#1211 - Dr. Ben Goertzel

Joe Rogan (0:06)

Boom, hello, Ben.

Ben Goertzel (0:08)

Hey there.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

Good to see you, man.

Ben Goertzel (0:10)

Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.

Joe Rogan (0:11)

Thanks for doing this.

Ben Goertzel (0:13)

Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. I've been looking at some of your shows in the last few days, just to get a sense of how you're thinking about AI and crypto and the various other things I'm involved in, it's been interesting.

Joe Rogan (0:28)

Well, I've been following you as well. I've been paying attention to a lot of your lectures and talks and different things you've done over the last couple of days as well, getting ready for this.

It's, AI is either people are really excited about it or they're really terrified of it. Those are the sort of, it seems to be the two responses. Either people have this dismal view of these robots taking over the world or they think it's going to be some amazing sort of symbiotic relationship that we have with these things that's gonna evolve human beings past the monkey stage that we're at right now.

Ben Goertzel (1:00)

Yeah, and I tend to be on the latter more positive side of this dichotomy. But I think one thing that has struck me in recent years is many people are now mentally confronting all the issues regarding AI for the first time. And I've been working on AI for three decades, and I first started thinking about AI when I was a little kid in the early, late 60s and early 70s, when I saw AIs and robots on the original Star Trek. So I guess I've had a lot of cycles to process the positives and negatives of it, whereas now, suddenly, most of the world is thinking through all this for the first time. And when you first wrap your brain around the idea that there may be creatures 10,000 or a million times smarter than human beings, at first, this is a bit of a shocker, right? And then, I mean, it takes a while to internalize this into your worldview.

Joe Rogan (2:02)

Well, it's that there's also, I think, there's a problem with the term artificial intelligence because it's intelligent, it's there, it's a real thing.

It's not artificial, it's not like a fake diamond or a fake Ferrari, it's a real thing. And it's very-

Ben Goertzel (2:20)

It's not a great term.

There's been many attempts to replace it with synthetic intelligence, for example, but for better or worse, AI is there. It's part of the popular imagination. It seems that it's an imperfect word, but it's not going away.

Joe Rogan (2:37)

Well, my question is, are we married to this idea of intelligence and of life being biological, being carbon-based tissue and cells and blood, or insects or mammals or fish? Are we married to that too much? Do you think that it's entirely possible that what human beings are doing and what people that are at the tip of AI right now that are really pushing the technology, what they're doing is really creating a new life form, that it's going to be a new thing, that just the same way we recognize wasps and buffaloes and artificial intelligence is just going to be a life form that emerges from the creativity and ingenuity of human beings?

Ben Goertzel (3:20)

Well, indeed, so I mean, I've long been an advocate of a philosophy I think of as patternism. Like it's the pattern of organization that appears to be the critical thing, and the individual cells and going down further, like the molecules and particles in our body are turning over all the time. So it's not the specific combination of elementary particles, which makes me who I am or makes you who you are. It's a pattern by which they're organized and the patterns by which they change over time. So I mean, if we can create digital systems or quantum computers or femto computers or whatever it is, manifesting the patterns of organization that constitute intelligence, I mean, then there you are.

There is intelligence, right? So that's not to say that, you know, consciousness and experience is just about patterns of organization. There may be more dimensions to it, but when you look at what constitutes intelligence, thinking, cognition, problem-solving, you know, it's the pattern of organization, not the specific material as far as we can tell. So we can see no reason based on all the science that we know so far that you couldn't make an intelligence system out of some other form of matter rather than the specific types of atoms and molecules that make up human beings. And it seems that we're well on the way to being able to do so.