#262 Deepak Chopra: How to Use AI to Expand Human Consciousness

0:00Either we adapt to new technologies or we become extinct. that there's no choice. And like any technology, it has both divine and diabolical applications. AI can't give you the experience, but AI can create a map for you to go your route that you want to. So there's nothing behind consciousness. It's fundamental. It's without cause. It's outside of space-time. It is spaceless. It is timeless. It is infinite. It is beyond imagination. it is incomprehensible. Spiritual awakening is to go beyond all human constructs and know your fundamental identity as what spiritual traditions call the soul or the spirit.

0:46But let's just call it consciousness or awareness without any human construct. Building multi-agent software is hard. Agent to agent and agent to tool communication is still the wild west. How do you achieve accuracy and consistency in non-deterministic agente caps. That's where agency, A-G-N-T-C-Y, comes in. The agency is an open source collective building the internet of agents. And what's the internet of agents? It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other, and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for interagent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows.

1:46Build with other engineers who care about high-quality multi-agent software. Visit agency.org and add your support. That's A-G-N-T-C-Y dot O-R-G. Visit them today to support high quality multi-agent software. Deepak, if you could introduce yourself to listeners. My name is Deepak Chopra. I'm a medical doctor trained as a neuroendocrinologist who got interested in integrative medicine. I have written about 96 books. My newest book is Digital Dharma, How to Use AI for Well-Being and Spiritual Intelligence. I have my own AI, which is called Deepakshopra.ai, which is a health coach and a spiritual coach with me as being the coach.

2:43And it's available in four languages now, English, Hindi, Arabic, and Spanish. And I'm engaged mostly in writing books. I'm licensed to practice medicine in three states and California. I'm an adjunct professor at University of California, San Diego and Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and also University of Central Florida where I teach medical students about integrative medicine. Well, you're one of those guys that are busier than I am and I'm always perplexed at how somebody can do all those things at once and write a book. actually I've got to ask you right away did you use any AI in the writing of the book so far I haven't on digital dharma I wrote 90 % of the book myself and then the 10 % I told readers how to use prompts yeah for that i used the uh you know to give some examples of how to use the prompts yeah um let's start with the ai revolution i mean you you've written a lot about um you know health and and well-being and spiritual well-being a lot of people see artificial intelligence as dehumanizing or replacing human connection and see it as a threat to spiritual well-being as a result.

4:37You've embraced it. Can you talk at all? I mean, we all know that young people in particular are suffering from a digital addiction, and the problems that come with too much exposure to social media, particularly for adolescents. But you've embraced this. Is it because you see it, artificial intelligence, and particularly the generative AI that's been around now for three or four years, as different and and useful or is it simply we we can't fight progress so figure out how to make the most of it craig let's just delve a little bit into human history so about 40 000 years ago humans, homo sapiens, took a different route from all other species in that we started to use language to communicate with each other.

5:53All biological organisms have a language for three things. One is mating calls. The second is danger calls. And the third is food calls, food. So that's how we were along with other species. But then 40 ,000 years ago, plus minus a few decades or centuries, we learned how to communicate the way we are communicating right now in terms of narrative and story. And then over tens of thousands of years, we actually improved our language models in the sense that we created not only narrative language, but language for biology, language for physics, language for mathematics, language for chemistry, language for astronomy, language for philosophy, language for religion, language for spirituality.

6:58So with the current models that we have, we have access to what it says, multiple languages, large language models. And therefore, we have access, any single human being now has access to the entire database and knowledge and even wisdom of all of humanity combined. There's no human being that can come close to it. At the same time, AI is built on algorithms. You know, I like to think of AI as extended human intelligence. And even there, it has selection bias because, after all, it's programmed by human beings. Nevertheless, it's the best instrument we have to tap into the wisdom of the ages and also the health span, longevity So when I wrote my book and also when I created the AI I focused only on health span, longevity, well-being, physical, emotional, spiritual and spiritual intelligence so my AI is not a large language model and what I found is actually young people are very comfortable using it because they don't feel judged and my AI is personal AI it's got my voice, it's got my music and so they feel very much engaged and I agree with you that we are in a very critical time you said generative models have been around for 3-4 years But AI as a large language model has only been around since the year 2012.

8:46So it's not even 20 years. And either we adapt to new technologies or we become extinct. There's no choice. And like any technology, it has both divine and diabolical applications. So you can use AI literally to cause human extinction, if you know how to use it. or you can use AI to create a better world, healthier world, more joyful world, more sustainable world, more just world. That's my dream. So when I started this project, I engaged with Sam Altman and, you know, OpenAI. And I said, is it worth trying to use AI for health, well-being, and reaching a critical mass for well-being and spiritual enlightenment?

9:39And he was totally enthusiastic about the idea. And that's how it came about. And the training, you're fine-tuning a base model. Is that right for Deepak Chopra, not AI? The training is entirely through my team, not through ChatGPT or any of the others. So it's not a large language model. It's a small language model. It doesn't hallucinate, and it's very personal. It gets you and me engaging. Right now, for example, even this conversation will be fed into my AI. to generate new applications. It also has what we call the RAG model, regenerative augmentation generation. So we stay current. Yeah.

10:36You know, I've been talking to, he's Indian actually, the head of the tech practice at Boston Consulting Group for North America. And he has this fascinating idea of doing what you've done, but training the model on all of the religious texts of the world. The original texts, not the commentaries and interpretations and all of that. Have you done anything like that? I have. So, you know, what I do is, by the way, you can get commentaries of the original text on any AI. You know, you can go to perplexity, chat GPT. And I think those are very good, by the way. What the material there on religion, spirituality, philosophy is very good.

11:42But what they don't do is, which I'm attempting to do, is say, okay, you know, if Jesus Christ and the Buddha and I met together and I had the opportunity to ask them questions, how would it go? and at the end of this I'll send you three videos that I just produced through AI three conversations with the Buddha on the nature of reality, enlightenment, etc. But now I'm expanding that I can do that with the Kabbalah I can do that, you know, Judic and Vedic cognition, etc. And that's a very creative way to show the commonality of spiritual experience. How did, you know, if there's one thing in common, two, three things in common, spiritual experience, I'm not talking about dogma or philosophy, but the experience.

12:44There are three things. One is transcendence. The second is the loss of the fear of death. And the third is the emergence of platonic values like truth, goodness, beauty, harmony, love, compassion, joy, equanimity. So I ask myself, how can we maximize that experience for everyone else? AI can't give you the experience, but AI can create a map for you to go your route that you want to. So, you know, there are many maps for me to go from New York to, say, even Boston. I can take a road map. I can take a contour map. I can go by air. I can go by ship, et cetera. I can go by helicopter. So each of us has different routes to the same destination.

13:38but then you look at the comparison in these roots and you realize that all these different traditions ended up in the same destination, although they took different cultural and mythological pathways to it, you know. Yeah, that's interesting, although one thing, probably the only thing I learned in college is that meaning lies in difference, not in similarity. And so what interests me is where those religious traditions would differ or where they would contradict each other. That too can be done, which is, I'm not doing that right now where they contradict each other. I'm saying where do they agree so we can have some, you know, reconciliation and the turbulence of the world, which is all about dogma right now, religion, dogma, and different ways of looking at the same situation.

14:46So if we want to bring more peace, conflict resolution, it's important to focus on the commonalities as well. Yeah. There was a guy at the very early on during AI went through the supervised learning phase. I mean, it's still a big part of AI. But before generative AI, just pattern matching. And there was a lot of enthusiasm among the AI community. It hadn't really penetrated the public consciousness yet. But there was a guy who created a church of AI. I don't know what happened to it. But I saw that. And Yuval Harari is also talking about the church of AI, etc yeah this is evil ultimately yeah it will it's interesting because i mean we're so early days but you have your ai i actually have my ai i haven't put it out to the public yet but eventually we're all going to have a digital twin and And it'll help us explore, for those that want to explore, some of these issues, some of the religious traditions that people follow.

16:10And, I mean, there's already a decline in religiosity or organized religion, at least in industrialized countries. and you can imagine that the day will come when traditional religion is is kind of this archaic artifact but as you said the convergence of all of this uh human uh exploration the spiritual exploration is codified in in uh ai and ai becomes the spiritual leader or the the religion, so to speak, for people. I mean, have you looked into the future and imagined that? Yes, I think we could call it spiritual experience rather than religious dogma, and we can draw the best from all traditions.

17:11But, you know, as we speak to you and a lot of people watching us, I'm sure, there is more interest right now in health span, longevity, prevention of disease, reversal of disease, things like that. And although the information is available on the internet, on through various AIs, what I'm focused on, just as you mentioned, you have your digital twin, I'm now engaging and helping, actually, other physicians create their own digital twins. So I'm working with a physician surgeon in Mount Sinai who's an expert on men's health, another who's an expert on cancer, another who's an expert on mental well-being.

18:03And then we all have these twins, and we create an ecosystem of these digital twins that do grand rounds. You know, like when I was an active physician, when we had difficult patients, difficult means, you know, difficult to treat. It seemed to be almost no one knew what to do with them. Then, you know, once a week we all got together from different specialties and we tried to solve the issue, difficult diagnosis or treatment, etc. And invariably, when you brought together a lot of experts together and you had them give their point of view, somehow a solution emerged. So right now what I'm doing is creating an ecosystem of digital twins that will talk to each other.

18:56So if you say, Craig or somebody, Stephen says, I have diabetes, I'm 44 years old, I've tried this, this medication, it hasn't helped me, and could you help me? So then these digital twins get together and they actually look at your problem in a unique way, in a way that regular AI doesn't do right now. You know, because I have diabetes, I'm dealing with this cancer. The normal AI will not ask you how your marriage is going along. Or are you stressed about your finances? Or do you have a problem with your kids? Or how do you sleep? You know, these are the things that are missing right now in the holistic management of chronic disease.

19:48We now know that only 5 % of chronic disease is fully predictable through gene mutations. The rest, 95%, is what we call epigenetic, influenced by lifestyle. And unless you go deeply into the history of a patient, which a normal doctor doesn't have time to do, and even AI doesn't do, It doesn't ask you about your life, about your social interactions, about your marriage, about your children, about so many things. You know, every day we go through eating, breathing, digestion, metabolism, elimination, sensory experience, emotions, thoughts, desires, memories. So all of that contributes to our well-being.

20:37And I believe that the future of well-being can be very personal, very predictive, very preventable. And along with your participation, we can probably handle more than 95 % of all issues, medical and psychological and mental. That's where it's going to go anyway. So I thought, let me embark on that. You know, I also know I am in the process of putting these digital devices, these, you know, wearables that can correlate your question, your lifestyle with what's happening with your heart rate, your blood pressure, all of that. So we're looking at a very interesting future. Yeah, yeah. The wearables is fascinating.

21:26It hasn't really developed to the degree that it could, but even at the current, you know, being able to track blood oxygen, for example, or heart rate.

21:47Let's talk about the book. uh you talk about for example of uh the art of the prompt i mean there is an art to to working with ai uh and the there are a lot of uh you know prompt lists out there but my experience is you you really need to engage on a daily basis to begin to understand what works and what doesn't work and what's a good response and what's, you know, a weak response. Can you talk about that, about how do you teach the art of the prompt? Can you? Yes. so you know you're very right that it takes you have to engage with it daily to get into how to master the art of the prompt you start with a generic question and then when you get an answer and you're not happy with that you say can you actually um reframe your answer in terms of spirituality or in terms of epigenetics or whatever.

23:07And then you start engaging with it in a conversation. And ultimately, actually, what is so interesting about these generative AIs, you can finally get it to engage with you in a way which is non-confrontational but leads to a creative insight, both for you and you realize that AI doesn't have a fixed mind, you know. The prompts, when you use the prompts in an intelligent way, you actually become much more creative, you know. The other day, an Oscar-winning director called me a few months ago when AI just was coming and there was a strike going on and all of that. And he said, you know, it seems like my chef will be able to write a better screenplay than I do.

24:03And I said, well, not true. He'll be able to write a better recipe than you can. But only you, with your experience, will you know how to use the AI for screenplays better than your chef. He'll know how to use it better than for cooking meals. so developing better cuisine so actually it makes us more creative and it helps us and the more experience we have in our field it enhances our creativity in our imagination yeah so so you know active engagement is important uh the uh in the book you talk about and i have to confess i haven't read the book so i'm reading a summary ai summary uh you can just go to my yeah and ask it any question i'm not getting the book now i did but i hit the paywall which i was a little just disappointed by well let me tell you about the paywall yeah so it costs us three to five cents to answer the questions yeah so what we have is you know up to a certain amount It's free.

25:22And then we have to cover our costs. Yeah. That's where the paywall comes. And now we've created something called SuperTab, so you can run a tab and you pay when you can. You can just say, run me a tab for$5. Right, right. I see. Yeah, I didn't explore. And I saw that the price is minimal. It just, it was... up to a point you have to pay for the service right yeah yeah but uh but you were talking about in the book again uh how ai can help unravel the mysteries of consciousness uh and that's something i wanted to talk to you about i know you've you have this uh quantum explanation or quantum theory of consciousness that's that a lot of physicists and quantum physicists have been critical of I had recently a guy named Stuart Hamroff he's an anesthesiologist oh is that right he's a fascinating guy uh i haven't had stuart penrose on uh partly because i'm not sure i could manage the conversation um but but stuart was wonderful uh talking about the potential of a quantum connection you know through the microtubules and those neurons in the brain between the physical construct of the brain and the immaterial construct of consciousness.

27:15Where do you stand on that? Do you believe, and I was actually asking your digital twin this. I couldn't get a straight answer, to be honest. as to whether or not you believe consciousness is an emergent property of the physical biology or whether there is a separate but related paranormal, non-physical realm in which consciousness exists. yeah I'm just you've certainly thought about all these things so I'm interested so here we are you know those who criticize me for my quantum models actually haven't read or watched my videos on YouTube on these matters they just got dismissive because I used the word quantum and I'm not a quantum physicist I've never claimed never claimed that quantum mechanics is the key to consciousness.

28:25Quantum mechanics is a model that explains experience in consciousness. So when you say, is it an emergent property? The answer is no. Matter is an emergent property. And matter actually doesn't exist. It's a human construct. So when you say matter, you know, let's pick up anything that is material right now. Let me pick up my iPhone. Okay, so this is a piece of matter, right? But how do I know what this is? Not through physics, not through biology. I know it through a direct experience, which is sensation, which is color, which could be sound which could be taste or smell so the way i know any object is through my five senses which in turn are activities in what we call perception and perception is an activity in consciousness so everything that we call matter is actually a human construct for a perceptual activity in consciousness now you say where is this consciousness if it's not emergent where is it and the simplest answer is it's not in space and time and the reason it's not in space and time is it doesn't have a form if you had if your consciousness had a form you'd be able to see it or touch it okay but you can't so it doesn't have a form and doesn't have a border so it's infinite it and it's spaceless and it's timeless and it's outside of space-time.

30:13This is a very mind-boggling idea that people who are watching this program or listening to this conversation, they think this experience is happening in their brain but there is no sound in the brain, there's no color red of the spectacles they're wearing in your brain, there is nothing that you can call experience in your brain. All there is in the brain are what are called neural correlates of consciousness, which means they are the electrochemical activity that correspond to sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. But the brain doesn't have any sensation, image, feeling, or thought. In fact, if you put a knife through the brain, the brain can't experience its own experience.

30:57The brain doesn't have any experience. It's a computer that correlates experiences with electrochemicals. And the electrochemicals are also an experience in consciousness. So there's nothing behind consciousness. It's fundamental. It's without cause. It's outside of space-time. It is spaceless. It is timeless. It is infinite. It is beyond imagination. It is incomprehensible. and everything that we'd call technology or quantum mechanics is a mathematical model to predict the outcomes of experiments, no more, no less. So on a deeper level, I mean, Stuart's a great friend of mine. Sir Roger Pendrose is a Nobel laureate.

31:47What they're saying is also misunderstood. So if I, let's say, take an analogy. The analogy is electricity, okay? And so that electrical field is powering my phone. It's powering my devices. It's powering my light bulb. It's powering my TV set, the microwave oven in my kitchen, and all the devices I have here. now if my device shuts off let's say the light bulb fuses that doesn't do anything to the electricity okay the electricity is there and all the information that electricity is capable of expressing through various devices is also there so your brain is a particular device that consciousness uses to have a human experience and only a human experience what you call the physical world is also a human construct for human experience a bat would not be experiencing right now what you and i are experiencing because it experiences the echo of ultrasound a bird navigates through ultraviolet an insect with a hundred eyes i don't know what it sees so where i'm coming from is consciousness is fundamental and actually there is no physical universe there's no such thing as a physical body or a physical brain or dna or genetic material these are symbols for modes of knowing and experience in consciousness that humans have given names to, just like we give a name to latitude, longitude, greenish mean time, dollar, yen.

33:47These are all human constructs without which, by the way, life would be impossible. If you didn't have latitude, longitude, greenish mean time, you wouldn't be able to take a plane from New York to Botswana. But the fact is, we made it up. The Greenwich Mean Time is not Botswana Mean Time, it's Greenwich Mean Time. Latitude and Longitude are human constructs. Botswana is a name for a particular experience. So is New York a human name for a particular experience. Once we get this, we'll solve the heart problem of consciousness. But nobody is listening because they're all so interested in their models of reality.

34:30and they confuse the models of reality with reality. Reality is incomprehensible. Incomprehensible. You know, if you go on the internet right now and say, what are the 125 open questions in science? The first open question is, what's the universe made of? And the shortest answer is made of nothing. Then the second open question is, what's the biological basis of consciousness? It's the wrong question. There's no biological basis of consciousness. consciousness, biologies and experience in consciousness. How do you know there's a brain? What is it that knows the brain? What is it that knows the body?

35:08What is it that knows emotions? What is it that knows AI? Nobody's asking it. You know, we experience the world. What we call the world is our five senses. But there's something that knows the five senses, the mind. And there's something that knows the mind is consciousness. Now, this is my take on it. And, you know, all those critics talking about, you know, he's talking nonsense, quantum mechanics, etc. I'm not saying quantum mechanics can explain consciousness. What I'm saying is nothing can explain consciousness because it is outside of space time. This conversation you and I are having is being computed outside of space time.

35:51Now, that's a mind boggling idea and people are not ready to accept it. Although right now, the conversation is emerging in that direction. Simulation. That the world we live in is a simulation. And that is where AI comes in. Because AI will extend. AI is not where it is going to be now. With VR, with XR, with MR, with immersive experiences, you'll be extending the range of your experience to the point where you'll be able to experience the world through the nervous system of a bat or a bird or an insect with a hundred eyes or a dolphin, you know, because technology is actually proving what I've been saying for a while, that the physical world is actually a simulation.

36:44It's a perceptual activity. It's a human construct for sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. So I got it out of my system i'm not creating a new model for consciousness you can create models of consciousness but consciousness is ultimately not computable yeah yeah yeah never be conscious in that sense it doesn't feel hunger or have sexual urge or fear death or have existential problems you can simulate all that but we are only a simulation yeah uh it's an interesting idea i mean the one thing about i mean a couple of things come to mind i i interviewed albert hoffman before his death who albert hoffman the guy who synthesized lsd 25 and i was at his home in uh bern switzerland up on a mountaintop uh and he was uh talking about how how beautiful the world is uh but that it's all exists in your mind that there is no color you know the color is is a is a yeah not a property of the physical world nor is found a property of the physical world nor is texture nor is fragrance nor is, you know, what we call taste.

38:15These are subjective qualia in consciousness and not properties of the physical world. So we navigate something called a physical world, but all the time it's a controlled hallucination. Yeah. And something else I read recently, and I'm slowly getting interested in quantum mechanics. I was listening to somebody talk about the collapse of the wave function, which I won't get into. You can. But there are multiple possible states. And when you, in perception, collapses them to a single state. That's a simple way to describe it. and perception is a snapshot of infinite possibilities that's right but what the explanation i heard which really made sense to me is that we are surrounded by radio waves uh we we we don't perceive them but if you have a receiver and you tune it you can tune it to one frequency and you can hear that frequency you don't hear all the other frequencies and that the the the wave function is like that there's that that the there there are all these possible worlds we're tuned to one possible world right so those who are watching us are tuned into this there are other people watching you know what white lotus or something yeah and we that's not part of our reality at the moment yeah yeah it's a fascinating idea however uh when you were saying that that you know the physical world is a manifestation of our perception you held up the iphone or ai we're able to manipulate something outside of ourselves the physical world to create technology that that that can give an experience that shared across all humanity so there is there is something outside of our perception that we're able to physically manipulate uh you know whatever you want to call that it's not only consciousness we have the ability to manipulate the simulation through our technology.

40:56And what we call the laws of nature are the regularities of experience in consciousness. That's all they are. So we objectify the regularities of experience as the laws of nature. The sun rises every day, it closes every day, and based on where we are, our premise is that the Earth is spinning on its axis, is going around the sun but that's only from this location okay so all these things are very relative and they are actually useful to codify into constructs and those constructs are what we call the laws of nature but we actually codify them okay just like we codified money i mean there was no such thing and yet it runs the world right now okay the money is a human concept nation states are a human concept colonialism is a human concept everything that you can give a name to is a concept because otherwise that's what a name is it's a concept so ultimately everything is a concept, but the source of all these concepts is what we call pure consciousness.

42:14Now, the quantum model is very interesting because it simulates how the mind works. Before you have a thought, it's in superposition with infinite thoughts. Okay. You can jump from one thought to another thought. I say, think of the Empire State Building. Now think of your mother there's no connection but you move from here to here instantly that's like you know quantum tunneling or quantum leaps and then there's the uncertainty principle you don't know what the next space time event will be only you can predict it with shodder's equation the statistical likelihood same thing with your thoughts if i asked you what's your next thought going to be You have no idea.

43:00Okay, so the mind is modeling the principles of quantum mechanics, but neither the mind nor quantum mechanics is reality. Reality is just pure consciousness. Yeah. You talk about the limitations of AI, that it certainly lacks consciousness for the reasons that you've just given. And it lacks a general, I'm sorry, genuine spiritual wisdom. Are you saying that things like empathy are qualities of this infinite consciousness that we are channeling as individual entities? Empathy is entanglement, similar to quantum entanglement. You know, when you look at a child and you hurt a dog or a cat or whatever, the child winces and cries because it feels viscerally the pain of another.

44:24So it's a natural phenomenon for consciousness. After we get bamboozled by social constructs, we lose that. But, you know, mammals particularly are naturally empathetic, not just human beings. Monkeys and elephants and giraffes and all mammals have empathy for their kind, but even for other species. You can have a relationship with your dog or with your cat, etc. And the cat can also read your moods and knows how to, or the dog. I mean, there's lots of evidence of that. So empathy is a property of consciousness. So is compassion. So is love. So is joy. So is kindness. These are evolutionary qualities of consciousness.