And people like, Rupert Sheldrake is saying morphogenic resonant uses the same thing. It’s kind of like morphogenic resonance is a law of attraction at the molecular level. So if you say, well, law of attraction, you don’t believe in it. But do you believe in evolution, and you DNA and law of attraction, morphogenic, resonance is the same thing. So you got to tie all these things together. And if you don’t, you’re only like solving part of the problem. You’re not solving the whole problem. So how’s that for a big enough swatch? That’s your question.

[00:38:48] Alex Tsakiris: It’s perfect and it is great. And I want to pick up on the last thing you said, because I think it’s super important, although it’s kind of abstract up to a little bit in that if you can’t tie it all together, you have to tie it all together. And it somehow perfect. Yeah.

[00:39:32] Doug Matzke: Hey, I don’t even know that my answer is right. But I’m at least saying here is part of the problem that we’re trying to solve. The whole problem that we’re trying to solve, not part of it.

[00:39:39] Alex Tsakiris: Great, and that’s what I really respect because I’m gonna try and put it together differently. But before I do that, I got at least say, at least this guy is framed up the problem in a different way.

[00:39:55] Doug Matzke: Yeah, trying to.

[00:39:56] Alex Tsakiris: In a way that is obviously a step forward. And again, the step forward is, you’re at least dealing with extended consciousness, which is reality, you are at least, your connection between morphogenetic field and law of attraction is brilliant. I mean, you’re 1,000%, right. It’s, you can believe in law of attraction or not believe in the law of attraction. But there’s a reality there that is supported by the science that you can’t kind of get away from. The problem is, again, the Range Rover on the refrigerator. And the way that translates to me back to the Turing Test is, I think the Turing Test is incredibly useful. And let’s again, remind people what the Turing test is, if I can write a computer program that fools you into thinking that I’m intelligent, then I’m intelligent. That’s it!

[00:40:46] Doug Matzke: Yeah, in some domain.

[00:40:48] Alex Tsakiris: Forget even the domain. It’s like, that’s the basics of the idea. And I that what’s useful about that is it kind of provides a baseline of cognitive ability that we’re a lot of times afraid to go to, so the example I always use is like an online chess, so like, you can do the Turing Test, anytime you want. Just log on to an online chess portal, and play the computer, and pretend that you don’t know if there’s a person there or a computer. And then you’ll go, “Wow, this guy I’m playing, or this girl I’m playing is super smart, I can never even get a game off this.” Well, I think that’s a pretty useful baseline in terms of cognitive capabilities. And I think one of the problems that it really brings up is that we can see in these narrow areas do you call the domain, in these narrow domains, which I don’t think are that narrow, and I think there’s more and more of, and there’s more and more of them every day that are popping up that are below our level, because they’re not putting them in our face. They’re just implementing them and using them. So whether it’s search, or whether it’s all this other stuff we could talk about, what do we do with the fact that, if you advance even in a narrow domain, the cognitive capabilities of an artificial intelligence, that is powerful, and you tie that to the diversity problem, and it’s like, there’s a lot of power there.

[00:42:30] Doug Matzke: Well, I see a common theme from you, and in our conversations, and other conversations about people abusing their technology and power and so I think that’s part of your concern about the big companies who have control over many facets of our life, the Microsoft’s, and the Googles, and the who else is doing the Facebook’s? And so I so I respect that. Any technology, as simple as simple as like, facial recognition can be abused. You think, “Oh, that would be good.” But same thing with DNA, people are putting their DNA in these databases, and now all of a sudden, they’re having consequences from that they’re finding some relative they had was bad, unintended consequences. So the question is, how do we take any technology and not abuse it? And that’s a concern. I hear that’s a concern for you. And it’s a concern for me, too.

[00:43:37] Alex Tsakiris: That’s great. That’s not my concern. And if there isn’t, I mean, no, there isn’t that

[00:43:44] Doug Matzke: You are interested in that subject, though. Right? You’re interested in that subject, whether it’s a concern you’re interested in, right? Because …

[00:43:48] Alex Tsakiris: Here’s where I go with that. And if this is a rerun recurring theme, through our conversation, then great because bringing it to the surface, maybe moves us forward, is that I think sometimes you stop at the metaphysical and not an arc fully considering the spiritual. So I wrote a book a couple years ago, Why Evil Matters. I think this is why evil matters question.

[00:44:15] Doug Matzke: Yeah, I would agree with you.

[00:44:18] Alex Tsakiris: Because Google is in the social engineering business, whether they like it or not, because no matter how they do their search thing, and no matter who we all see it, right, we go to DuckDuckGo. If we might not legit search, and we’d let Google kind of Wikipedia it, if we don’t care if it’s some generic kind of thing. They demonetize. They are incredibly politically kind of influenced. But here’s the question Doug. The question is, are they fucking evil? I always referenced Onika Lucas, the woman I interviewed part of the Dutro cult, in Belgium, six years old, sold into a satanic ritual. So, and I always bring that up with people, because I get people aw. And then they go, “Oh, no, that’s fucking evil, I get it.” So in this extended realm, there are these forces. We don’t know what that is. We don’t know what the extended realm is. But there is evil. And that is a super important point. Because then the issue is not really, is Google in the social engineering business? The question is, are the people behind the AI evil? That’s ultimately what we want to know.

[00:45:43] Doug Matzke: So here, I’ll ask you the question, a follow up question for you. Is it evil because they purposely did this to manage those choices? Or was it accidental, and they didn’t realize the logical consequences of it? That’s what I was trying to talk about logical consequences. And so which one is which one is evil? Are all applications of that technology evil, are only the ones that they consciously made the choice to manipulate people with it?

[00:46:13] Alex Tsakiris: I think in order to answer that question, we have to move another level up, so you moved us from the physical computing to the metaphysical, and that’s the good thing. But then the next level up is the spiritual, and that’s why I said the soul phone thing. And I don’t know if you had a chance to kind of look at that, but to me it kind of, so do you know who Gary Schwartz is at the University of Arizona?

[00:46:44] Doug Matzke: Oh, yeah.

[00:46:45] Alex Tsakiris: Okay. Do you know Mark [unclear 46:48] Are you familiar with the soul phone?

[00:46:50] Doug Matzke: I’ve heard the term, yeah. And I think from something that you’ve told me about it, so. And yeah.

[00:46:56] Alex Tsakiris: So Gary and Mark, have done, what you beautifully summarized the last time around, taken like Dean Reagan, six, double slit consciousness experiment, said, “Okay, we’ll put it in a box here. And we’ll just and now we can measure whether there’s an outside effect by two?” And now wouldn’t it be great if we could talk to disincarnated spirits? Wouldn’t it be great if you could talk to your dad, who’s passed away? Would it be great if you could talk to your grandfather? And let’s put a keyboard on this thing, which is one of the things they got to plate it? To me, this is classic.

[00:47:35] Doug Matzke: Otherwise, it’s Morse code, right?

[00:47:38] Alex Tsakiris: Well, otherwise, it’s Yes/No questions.

[00:47:43] Doug Matzke: Yeah. Right.

[00:47:44] Alex Tsakiris: It’s a misstep, in my opinion because we’re not, it’s substituting the metaphysical for the spiritual. We don’t understand what these extended realms are, we don’t understand the mind of God. We can try and get closer to doing that. And that can inform how we might look at the metaphysical, but we can’t start with the shut up and calculate thing first. Do you feel me on that? Or do you agree or disagree?

[00:48:19] Doug Matzke: No, I agree. And if you look at the soul phone, they’re trying to do what our brain is doing. Somehow are conscious, if you believe that the consciousness and spiritual being who we are, separate from our brain, you go, well, somehow the brain allows us to interact with that consciousness in that soul, and that spiritualness of us, and sometimes we get insights from our higher self or whoever. And it shows up in our life, we do something, maybe we trip. So therefore, we miss getting run over by a truck, those kinds of coincidences, right. So the point is, is that the soul phone is just trying to do what any PK experiment is, it says, “How do we get to the fidelity that we have with our mind and brain where it’s very high bandwidth?” So high bandwidth that I could move my finger when I want to, I could blink my eyes when I want to, I could move around in the physical world. What if we had an electronic device that was just as the same fidelity is sort of as a blank brain? And we could have souls visit in there and they could, like, communicate with us? I mean, I’ve had that idea. I mean, that’s people would want to talk to people. Well, we already sort of have that, we have them. We have channels. We have people who can communicate with souls because they’re kind of like having this conversation on both sides of the fence. So, people are already doing that. And they think it’s weird because there’s a channel there or we have a person who has a, you know about [unclear 50:03] and says, “I’ve had this brain and this consciousness up to this point. And now, some other soul is in here. And it’s not the original soul.”

[01:01:06] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, but it’s deeper than that. So here’s the deeper part. Because I get a ton of really smart people who contact me and want to do flat earthier want to talk about flat earthier? I got into a debate with a guy. Yeah, smart guy graduated from LSU. You know that? You’ve never looked into it. You know, that’s his. And I go, dude, I looked into it for about 10 seconds. I mean, that’s all, it’s it. But here’s the point. It’s, in a way, I think it relates exactly to what you’re talking about. Because it’s like one of the biggest all media people that you’ll hear talk about Flat Earth is a guy named Eddie Bravo is on the Joe Rogan show and Sam Tripoli has him on the show and he’s a jujitsu guy. Now Eddie Bravo is an absolute genius at jujitsu, not only in executing it physically. But he’s actually devised a whole different system that is super successful in this net. Eddie Bravo is not a dumb guy, he doesn’t walk around and stumble over the curb because he can’t, he functions fine. The way he’s processed, our myth of progress kind of world, our shadow banning demonetization is to say, “Fuck your science, it doesn’t add up. You keep saying one thing, and then doing these evil things. And then you’re trying to convince me at some level, that what I’m observing everything, I’m experiencing is not what it is. Prove it to me. It’s an Uber empiricism that I think you have to kind of respect at some level. Because the game to a lot of people, the science game seems so incredibly rigged that, that’s the only response is prove it to my satisfaction, I’ll be the judge or I’m out.”

[01:03:13] Doug Matzke: I thought about flat versus this. What kind of evidence could you ever convince them? And there’s nothing, there’s nothing that you can say to convince them?

[01:03:22] Alex Tsakiris: And that’s even wrong, is that famous guy.

[01:03:25] Doug Matzke: Yeah. And I think it has more to do with them than it does about science. And they come up with all these excuses about why. Why they’re trying to justify their stance. I think they’re afraid to learn anything. So it probably comes it says more about them than it says about science. And then people say, “Well, it’s about science.”

[01:03:50] Alex Tsakiris: So Doug, we’ve kind of gone around the world a couple times, I feel in that way. It’s kind of like the first interview, but there’s so much depth to this book, Deep Reality. Tell us what’s one or two of the main takeaways that you want people to get from this book and from your work.

[01:04:16] Doug Matzke: We probably are not quantum computers. You said, you don’t like that terminology. And I’m only using that as a bridge to talk about the fact, well, what is a quantum computer? It means that it’s a hyper dimensional thing. So humans are really from a spiritual perspective are probably really hyper dimensional beings. If you would think about, you see the aura around saints and stuff like that. Well, that’s just a matter of representation of how do you represent a spiritual being that’s an infinite dimensional space is very gazillion dimensional space in three dimensions. Well, the best way you can think of it as a ball of light, so if that’s who we really are, that’s the end story that you’re looking for the spiritual side of it, how do you back up from that through the quantum computing and through the physics and through the computational side of it and say, well, that thing that set of dimensions that we see is light, is probably bits. And the reason is, because if you have three bits, you can form a photon, it’s called a qutrid. If you look it up, you can find that that’s what they think photons are is a qutrid. So it’s a higher dimensional version of a qubit. And by the way, in the geometric algebra, math, it’s a boson, it’s a photon, it looks like a boson. So, my belief is that, takeaway is here, we have all these layers and the high level, which is what you’re interested in is the spiritual nature of humans, that we’re hyper dimensional beings and we’re not in our brain, our brain is this bio computer antenna transceiver. And the real action is going on in the spiritual domain in our, in this hyper dimensional mind. That’s really not thought, I mean, it’s thought yet no thought. It’s a wave, not a particle. There’s our being this is more like a wave than it is anything else. But it’s informational. It’s not energy. And it’s not in space and not in time. So personally, not technologically wise, personally, with that information, what are you going to do about it for your life, that’s the big step that I’ve tried to get people to do is, you don’t have to, you can unplug from all these social networks and not be affected by all and you can sit there and meditate and figure out your own emotions and come up your internal state, and evolve and improve your consciousness and become lucid dreamer, and meditator and a Zen monk, and touch the Akashic records, and do that all without ever touching Facebook or Google. You can do that. I know people who have, housewives who have gone up that spiritual ladder, like you wouldn’t think that they could anybody can do this. So once you believe, oh, this is who we are, everybody should be interested in who we are, and who they are individually. And that’s what I think you were talking about earlier is, who they really are, what is their being? What’s their purpose, what are they trying to do in their life. And love is, these emotions are part of that. Because soon as you realize, everybody says, “Oh, if you’re in a spiritual domain, love is the ultimate love, this God like love this mother, like love this near death experience, love beyond any measure that we can imagine.” And that’s the only truth there is. And some people apply the word consciousness to that, well, I again, if I start there, instead of I sound like a crazy person. But if I start at the building up this description, from the classical computing and limits of computing and quantum computing, and they realize hyper dimensional spaces, and finally get to the point where you can’t represent, you can’t do these behaviors. If you have a lower dimensional space, then you go humans are, we have all this magic. That’s all the spiritual magic that we can do. Because we’re hyper dimensional beings. So there’s the big picture, and hopefully, that meets the kinds of insights that you’re looking for in your speaker.

[01:08:17] Alex Tsakiris: That was awesome. Like I’m so with you, in terms of, I’m not just sitting in a cave, a whole day, I’m not and I’m not sure that there’s part of me that says, you know, that’s probably a more direct path. But it doesn’t seem that way to me, it doesn’t feel that way to me, and I have to follow my intuition. And I kind of feel that that’s what you’re doing, Doug, you’re because a lot of quote unquote, spiritual people that blow past all this stuff and want to ignore all this stuff, and just say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. It’s all love and stuff like that,” kind of what I see you doing is kind of dragging them back through it and say, …

[01:09:03] Doug Matzke: This is how it works.

[01:09:04] Alex Tsakiris: Yes.

[01:09:05] Doug Matzke: This is how it’s practical. Yeah, this is how it’s possible to do this. Yeah.

[01:09:09] Alex Tsakiris: And I think, whether you’re right or wrong on that, I applaud that. I think that’s an important step-in that, ignore it at your own peril. Ignore it at your own Mooney cult, or TM cult, or Christian cult, ignore it at your own peril is kind of what I hear you saying, I hear you saying, if we’re going to talk, let’s be as precise as we can. And here’s my attempt at doing that. That’s what I think Deep Reality.

[01:09:46] Doug Matzke: Connecting all the layers and call, it’s deep because it connects all these layers, and all these topics as well. So, it’s deep and broad at the same time, so.

[01:09:56] Alex Tsakiris: Well, fantastic. I worry that the This amazing work that you’ve done won’t possibly reach as big an audience as it should. But then how could that possibly matter? It can only reach the people that it’s supposed to reach. And if this interview helps that a little bit more than that’s great, but please do if you can check out this book. And I think you’ll be blown away. And I think it’s an important piece of the puzzle. So thanks so much for coming on, Doug.

[01:10:34] Doug Matzke: Thanks again. We’ll have to do this, occasionally, whenever you get the itch to. Did you give me the true Skeptiko experience today because you held my feet to the fire?

[01:10:47] Alex Tsakiris: You got the treatment, man, believe me.

[01:10:50] Doug Matzke: I didn’t feel like it was too bad.

[01:10:54] Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again to Doug Matzke for joining me today on Skeptiko. The one question I’d have to tee up from this interview is, is a AI evil? Or as we kind of came around to in this interview are the people who are currently pushing AI so prominently into our life, are they evil? Let me know your thoughts. jump on over to the Skeptiko forum, if you like or drop me an email or find me anyway, you will love to connect with all of you who listened to and contribute so much to this show. Until next time, take care and bye for now.  [box]