Blaise Agüera y Arcas: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, interesting. Interesting. I mean, how does this affect I mean, we haven't really spoken about agency yet. Presumably, you could have a strong agent, which is just doing something quite trivial. But when we have this collective intelligence and this information synchrony between agents, how does that affect your ideas of, you know, purposeful behavior? I sometimes use the example of rowing to to describe what's happening when purposes merge into a single purpose and and consciousnesses, you know, merge into a single consciousness. There's there's this term that I learned from Dan Brown's book, The Boys in the Boat, swing, which is when when the the 6 horsemen, or 8 horsemen, sorry, you know, all achieve this kind of state where they're in perfect sync with each other and and, you know, you know it when you when you when you experience it, the the boat acquires a soul as it were, you know, you all feel like you're like you're you're pulling as 1 and boats with that property go a lot faster than than boats where people haven't quite achieved that sync. That that I think is kind of what happens when, you know, when we we think of ourselves as being a self, despite the fact that our brain actually consists of a lot of parts, you know, like the same way that that as the oarsman, that, you know, in some sense began with their own purposes and their own self models and their own models of the other parts of the brain. But, you know, this process of of subjective symbiogenesis, I guess you could call it, where where all of those wills become 1 and all of those selves become oneself. In hiring for example, you you want folks with high agency, but you also want alignment, which is the potential for this kind of synchrony. And we often have it. We do a thought experiment on MLST that you can look at a boat or a flotilla of boats and you're trying to draw a boundary. And the boundary for the agent should be the minimal description. It should be, you know, where where is most of the agency? Where is most of the planning and future modeling happening? And usually, it's it's the pilot. It's it's it's the driver of of the boat. But you're talking about the situation where there is such a synchrony and alignment between the agencies that almost like the the best intentional stance, if you like, is to draw a boundary around all of them.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.