Voluntary self-sacrifice is the uniting metanarrative.

And that works to unite people psychologically, and it works to unite them socially.

I'll challenge you. I think the meta-native isn't self-sacrifice.

I think it's sacrifice in service of getting to what is most real.

I've been trying to figure out how conscience operates psychologically.

One of the things that might distinguish AI systems from human beings is this vertical dimension.

I think that what drives self-destruction is self-deception. So at the heart of evil is self-destruction.

Why would any system destroy itself? That does in fact have an inevitable collapse, a downward spiral into chaos.

This goes back to the idea of conscience, you know.

So maybe once you get your goal set,

the perceptual systems,

are they going to lay out the landscape for navigation?

Well, that's a very hard question.

Yeah, well, they get harder as they get, as you go up the ladder.

Music as you go up the ladder. Today's conversation is an extension and continuation of a series of conversations I've had,

most particularly I would say with John Verveke, who joins me today, and also with Jonathan Pazio.

And those conversations really center on specifying the foundational principles of iterable society and stable psyche.

That's a decent way of thinking about it.

Or specifying more clearly and understandably the apex towards which systems of value strive.

And that's a very complicated set of problems, and so it takes a lot of conversations to make progress.

But I found I've been able to make a lot of progress with John and Jonathan.

They're also both lecturing, by the way, as well as me, for Peterson Academy.

...