A Verb In A Polymorphic Sense featuring Mike Siracuse

Emmy's Black Box: The Podcast is back with Season 2.

Emmy has a chat with Mike Siracuse about a little thing known as consciousness.

Some links that are relevant to the discussion:


The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle

Elan vital

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lan_vital

Kayfabe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe

81-minute Stanford Read

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53642061-the-hidden-spring

Danger, Will Robinson

https://youtu.be/REvmhBO99I4

Carole King’s Tapestry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapestry_(Carole_King_album)

Amira Willingham, Holland’s Got Talent

https://youtu.be/17yLLsE9W_o

Transcript

Emmy: [00:00:00] I left you all on a bit of a cliffhanger. Truth is, um, after I interviewed Skip Rizzo for my final episode of that season, I checked myself into the psych ward, which I have done several times. This time, I found that my symptoms were consistent with a little thing called borderline personality disorder.

And I got a new treatment, uh, I've been working really hard at it, and I'm doing a lot better. So, thank you for everyone who checked in and was a part of that journey. The continuing journey. of being alive. And speaking of which, uh, if you follow me on LinkedIn, you might've seen a few weeks ago that I put it out there that I really want to focus this second season of my podcast on consciousness.

Last season was sort of focused on tech and something I [00:01:00] learned about tech over the last couple of years is that a lot of it is bullshit.

And that's to differentiate from technology, although some of that is bullshit and garbage. But most of tech, and that is tech the industry, that is tech the lifestyle, that is tech the personality,

is bullshit and garbage. And so for this season, I wanted to focus a little more on something else. Uh, the conversation you're about to hear is a guy named Mike that I met on LinkedIn and we vibed. And so it kind of happened organically, not going to preface it too much. All this to say that I'm glad you're back with me for the ride season two Emmys black box.

Let's give it a whirl. Welcome to

Mike: Emmys black box. You've reached [00:02:00] Mike's inactive mind. Just leave a message at the beep.

Emmy: Yes, I wanted to say an official welcome to Emmys black box.

Mike: It is my pleasure to be inside.

Emmy: This is the first episode of season 2 when I called the show Emmys black box. I was not yet familiar.

With the quote unquote black box as a phenomenon in computing where I was getting it from was on the one hand is the black box theater, namely a theater with three black walls and a black floor where the audience is invited to to fill in the blanks with their imagination and then also and which you might find even more relevant to your experience is what I thought was called a black box on a plane.

As the sort of maybe an urban legend that there is this quote unquote black box on an airplane that is sort of the thing that people find when an airplane crashes [00:03:00] and so the theme song to me is black box is is it a safe or a theater I like

Mike: that. The black box on aircraft is real. I can definitely attest to that.

As a former accident investigator in the United States Navy, they are real and they're very informative when they survive. From a technical perspective, the black box that I was kind of referring to was the old black box of AI, even back in the day. It was the black box. You put something in. It came out and you said, okay, there's, you know, some reason for a decision or a decision itself.

But we used to have an old saying as program managers in that world is don't ever go for a tour at the sausage factory, you know, because you got to go in there and find out what it looks like, how they built it. And there's a lot of assumptions and a lot of pace and a lot of scenes that aren't filled.

But that's why it's good to get inside the black box and figure out what people are thinking. And

Emmy: so the old the. Adage, see where the sausage is made, I think is a nod to Upton Sinclair's, the [00:04:00] jungle could be, it could be right, which is about sort of the horrors of the meat packing industry or whatever that industry is that involves producing meat for public consumption.

Oh, the food

Mike: industrial complex. Yes,

Emmy: that. But I think it was famous because it's sort of, it was a bit of an expose about something we experience every day, but not knowing. How it's really made and we don't want to know is when you went into the black box of AI. Did you find things like that? Well, it gets

Mike: to this point, I guess that I should make early on that AI, the field of study kind of ignores consciousness.

It really can't deal with it. You know, an AI is a flute and it needs to do something. So it has a limited set of assumptions that it has to execute. Now, sometimes we can create stochastic models like GPT and say, wow, that's kind of fascinating. But even a GPT, it can't go back on its own thing that's created, say it creates a summary of war and peace.

It can't go back and then start reasoning on it without being retrained again. So this thing called consciousness is [00:05:00] recursive in its very nature. You know, it's not only the muse, but it's the mused. Right? Like we live and it kind of injects its way back into, you know, what's happening with our lives. I see a future of general intelligence vice artificial intelligence.

The A. I. Is a flute and the general intelligence has to play the orchestra and the best information exchanges we know at the technical level between zeros and ones and we need to get back there. So to me, it's more of a case of information science as we move forward than it is about data science. That isn't a dismissed data science in the world of AI.

It's just to recognize that, you know, at some point, these AIs that we create may be, you know, all the parts of an orchestra, but they have to play together, and they're fundamentally really not designed to do that.

Emmy: I do want to preface this to our listeners. By saying that you and I, Mike, have had a prior conversations to put a little bit of strategy into how we want to operate during this podcast and the central question revolves around consciousness, which you and I have discussed and Mike, you had a [00:06:00] suggestion, which I thought was great is to focus on these simple questions that I remember learning You know, simply who, what, where, when, why, et cetera.

Of course, to describe it a little more, it's sort of consciousness. What is it? Why does it matter? When does it matter? How does it function? Where does it exist? Who possesses it? And finally, is its intent inherent to Vita? And I'm quoting you on that last word, Vita.

Mike: I'm taking proprietary stuff there.

Concept guy for screen, right? It's like, you got to plant something somewhere, you know, and beat that obviously just life, you know, and all of life being a common expression of the source, right.

Emmy: And in thinking about this, you know, we've talked about black box and I, we've talked about black box and aviation and then that other definition was from theater and you and I have actually talked about theater [00:07:00] as well, less so in an exhibition away as in, oh, I'm gonna go see a play.

More so as actors in sort of how an organization or an industry or a civilization can participate in a sort of theater making with each other. And what was the word you used for that again? He fah bee?

Mike: Oh, well, no, that's something very different. If I was going to use a word for that, I would use the Hawaiian term.

Mokani. It means community. And that goes out really special right now to Lahaina. But there's that sense of community, that sense of building, you know, if I was going to grab a philosopher, it would be Elon Vitale, you know, and like a story, you know, the, the great screen concept developers or our ages, you know, have told us and showed us that if you want to tell a great story, don't, you know, tell story great and give it a beginning, the middle and end, and then let it come to life.

So much like the rest of life, it needs some parameters and needs some guidelines. And then if, you know, a great script [00:08:00] is there ready to capture it, I believe. Because the story in and of itself has a consciousness, you know, just in its very way that it represents life, it has a beginning, it has a middle, it has an end.

So to back to the play, it's so relevant because it's, it's been just who we, how we convey story for millennia, not more. Yes. And

Emmy: I think that's, that's a great thing to continue on, but just to tie a knot at this juncture, I think I was, I was being a little coy with my theater and I think I was using theater really as a synonym for.

Lying or if you like bullshitting.

And that is the word that I wanted to, wanted to put out there. All

Mike: right. Well, then if we're going to go that angle, definitely. Kafabi. Kafabi. Yeah, Kafabi. It's basically an understanding between all the participants that are making money off of it that it's real. They all know that it's not real, [00:09:00] but you can never admit to anybody outside of your circle that it's not real because that breaks Kafabi.

What's interesting to me, and I think part of the discussion we were having was, you know, how much of that has infiltrated all of our industrialized complexes. You know, the food one, like you mentioned, or education, whatever the case may be, how many of these systems are at scale, just playing a coffee and really not building that community.

That's so needed that you talked about. So I guess at that level, it is very real and very kind of, I don't want to say it's a lie because that's indicting a lot of just what we do as humans just to survive. But it's not for the best. That's for sure. It's not out of the pure consciousness of what we are as human beings.

I don't believe. Thank you. And

Emmy: that's what I was going to ask you to move forward. Does Kifabe and consciousness exist on a sort of spectrum or a continuum of some kind? Are they two forces at work in some way?

Mike: It gets to the really heart of this matter. Maybe at some point here in the next two [00:10:00] minutes, right?

We'll throw a definition out there and just kind of get that back to you. But your question there kind of is... Not only a theological one, it's a philosophical one and a scientific one, right? And my core belief over the last three or four years, at least, has been to look past all three and say, where do they...

Agree. And maybe in that sense of community that you talked about and just as on the planet, because let's face it, let's be honest, right? Maybe it's too much, but it's not the planet that's at risk folks. It's something else. And it's us, right? You know, the planet is going to be fine. And, you know, short of the moon hitting it again, or, you know, big.

extinction, but they'll still be around, but back to your question, you know, it's that big question. What's the purpose of consciousness, right? Is it to lie or is it to, you know, in a purely physical sense that you still, well, every creature does two things or one thing. They creatively imitate other things to survive.

So two

Emmy: minutes have, have gone by. So we promised our listeners that [00:11:00] we did, we would do a working definition here. So. The definition, the word is consciousness, which is a noun, we may view

Mike: it as a verb in a polymorphic sense. But please go ahead. Sure.

Emmy: Okay. So this is a working definition of consciousness we have here, which is a capacity for a thing to become itself, learn and creatively survive using imitation and information

Mike: exchange.

Yes, that presently is the best way that I can describe in a, in a conceptual manner, like a screenwriter. If I was going to you. And what I think it is, you know, that's after reading, just trying to kind of alchemize that 81 minute read at Stanford that I sent you and it's good stuff, but it's just like, okay, but what does it mean?

Right? Is consciousness still exist when I'm sleeping? You know, those are the types of questions that 50 percent of the discussions about and I'm not sure it really matters that much, right? It gets back to your question about the continuum, right? Okay. From a theological perspective, you'd have to ask, do you [00:12:00] believe God is everything, before you could ask that question, right?

Because from a, from a bifurcation in, in theology, if you don't believe that God is everything, then it's impossible to ask a, answer a question at that level. That's about the whole system. So it's a, it's a tough one, right? If you believe consciousness is at the core of everything, like the vitalists used to believe, but that was replaced by some, you know, interesting work in the quantum world and, and you know, a lot of the accomplished quantum physics will just say, well, they're kind of answering the question, does a rock have consciousness, let alone does every living thing from a cell to the Christ possess it almost like a mustard seed to a

Emmy: tree.

So. If we look at this definition, there are a couple of things that pop out there is, you know, to become itself, to learn, but the key thing survive. So if we look at the question, why does it matter? I think most people would agree that surviving matters. So there is this notion of there's surviving and then they're surviving creatively.

Is there a distinction there?

Mike: It's funny you asked [00:13:00] this because I was just thinking about it. We may get creative. In learning how to be at peace in order to survive, you know, the question of creativity is in, in, in service to that ability to survive that may mean over a billion years, a creature that's an apex predator may mean, you know, an octopus that just feeds to stay alive.

But. It's still intelligently pretty superior to most life on the planet, including us. You know, so if we're looking at this from three levels as we move down and even as humans, we can do the same thing. If you look at the, you know, the Buddhist tradition about how the consciousness is viewed, it's four layers, blah.

Well, it's the same thing here, right? Even the tree of life says the same thing, right? There's a virtual layer, there's a metaphysical layer, and there's the functional layer, right? Now we're about science and we go even deeper than that. But do they all agree at some point, right? And in order to start getting at that question, like you had about the continuum, we, there has to be something that's driving all of it back to the definition.

The most important word there in my mind is the [00:14:00] first one capacity. What is that capacity? What programs it? If you think about an electrical circuit, you say it has a capacity. It's designed to do a certain thing. Well, how did it start? We've got these amazing creatures all over the planet, but something's driving it.

There's a primary reason, I believe, but it's not the only reason that most sentient creatures have a similar facial structure and sensor arrangement. It matters because something underneath that capacity is what we don't know. So from my perspective as an entrepreneur in the information exchange space, I've been really focused on this recoilless effect between cells.

Because imagine a cell's a shotgun and it's shooting information into another cell. And in the real world, we shoot a shotgun and there's a recoil on one end and a recoil on the other end. But at the cellular level, there's no recoil because of, because of this capacity, this lattice to take that recoil and to absorb it.

And then the big question I ask, and hopefully this kind of creates an impression on our listeners that [00:15:00] why I'm interested in this, because in order to do Say fire detection at this scale, we have to understand consciousness because back to theology and philosophy and science in order to keep people safe, we have to understand all those provisions because the only certainty in this level of work is uncertainty.

And if we, if we don't have a common view of the physics underneath. Say at scale emergency alert warning, then we create all kinds of different information or data models for all the different, you know, models that try to keep us safe. It's like they're shooting shotgun shells at each other, but they're not recoilless.

There aren't good lattices that exist like they do at the cellular level, like they do with a dolphin with echolocation, you know, and a lot of other ways across nature within our own body has recoilless things that are fascinating. But we're not playing that imitation game to get back to your question about the definition, you know, a capacity for a thing, anything to become itself.

And that opens up a whole bunch of bifurcations right there, right? Some people say, [00:16:00] well, it's something that's aware of itself being aware. Well, that's one part, but again, it just starts because again, back to the Stanford, which is. Excellent. 81 minute read, but boy, it opens up your mind to just how diverse the field of study is.

So I think that's why it's important that definitions and in my mind, most importantly, not to avoid your question at all, but how important that first word is a capacity. Well, what is that capacity? What programs it? How does it update itself? So

Emmy: the words that jumped out were another sort of I like continuums, obviously, or continua, I guess, if it's some kind of Latin word, whatever.

But between two words you said, which are safety and uncertainty, and it's interesting because I was just reading this book I mentioned to you in passing was The Hidden Spring by Mark Psalms, and he was talking about the relationship between uncertainty and entropy. And entropy is one of these words that [00:17:00] I always saw on like social media.

That just means generalized chaos. But what he sort of put forth was that entropy is the opposite of what you're saying. If consciousness. Is the capacity for which something can become itself. Entropy is the opposite process where it collapses into something else. So that brings us to the question of when does it matter?

When does consciousness matter? And I would also ask, when did consciousness begin to matter to you? Ooh,

Mike: that's a good question. But I've got to roll back a little bit. Because I want to, I want to go back to that last part that you left there. It was a great question about, you know, entropy and consciousness.

What I would offer is that it's polymorphic and it has to be looked at from multiple different views, like a screenplay done great, 15 different people need to look at and they all [00:18:00] have their view. And it's the same with this, that's why definition is so important and why it's important for that. So when you talk about an entropy of say, an entity, you know, a dolphin, it's death, it's collapse, that entropy, that natural entropy that's required of the ongoing narrative, what I call the natural order story, death's part of it.

Entropy is a huge part of it, you know, at some point, the, the big bang that's going to be enterprised, that's a word later on into, into its death. But I think they're both valid concepts, I guess, is my point. They can't exist, nor would they exist without each other. I don't think we just yet understand.

And maybe it may be a binary view of something that's much, much, much beyond our view of really truly understanding it. Accepting it's one thing, just like electricity, but using it, but really understanding it, I don't think we still do in terms

Emmy: of when does this matter? If we think about everything we've covered so far.

Mike: All the time. At some point, this [00:19:00] whole planet was full of mushrooms and mycelium, and something decided it needed its own belly, and then the sun and the leaves all decided to do a great dance, and the rest of the earth kind of, woof, here we are, fractal expressions of a source. Start asking your next question, you know, what got me interested in consciousness?

Was just this understanding after being part of teams that were attacking big problems and what I now refer to, you know, should have back then, but I wasn't really informed that I wasn't smart enough. There's complete problems, these problems of significance that we face for all of us as a nation, as a world survival, and we have to be creative and doing so our information exchange problems at scale.

And we talk about decisions. And, you know, if I want to get an airplane from point A to point B, it's not a straight line. It's a circle of decisions, like all of life. And, you know, when we start listening to Turing and Godel and all those guys come to these big problems with the complete problem, and that's the halting problem and the decision problem itself.[00:20:00]

So what, what got me interested in, you know, really focused on consciousness was just this. Inadequacy, both of myself, of trying to imagine systems or a machine that could operate at what's called the operational layer of war, or operational layer, say, of fire detection, is just... Again, the conductor, you know, because that truly is the imitation layer.

Does that make sense? You know, you've got a strategy and then you have a imitation layer that takes all those physical things and tries to make sense of them for people that are either making business decisions or life saving decisions. And you got the people on the ground, you know, with the sensors or the sensors creating this information.

And we play this imitation game, hopefully creatively, but with what purpose, what got me really focused on consciousness because it's core. It's hard to not get put into a theological, philosophical, or scientific box here. And I wouldn't disagree with what you said about where they agree, but again, I would focus on where [00:21:00] they agree past looking past the potential dogma of all three.

And I think the only clarity that I came to was that life comes from Earth. All life comes from Earth. And then I became kind of interested because I read somewhere that, you know, I think Mears said it, that we're of the Earth and not on the Earth. That really got me focused. Because a lot of times, theologically, we're focused on, and even scientifically, we separate ourselves from the earth and say we're on it, you know, we've got dominion or domain, when in reality, we're of it.

We've got a lot to learn from the octopi and the dolphins and whales, and we should be cutting them up, by the way, we should be imitating them. So the whole core of consciousness was just really the core belief of just wanting to build better information exchange systems at scale. As strange as that sounds.

Because I don't think you can do that without understanding the consciousness of the one, the community you're trying to protect, say, in the case of, you know, wildfire or against a domestic or international terrorist threat, you still have to address that issue. The question becomes, then, can you then translate into something a machine can reason about or, and humans can [00:22:00] reason about?

So the why, in my estimate, the why is all the time. We only take time off from consciousness, in my belief, when we're in denial that it exists.

Emmy: Yeah, again, lots of stuff I want to respond to

Mike: danger, danger, danger, Will Robinson.

Emmy: We, we only have language for now as a way to, to communicate, you know, we can't, Oh, and concepts

Mike: and metaphor.

Emmy: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. You know, the many, many forms of language, but okay. So what, what was I just thinking? Okay. So we have a lot of concepts out on the table now. One thing I was thinking of, you mentioned war. And what I started thinking of is the notion of defense. So that is a loaded word for many reasons.

And I was thinking of defense as the notion of creation and destruction defense. At least in this country, [00:23:00] America can be a massive apparatus for creation, innovation, design, research, et cetera. But of course, on the other hand, it can be a major apparatus for destruction. And all of this is for one could argue the, the safety of a state, a nation state, what have you, an entity.

So one could say, well, is defense consciousness, what is the relationship between defense and consciousness

Mike: as an expression, I guess, of, of our consciousness. And I'm, I'm talking about maybe the human species or whatever we want that out to be, whatever, whatever it came to be to formulate the constitution and its hope that we would become what was laid [00:24:00] out, obviously, we still haven't done that.

But there was a hope that we would, and even back then it was known, and some would argue those were some of the best, you know, political scientists of their day because they understood that the value of a democratic republic was really good. Not a democracy, but a democratic republic, that the states have certain rights, the federal government has certain rights, and it has to be distributed.

And I guess the same can kind of be said here, right? And what was core of the constitution at its core was that there was always this fine line. And I think there always has been between privacy and security and safety, but really privacy and security. And that's a tough, I mean, for any nation state in the history of our whole species and even before that, that's a tough one.

You know, it's easy for an apex predator, right? They have nothing to worry about, but themselves put an apex predator in charge of, you know, keeping 300 million people safe. It's a completely different viewpoint. There's so many trade offs, you know, privacy has to be number one, say in that regard, but it's [00:25:00] really in my mind, you know, as an ex not ex as a, as a inactive naval officer, a political in nature, the defense of whatever we hold to be sacred, wherever we happen to live is.

It's hard, especially at scale. It's just hard. And we have to be careful that it doesn't overtake the primary consciousness, hopefully, of this nation, which is privacy and liberty. Quite frankly, I'm more worried about the other industries in our country, a lot more than I am about the defense industrial base.

Our models are imploding with each other at scale. All of these, all of these industries appear to become semi industrialized in their own way, and that's not a good thing. Because it gets back to the point about, you know, how do we build better community? How does this sense or this understanding of consciousness help us?

Help the species, right? I think if I had a tagline for this podcast to be that, you know, if I'm going to listen to these guys talk, you know, what can I take away from it? Like a hero's journey and do something better in the world with. So that's why that's the win there. Why I do what I do because it kind of [00:26:00] brings storytelling, which I love and information service design together, which I love at the point where they intersect, which is it's all about the experience.

Emmy: So, so we touched on the notion of defense. And I

Mike: tactfully avoided it, I know, but we can go back to it.

Emmy: No, I think, I think we handled it well. In our, you know, common language, call it popular psychology, everybody knows about the defense mechanism, right? Maybe it's an evolutionary concept that actually implies some sort of function or utility, but now it's become, you know, defense mechanism is something negative.

Mike: It gets to a bigger issue about, you know, Now we're, we started entering, like if, if you look at the Native American culture and their, their appreciation for the game of lacrosse and, and even to this day, you know, and we'll put fantasy aside and betting and all that stuff, but the core of the, of the essence of sport is so we, we don't war.

Right. So it's [00:27:00] almost a, it's a, it's a projection of a violence of sorts, but it's so we don't, you know, kill each other. Right. So defense, I think is core to consciousness because we have to, again, back to the, to the, to the definition, what's number one, it can only be one thing that's survival. The only way we can know that is to look across the whole spectrum of life and say, where does it all agree?

You know, because an apex cheetah doesn't agree with a baby human because they have different views, right? And they never will. We hope that baby human doesn't turn into an apex predator, but it may as we're seeing. Can I swear? What we're seeing fucking weekly in our schools and our malls. And if I made a political statement at this point, and it's not political though, it's apolitical, it's just moral.

If it takes a community to stop one of these free shooters and it's taken the communities to build them to, and to make them or at least [00:28:00] help create them. And if that offends anybody, I'm sorry, but. We've got to start taking this next dig down because there's a, there's a, an expression, you know, it makes me think of carol king's tapestry, right?

There's an expression and this gets to your continuum because I'm not sure it's a continuum as much as it is a continuum expression stochastic like a GPT, but it just continues to create. And there is a threat of consciousness that we would all perceive possibly as evil. But again, this gets back to the theological question, which I think the biggest one is, and if I can recommend a book, I'd say, hey, most people, if you're Roman Catholic or come from that tradition or background of even Christianity, read The Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes.

Written over a hundred years ago, but he made a very clear predicate. He said, if God is everything and I'm paraphrasing, then everything changes and it starts to answer your question a little more deeper naturally than we've seen this over 2000 years of Christianity. We've got to have a bad guy, right?

We have to have the devil. You know, if you have the fear of going to [00:29:00] hell, and then we had a good guy, we've got abundance. We always have to have that counter, right? It's like a great script. It has to have something to counter it. And I guess it rolls back to your original question about creativity and survival, right?

Or its whole concept. Because I think they come together in that way. Yeah, we have to be creative to survive. But sometimes we have to be creative in the face of something that wants to be just as creative to kill us or eat us. Sometimes it's just to get along better with our family.

Emmy: So here's the thing.

You mentioned lacrosse. The word defense is built into all team games. And offense. And offense, exactly. Which are both part of the larger umbrella of the other defense we were talking about. So, lacrosse... It's a game, it's a sport, and I love what you put forth, this idea that we play games so we don't war.

And I'll go back to Psalms, the hidden spring identifies play as a core [00:30:00] conscious feeling that aids in our survival, our desire to play, because it gives us that space to purge these sort of desires to protect, to have contact aggression, for lack of a better word, it also helps us sort of push the boundaries of what we can and cannot do in a sort of quote, Thank you.

Civilization, if you will. And when I think of play, I also think of creativity, which you put forward. And I think that's a good thing to tie a rope around because the first thing you and I sort of talked about was script writing. And so if we look at our, just like little questionnaire thing, how does it function?

Yeah,

Mike: that's a great segue.

Emmy: Yeah. So a script, how does a script function? We've talked about this.

Mike: Well, I would say that the concept developer and the screenwriter together, and whether that exists in one mind or not, well, that's great if it does, but [00:31:00] they have to develop an intent. Of that script and it has to be complete and it has to be balanced and everything has to be agreed, but at some level, because it's an imitation game, right?

A movie is a simulation. It's no different than a hundred million dollar simulation in the defense space. Not really. There's different effects from that simulation, but it's still a simulation. And if you're a scenario traffic control system, say it's playing an imitation game, much the same way that a script plays an imitation game.

You know, if I'm designing an air traffic control system, I'm like a script designer. I have to get to a bunch of other people that are going to build it. But underneath it is this decision game that's going on all the time as part of the larger imitation game. Because let's face it, fundamentally, what I've come to understand for myself is what I call creativity is playing with the things that I love.

I love the concept of information exchange. I love air traffic control, love flying. So I like creatively putting them together and see what works differently. You know, is that consciousness? Well, I happen to believe it is. Sure. I have no idea what myself is at this point. Somebody asked me the other day what their [00:32:00] kid was studying in college.

They said, I don't know yet. And I said, Hey, I'm 63. I still don't know.

Emmy: When I think of a script, a screenplay, I think of a film. When I think of a film, I think of, you know, drama and makes me think of tragedy. So if I think of Greek tragedy, they sort of teach you early on that Greek tragedy. One of the key functions of it is to provide catharsis.

So this idea that I'm in the amphitheater, I'm seeing this awful stuff happen to Oedipus, all of a sudden, the day to day of my life, and all of a sudden, not only are those problems edged out by the drama that's taking a place on stage, but through the resolution of that drama, I feel relief somehow from the problems of my daily life.

So how does that

Mike: function? I'd roll back to the sports analogy [00:33:00] again. Let's just. Say that a percentage of some religion is crowd control. I don't want to offend overly. Well, art art is the same way, right? It's a form of art, especially in certain periods, especially, you know, Michelangelo and Da Vinci at their best were still governed and what they could create, you know, to the point where, you know, if you go to the Sistine Chapel, the brain stems there.

Right. Two neurophysicists, brain surgeons found is like, Whoa, damn. So there's always this embedded, you know, nature to things, right? And I think it's the same way with art. When we watch a movie or even a great song, you know, that song has a purpose and intent. Consciousness, maybe, right? I mean, anybody that's seen like little Amira Winningham the first time she sang opera.

Holland's Got Talent has to believe in channeling to some degree. You know, if you follow Jung and Campbell and this global consciousness and even the Christ and others, can we tap into it, [00:34:00] right? That type of thing. So these continuums, I don't, I don't know how much they exist outside of our minds because it's like mathematics itself.

What came first, mathematics or mathematics, right? Was it our view or was it just the natural order expressing itself? And we just continue to get better glimpses of it. So I think that's important to recognize in the how, because let's face it, how we, we don't know. Right. We, we, we don't know how that capacity forms.

We don't know that at the, how this at the cellular level, which Mausbauer showed with this effect of like 1958, how does it recoil this? How does a cell communicate with another cell with such power with no recoil on either end? Well, we know that it's lattices much like minerals that came from the earth, right?

That started all of this shit, right? Even before mushrooms, I guess I, and I'm no expert there. But it's all about the lattices. It's all about these exchanges of information. So, you know, the how I think is really at its core consciousness is about information exchange in order to [00:35:00] creatively survive and then to share it.

But it reminds me of a story about sheep. You know, I guess it's an old lore where, where somewhere in Scotland or somewhere and they have these moats in place and the sheep At some point on a weekday, Tuesday or something, one of them decided to lay down and roll over it. It kept them from moving over the smoke for hundreds, if not thousand years, right?

And then all across Scotland or wherever it was, the other sheep were starting to do the same thing at the same time. So it just starts to me really getting to the real question of the how, isn't so much how it works, but how does it communicate? Specifically, like with us humans. You know, if I have the consciousness of evil or if I have the consciousness of good, how do I convey that to others in ways that may not be physical, but they may be metaphysical?

Well, we do that allegedly through religion and other ways, you know, body, mind, spirit. But if we, again, back to mirror, if we, to wrap all it up for how is [00:36:00] if we recognize that we are of the earth and not on it, then we can really get at the how, otherwise we've got a kind of a dual view of something that shouldn't have that view.

We're of this place. I don't know how long it took us to get here. It looks like around a billion years in this form. So does that kind of summarize the how, or I guess how I would say be

Emmy: humble. Yeah. So. What this and, and I have to warn the listeners that this is a topic that I'm just barely scratching the surface on, but when you talked about communication and you talk about information, this starts to get me pondering quantum physics.

The notion of the conscious observer and the notion of superpositions comes to that question of where does it exist? Where does consciousness exist? And we have that word position a superposition. Is that where consciousness

Mike: exists again? Humbly? [00:37:00] I think if I were to stick with the narrative for the artists out here with along with me and the scientists.

I guess it was Turing, what was said about Turing is that he was capable of not only holding two sides of the argument, but all three. And what he did is he looked at life and said, how does all of life reason? And he showed us, right? And then post came along and said, no, but computers can't really do that.

You know, reading thing. We'll just have humans do it. We called them post machines, right? So if we look at it as part of a, an analogy back to narrative, because hopefully we're interested in this technology and, you know, art. integration, but not after, before, if that makes sense. It's like AI. We said, Oh, in the beginnings of AI, we can just look at the human brain as a machine and then we'll recreate it.

We'll have really interesting stuff. Well, yeah. If you were to ask me in the simplest way, like back to the Turing analogy, if I could try to look at this in that way, I'd say, well, it lives in the quantum world, but expresses itself every [00:38:00] second of every minute of every day in the physical. This very conversation that we're having in all of our lives, every second of every minute of day is an expression of consciousness.

So it's a tough question to kind of break up. It's sure it exists at the quantum level. And again, from a entrepreneurial perspective, how do I deliver a method? So like a screenplay that allows models of diverse nature and diverse capabilities, communicating better with each other during bad conditions like firestorms and other things.

These issues are all relevant because we have to figure out the information exchange and then do it as quickly and as efficiently as possible. So the question then becomes, in my mind, it's one element of force, so back to the screener narrative, if act one is consciousness, act two in my mind is entanglement on the quantum side.

Act three in the physical world, in my mind, is the execution of an intelligence. And then act four of the story is evolution. How [00:39:00] does this whole circular process feed back into consciousness? You know, because we, I think we mentioned earlier, at least we talked about it, that consciousness then becomes the mused and the mused.

Right. Cause it has to inform itself. And it was part of the discussion I think we had was at some level, going back to our original discussion. So it's really important. Even when we're sitting here talking about, we have to go back and say, okay, did our why and our, our when and our how meet the definition?

And I think if we reviewed, I think it did, but at this stage, does it meet the definition? You know, this question that we're trying to ask. You know, where does it exist again? I would state that it's everywhere. The space for exploration isn't clear, though. Again, if we have consciousness as act one and entanglement is act two and then act three is some physical intelligence like us talking over this phone.

It's still a full quantum experience going on the whole time. We've been talking, which we do not understand, [00:40:00] right?

Emmy: So we have this, this four act structure, right? Of consciousness entanglement. Intelligence and evolution, and you mentioned, I believe this conversation right now as an expression of the, you know, humbly, as you said, process of intelligence

Mike: is an expression of intelligence.

So the consciousness of whatever, however long that consciousness last from 1 2nd in a fit of anger to a whole lifetime and fit of alleviating suffering, because that's a fit to. Well, that's not really relevant to consciousness, right? It's just, it's a capacity. It's just going to express itself, whatever avenue it's given, right?

It doesn't mean it's always good or bad either. That's for the intelligence in the physical world at the quantum level. It's just, you know, they do this dance because entanglement then can be expressed into the real world, right? Networking. I can, I can start to explain in the physical world. So let me, let me take a second here because I think it's important.

We, we, we take for granted [00:41:00] what we're doing right now. Right? You and I are communicating and we are, what, 3400 miles apart, right? We've never physically met. Yeah, we're having this great conversation in my mind for me personally, and hopefully for you and hopefully for the rest of us. But it's the greatest expression of quantum mechanics we know.

And here's why right in the quantum world, it says that that a thing can exist in two places at the same time and that the particle wave, you know, really aren't separate, blah, blah, blah. Okay, but we're doing that in the physical world. A thing. My voice, a thing. Your voice is existing in two places at the exact same time.

That's pretty awe inspiring to me. Now, my question becomes is recoilless. Well, to the degree that each human is listening, it's called latency, right? Most systems, but it's really, you know, recoilless nature because It has to be something that looks beyond philosophy, theology, and science, but my point is still the same.

So back to the original point about where, and then back to the definition, [00:42:00] it all has to be kind of, at this point, self similar, but again, in humble, full regard to the heroes examining things a hundred years ago that are, should still leave the rest of us just going, what the hell? So the quantum world and the physical world, they're not as.

This gets back to, I think, a discussion that we may have had just on, you know, just chatting was this whole explanatory gap. There's an explanatory gap in the philosophy of consciousness. Well, there's an explanatory gap in, in physics

Emmy: too. That leads us into very well into this because you mentioned art and we have this question about who possesses it.

Mike: Everyone, right?

Emmy: That's what I was suspecting. You might say, yes, you know, everything and everyone. Again,

Mike: it goes back to to mirror. Are we of the earth or on the earth? If we're of the on the earth type, then it's us. If we're the of the earth type, then it's everything. Yes.

Emmy: And then, but also if consciousness at its core is a [00:43:00] capacity that everything and everyone has, yes.

What or who, and I'm most interested in who, because it's, it's more tangible and concrete for our

Mike: listeners. Well, we're at that stage of the analytic, right? Because from my perspective, it's important to recognize that the what, why, when, how, where, who isn't a mixer match in my mind. And in the machine that I'm designing is mine because they're not mix and match.

They have very specific roles and and Kipling meant them as an algorithm. I believe that fully, you know, you look at it a six stage algorithm. Yeah, but I can do things with that. I can make it three stages. I can do all kinds of math. Math. I don't have to do the mathematics. I found the math that makes it all work together, right?

Because I have my heart, and let me say this now from a who perspective, as we get to this stage, maybe it's important to say who you are, just a little bio for our audience, and who I am. And then we can get into this who of consciousness as we express it. Okay, should I go first

Emmy: or you? You [00:44:00] first. Okay, so my name is Emi.

I'm an artist. I'm a writer, musician, podcast host, obviously. And I am very interested in technology and I'm interested in alleviating human suffering.

Mike: Absolutely. If we were at a Baptist church, I'd yell out Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. You and George Boole. People should recognize that about George Boole, too.

He set it out to do one thing, alleviate suffering. We have all of our logic because of it. Now you go. Uh. Born in Buffalo, New York, joined the Navy, did 23 years, it was... All kinds of things retired, did some contracting work for a while, focused on a bunch of different things, but information systems that scale primarily deep career in aviation for the last since 2014.

I kind of walked away from all of that. I [00:45:00] kind of made a very personal decision deep down that it was just time to go. So I just went on my own. And for the last eight years now, I've just, uh, on a personal dissertation is the best way to put it, to really challenge myself, to technically understand all the things that I went through experience was privileged to do too.

You know, like flying airplanes, but really get into the next level and figure out what I now, you know, come to understand is the purpose of my design is just how do our information models work better together, man, because they're failing us. So the who of me is just back to what you said, the alleviation of suffering and it's 2023 and towns like Lahaina.

Are burning to the ground. Okay, that's one problem that we could solve. But the people dying at that scale is another problem that we should have solved a long time ago. And we've had all of the all of the information. I'm not being hypercritical yet. If anyone wants to dig down and I'm saying anyone at that level, there are realities that just were the same in California and [00:46:00] other places.

So my who is, you know, how do I take what I've learned both from my defense experience and post and not use it to harm anyone, but to help because there are so many, you know, I'll leave this with, you know, is that my personal message to the who out there, there are so many very, very good people that have been ignored by the defense department.

They were the renegades. They were the mavericks. They were the people that were saying, Hey, we shouldn't be doing this. We shouldn't be doing that. And they don't last long, but they're great minds and they're out there find them. So that's my who. So now we're on the who of consciousness, who in a general sense, like, who is it?

Who's at the door? Consciousness.

Emmy: Well, one thing I wanted to respond to, you know, you mentioned wildfires. Something earlier you said was that the, the earth. It's gonna be fine. It's it's us who's in trouble, not the earth, right? So if [00:47:00] consciousness is everything and everywhere, the earth, I think, is doing quite well with it.

It's using its full capacity. To become itself, learn creatively,

Mike: survive well, at some level, you have to say that the earth is an expression of consciousness, right? So its goal is to become the best version of it. I mean, does the earth fit the definition? I mean, that's the best way to test the definition at this stage of the who.

Could I put earth there and say that represents earth? Well, my guess, because the earth does that. I mean, the earth got hit by the moon and took, you know, what was it? Krakatoa hit and a bunch of other stuff. It adapted as a entity. I mean, it's a scale. That's just, I mean, people say, Oh, you're small. Well, you wouldn't want to swim across it.

And

Emmy: so what I, and, and sort of my message to the listeners out there is that according to our definition, every single one of us, Has the capacity [00:48:00] to creatively survive, and I think that, like you said, like these sort of heroes on the outer edges of the defense system, sometimes we don't feel encouraged to express and manifest our own

Mike: consciousness.

Well, and part of it may start with the reason we're having this conversation. Everyone's afraid to talk about what it is because no one really knows what it is. And it's easily assailable with that stature, right? I can, I can attack someone from 10 different angles if I'm an academic on consciousness by quoting, quoting Chalmer and Locke and, you know, Kant and any number of philosophers.

And I'm not degrading any of that work, but. I'm interested in the container for all those boxes. That is practical. That's my only, only thing that drives me insane because again, it bends my heart to watch what's happening, say in the wildfire domain for one very simple reason, we know as a country, how to do [00:49:00] this, we know how to counter this threat and we're not doing it.

And there's very specific reasons for that, but the good news, you know, stay encouraged and we know how to do it. We need to start hunting these wildfires just the same way that we hunt terrorists, the same way you used to hunt Soviet submarines. We need to start hunting them in real time, all the time.

Right. We, we, we know the signatures, we know it's coming, but we're not. Really doing as much as we can about it. So my consciousness says, could I take what I know we can do against say terrorists, what we know we can do against submarines and Iraqi scud launchers and everything else. And we can apply it at the national scale, the state scale, the local scale to counter this and not all fires before people go off on the.

You know, you got to clean up the forest floors. That's important. No question. You know, as part of it, but we need an overall view of designated areas. With quick immediate response, otherwise people are going to continue to die because our systems that they're again, they're firing our models, [00:50:00] social media against authorize, you know, federal state and local and then others are shooting information to each other.

And they're all collapsing when the stuff goes chaotic. So the who of, you know, what consciousness is, what's the consciousness or. The best case, what's the intent of these machines to keep us safe, right? So we have to come at it from those rather binary, even though I'm advocating this non binary world.

It has to be binary to a machine. What does a machine do like a great screenplay? You know, if you take one of my favorite films, Shawshank Redemption, almost every scene in that movie is about one thing. Hope. And if you can do that with an information service, how they tie together, because somewhere there's a hundred year old, 98 year old sitting in their house thinking it's 1945 and nothing of harm will ever happen to him at that scale because our systems take care of us.

Well, they don't understand the age of Netflix and social media and they die. And that happened an hour north of San Francisco, not two years, three years, four years ago. And it happens all the time. So my question becomes one of consciousness, the who of this whole thing, [00:51:00] what's our capacity, you know, as a nation, because this is our nation fit that, you know, definition, what's our capacity to do all of the things in that definition?

And are we doing the best we can at information exchange? And my professional view after the last, definitely the last 10, 15 years, no, we're not. Not even close. Can we? Back to your question of encouraging. Yes, but it's going to take innovation. It's going to take guts. It's going to take people on the outline ends of it, just saying, you know, enough's enough.

Let's get into any room. Let's get people together and open up the conversations and be humble enough to take at least a punch in the chest. So much of the tech world that I see is pats on the back that are really bullseyes.

Emmy: We have this final question, which is in regards to consciousness. Is this intent?

Inherent to Vita to

Mike: life. And that's the big question. I think I could be wrong. I mean, how does life do what it does? I've always been fascinated by that, right? Like we build airplanes and that's cool. We can't build a hummingbird. You look at that thing and go, [00:52:00] whoa, you know, everything that it does is a complete quantum classical experience every second that it lives and it knows it.

Now, it doesn't know that it knows it, but it knows it. Now, is that consciousness? Well, sure. So I, I guess at this point of the, the discussion about the intent, 'cause let me, lemme go back to the defense space where I, you know, I went into that little church thing about translating or carrying over what we've learned in the defense space and that the good news, the positive news about wildfires is they don't try to hide on you.

So it's an order of magnitude easier problem, but you gotta be hunting them. And that, that gets back to the point. Of intent, from my perspective, does consciousness have an intent? I think it has to, and then I don't know what else to say about it. It's just so overwhelming, right? What happens, like if you really sat down and thought about what's going on at the quantum level and the physical level across every living sentient creature on this planet.

And it's constantly recursive and constantly learning and constantly evolving. So sure, to [00:53:00] keep it relevant to some common cultural things, it's, it's kind of like chat GPT. Is the fact that it's generative, but that's about it, you know what I mean? Like this thing is just, and at its core, back to the point is consciousness.

Back to the question is how's it programmed, you know, the simplest way I can think about it, like, how does it know what it knows? So even when we're at the end of all this discussion, I'm ready to stand up and go, I don't know, but. Much like electricity, I think it's time we tried to take advantage of it in a way that serves us because we really, again, we didn't really understand electricity when we pivoted, you know, based on Boolean logic, primarily away from D.

C. to A. C. and some other things. And the warning, I guess I would put out as we do this, you know, I saw something the other day that said the most dangerous aspect of something of using like a generative pre trained transformer was in the field of computational biology, and that gave me a little bit of a [00:54:00] fear.

Cause that's so true. Do we really want not pre trained, but a generative molecular transformer that's creating life? I don't know. We're fucking with consciousness there, right? We're digging down as far as we can and say, Hey, we can see something here that if given a set of right conditions can expand into something else.

We don't know really what that is, right? Like some would argue that mistake with electricity and the industrial revolution. Do we want to do the same thing in the quantum revolution? The quantum revolution isn't just about building faster computers. It really, in my mind, is about trying to put a computational value.

This gets back to what you were talking about. Defense at all layers. Across the why, what is it we can do with information systems is one thing. Why you do it is something very different, but the same method applies. Any information system that we design, we should ask those same questions. What, why, when, how, where, who, and most importantly, what's [00:55:00] its intent?

And if it doesn't serve us like the current emergency alert system across this country, because if people think that they're safe from information model collapse anywhere, they're not, we have not made a transition from an analog age to a digital age in a way that really keeps us safe. And that's scary in 2023, in my mind, and we're seeing it every day express itself.

In a lot of different ways, when you've got whatever the number was, cops that show up at Uvalde, you're seeing information models collapse. So back to the original question, you know, this capacity to become itself by using information or imitation, that's really one of the way I think we should address maybe the next time or at some point is what is this imitation game because it's so critical to the discussion.[00:56:00]