A Quantum Leap into AI and Consciousness | Brian Roemmele - Part 1

0:00Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the quality of people. you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

0:42And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great big candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altachirk. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

1:26I don't even know what to say. This is just like the smartest podcast episode I've ever listened to. and I was doing it. But all credit goes to my guest, Brian Rommel, expert on, he's an expert on everything. But we talk consciousness, intelligence, quantum mechanics, AI, outrage, the fact that everyone is outraged and what the cure for that might be.

1:59This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show.

2:33you tweeted that were just, it was like you searched the world for incredibly interesting things that I'd never seen before. They were interesting intellectually and visually. And then you would tweet them. Like, what's an example? Do you remember? Oh my gosh. I would, I would go into a coronary fit right now trying to remember some of them. You know, I gotta, I gotta say, well, first off, James, thank you. Such an honor to be here. Deep fan of your work. My pleasure. Basically all your books. Big subscriber on Paradigm, so thank you for that. And you've made me some money in stocks, so I appreciate that.

3:12Excellent. So there's a method to my madness. I saw Twitter because I had come off of Quora. I'd been one of Quora's top writers for a couple of years, and I was a bit of a Twitter snob. I thought that it was hot takes. It was drive-by commenting. And there was very little commitment intellectually to what people were saying. And that's fine. You know, I'm not judging that. I just didn't want to participate. So I started creating what I feel ultimately now is a sort of human Rorschach test across social media. I just throw out ideas and concepts that are intriguing and they're designed to make you think.

3:55I think what I really try to do most of the time is I'm trying to elicit thought. What do you see here? And what's your first reaction? And was your first reaction right? What's your second reaction? And I just kind of went with it. So yeah, there would be all sorts of things. I really like showing animal intelligence because I've always been involved in machine intelligence. And I think if we don't understand animal intelligence to some degree, even primates, right? How are we going to really understand machine intelligence and what is intelligence and things of that nature? So Twitter kind of became an open market of my ideas.

4:37And yeah, I get very eclectic at times. Yeah. Like what were some of the, I remember some of the animal ones, like what were some things that intrigued you on animal intelligence? Yeah. Intrigued you so much that you tweeted about it? Oh, okay. So one of the ones that I thought was really quite profound, it's sort of my concept of what I call the Kim Peek proof. Kim Peek was Rain Man in the Dustin Hoffman movie. Oh, that was based on a real person? Absolutely. Kim Peek, I actually got to meet him briefly, incredibly beautiful individual. And what we learned about Kim Peek is the limits of human capability mentally.

5:15He actually was able to recite to you exactly what the weather was like the day you were born, what day of the week it was, all sorts of trivial things about who was the best baseball player at that particular moment in time, right? What game was being played that day? I mean, just incredible things. So my concept about any scientific theory is that if you cannot account for the outlier in the theory. You really don't have a theory. You have sort of a postulation. What do you mean? I don't understand. So let's say, what's an example of scientific theory where there's an outlier, like the theory of relativity?

5:59All right. Well, let's keep it with Kim for a second, right? So how do you explain? So Kim had encephalitis, right? The swelling of the brain, which essentially broke down his corpus callosum that sort of piece that connects your right and left hemisphere. It's not widely known exactly why he developed what is a savantism, right? A sort of a savantic syndrome. Kim, in one of the clips that I put up there, and it wasn't really about Kim. It was about primates. It was about this particular primate research center in Japan that was showing that a chimpanzee can be trained to remember a flash of 45 numbers on a grid of about 100 grid and remember the sequence after it flashes on.

6:48Now, humans can't do that. It's like, how did that primate know how to do that? Why? How fast was the flash? How many seconds were you allowed to look at it? Like half a second, maybe a second at maximum. Wow. And some of these guys and gals were trained and some did better than others. but the fact that one was able to do it, 100 out of 100 monkeys, right? The fact that one was able to do it fascinated the heck out of me. So I started studying the brain more and I said, okay, what did humans give up that chimpanzees had that we don't have? Well, it turns out it's Broca and Warnicke or the phonological loop.

7:27So we gave up short-term memory to be able to do what we're doing right now is having a conversation. So I started really diving into, and again, this is all based on computer science ultimately, but I started diving in. What is human creativity and human memory? Well, you have the right hemisphere technically. And again, some of this is symbolic talk. I'm not trying to talk in the sense of where neurobiology and neuropsychology is at this moment. But you have the right hemisphere, which is your creative thought process. and let's call that a bunch of nebulous clouds that you have to assemble to the left hemisphere, which is a serial chain of thought that is only so long.

8:11Once you lose that chain of thought, the idea sort of dissipates and you get frustrated. And I see this with creative people, songwriters, book writers, people like yourself that are just trying to come up with that idea and it just dissipates. Where did it come from? Where did it go? So it came from potentially the right hemisphere. And then the process of mechanicalizing it. Now, mechanicalizing it to speech is easier because it flows out of us. We're not translating the inner monologue, that voice we hear when we read or when we type sometimes. But when we have to mechanicalize it to a keyboard or writing it on a piece of paper, there's a mechanical slowdown in that process.

8:57So the flow is broken. And sometimes ideas and thoughts dissipate. So we went from 10 fingers to thumb clawing on a glass screen. And so what happens when you do that? Well, the flow of ideas slows down significantly. So much so that I believe that it is one of the underlying premises for hostility that we see in social media. I think the inability to emote correctly by using all of your functionality, your micro movements in your face, my hand movements, all of this frustrates people. They can't communicate correctly because we're communicating through an archival system, right? So think about this, James.

9:42Typing was designed for archival purposes more than it was for communication purposes. Right. And by archival, you mean I would type something so I could store it so other people could later create it. And right now we're kind of archiving in real time to each other. We're like archiving directly to each other. And the problem is about 80 % of what humans use to communicate, being in a physical presence or doing what we're doing with the video here. Video definitely helps, but it doesn't complete everything because there's nuances. that you pick up when you're physically present with somebody that you don't get otherwise.

10:21And I think those nuances are totally gone when we're throwing emojis at each other. Because emojis are completely open to interpretation. There's at least two interpretations to them. One is the direct and one is the ironic, funny version of that emoji. And none of it is really useful. So we've kind of de-evolved in our communication. So that gets back to the monkey scenario, right? Okay. And we'll kind of go back to Kim Peek now. So if the brain, in fact, can store as much information that if our listeners remember Rain Man, Kim Peek was better than Dustin Hoffman's presentation of Rain Man.

11:01He was absolutely phenomenal. And his social skills was actually quite a few degrees higher. He did have some of the situations of communication that savant's had. So what we have now is we have an outlier. We have somebody that can hold almost everything they've ever seen and heard. So it's in the brain. And that was a question I've had ever since I was a child, is how much of the brain is really stored? And how does it stay there? And where is the brain? Because we know holographically, we can't pull out a single memory out of somebody's brain. We wish we could, right? You can't laser cut, let's take that little unpleasant memory out of your brain.

11:45It's holographically stored. In fact, I later found out through Candice Peart's work, Molecules of Emotion, is that your memories are stored throughout your body through a neuropeptide memory system, a chemical memory system. And that's why when we get heartbroken, right? Think about that hurt, that love that just tore you apart. Do you feel it here? You probably feel it here or your gut. Right. So your heart. Yeah. Right. And there's more neurochemicals or more serotonin in the gut than in the brain. Exactly. And that's evolutionarily wise. That was for us to remember this food good, this food bad.

12:25Right. Because we had to have a way. Humans are born naked. Right. We don't, we have to be taught for the first eight years how to get through this world or we're going to die, right? That's just the realities of it. And our brain is as big as it's going to get, you know, beyond killing moms to a high degree, right? Essentially, the containment of the human skull is based upon how wide the hips can be displaced on a female before it's impossible for them to walk. I mean, that's really the bottom line. And yet there's trillions of possible bites that could be stored in the brain, right? Because every possible way is to connect the neurons in your brain and in your body could be another memory, another thought, another way of awakening a memory.

13:13Exactly. So if you're dealing with somebody like for a stroke patient or somebody with dementia or Alzheimer's, you can usually bring something more of a higher response if you put something that they smell that brings back a memory. I like to use the apple pie concept. go back and think about the first time you've ever smelled apple pie. Hopefully your mom baked or your caregiver baked. And the first time it was in front of you, hot apple pie baked. What does that sound like? And already a lot of things start happening. Most of us, the like apple pie starts salivating. All right, so what's going on there?

13:49It's setting off a whole series of memory. Now, if you've never tasted apple pie or anything that might feel like that, you're not gonna have that response. So the memory is encoded all over the place. And to me, that's fascinating because we're trying to create artificial intelligence, but we're not fully understanding human intelligence. We're not understanding human consciousness because really it's not intelligence as much as consciousness that we really need to kind of get to the bottom of. What is consciousness? Where is it? Where does it come from? Where does it go? Tell me more about like, How is Kin Peak the outlier of a theory?

14:30So it's a great question, James. So basically, if you essentially say that the human brain can only hold so much memory and then it stops, or you don't remember everything that has ever been done to you because you can't recall it, I call bunk on that. I believe that the human sense organs record basically everything. Now, I'm a really big fan of Tor Norstander's The User Illusion. And a lot of my work is based upon not just his body of work. I tell everybody to read this book. It will absolutely, profoundly change you on everything you think. Say the book again. Tour Norstanders, The User Illusion.

15:19So James, I was such a nerd. I followed this guy during his book tour. I went to a couple of his signings because I knew some of the work by Lashley and others that were trying to understand where consciousness was in the brain. And that came from a whole series of weird coincidences in my life growing up near Princeton and spending a lot of time at Princeton University as a child. Where did you grow up near Princeton? Well, I was born in Newark. I had my young life in Carteret, the armpit of New Jersey. And then I wound up in Flemington. And then from Flemington, I spent a lot of time in Princeton.

15:59I had friends whose parents worked at the university, the Institute of Advanced Study, David Sarnoff Research Center, and Bell Laboratories. So, you know, I'm talking about 60s and 70s because I'm an old man. And that was the prime time of Bell Laboratories. Bell Laboratories had so many incredible thinkers who were paid just to think. Walk around barefoot, in their pajamas way before it was cool, no shaving for two or three weeks. You would essentially think they're homeless and nobody knew what they were thinking about, but they were paid to be there. Same thing with the - That's funny, people think I'm homeless even though I try not to look like I'm homeless.

16:40Don't change, man. Yeah, this is not my normal look either. But so anyway, in that environment, I started to really feel that we need to understand consciousness at a very young age. And I was a rationalist. I thought I was going to be a physicist growing up. That's why I loved Princeton so much. And mostly quantum physics is where I wanted to be. But also planetary science had a lot of influence by Carl Sagan, obviously. and people of that epoch. But I started realizing that quantum physics didn't give us answers. It gave us actually a lot more questions. And the thing that really made me very angry about quantum physics is the observer aspect of it.

17:27I thought that that had to be the most astrological explanation of reality that could ever happen. So I rejected it. So I got involved in business and computers and stuff like that, because I can control the rationality within computer language. That was way irrational. But it did not stop me from continuing my curiosity. So quantum physics led me into trying to understand the brain and to understand the observer. Why the heck does an observation change a scientific test? Now, some people will say, well, it's not really like that, Brian. and you don't understand. It is. Ultimately, it is. Whether it's photons or something, the test is changing via the observation.

18:14And then entanglement was the next thing that completely freaked me out. How could matter be entangled? And how could that matter communicate across, apparently, especially in the 70s, apparently across light years of distance instantly? How is that possible? Do we have a correct theory to explain that? No, we don't. We didn't then and we don't now. So that puts you to the edge. If you are an empirical scientist, you got to go to the edge and look over and say, guys, gals, we don't really have a theory, really. We have the best possible prediction. And that's kind of the thing.

19:07Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as even an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the people you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues, who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

19:50And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs new AI Assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash altature. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

20:28if you think about it we don't really have a theory about anything exactly you know and you know you think of like stephen hawking's the theory of everything you know a brief history of everything we don't really know anything because so quantum mechanics are the basic building blocks of all physics all reality and we just don't understand how it works there's i mean there are particles even called strange quirks because it's just so strange we just don't even know a clue of how it works. And then the other big important thing, consciousness, which you brought up, we don't have a real theory of that.

20:59We have no better understanding of that than we had 5 ,000 years ago. For all we know, they had a better understanding 5 ,000 years ago than we have now. And so now we're trying to break it down using science that I'm sure is primitive compared to what's actually needed to understand these things. And we're trying to make some sense of it. Theoreticians have their ideas and experimentalists have their ideas, but none of it really works. We haven't concluded anything. Yes, we could make, the movie this weekend was Oppenheimer, we can make a nuclear bomb, we can make a rocket ship, we can make a computer, but these are all mechanical things.

21:37You put these tools together and it works according to Newton's laws of physics. But we're decades away probably from real quantum computing. And again, we're probably, I'd like your opinion on this, we're probably decades away from any real intelligence and artificial intelligence. Right now, it's like these massive statistical models, but we don't have, like you were beginning to allude to with the brain being different from AI. Exactly, James. Brilliant. You know, so let's look at it from a perspective of, you know, scientific explanation from a chemical and electronic and electrical standpoint within the brain.

22:18We are not even sure what particular chemicals, again, we can go to the very basics. A lot of people believe that the science of chemistry is fully understood. And certainly it must be fully understood within a human body. But you change just a couple of different chemicals in somebody, they're gonna think dramatically different. And we're seeing it play out as a real-time experiment in our environment. We're throwing chemicals out there. We don't know what the neurotropic effects are on people. We do know that there are neurotropic effects, but we don't know what the grand neurotropic effects are until we come back 200 or 300 years and say, those crazy people, I can't believe they did that.

23:03And that's coming. We live long enough, and you and I be like 400 or 500 years, I don't know. We're gonna look back and say, oh yeah, that was a big debate, but it was a debate about politics and philosophy had nothing to do with chemicals. And that's kind of the problem is chemicals divine your feeling and your construct of the world, right? So if you're chemically off just a little bit, your view of the world is dramatically changed. It's a very, very fine tuning. And ancients understood the pineal gland as being vitally important, so important that the pine cone became such a big thing all the way to Sumerian times, all the way to the Pope's staff.

23:50There's a pine cone under Jesus's feet, all the way down to Sumerians. You know, they're holding pine cones. The pine cone represents the pineal gland. That's symbolism. How do they even know about that gland in Sumerian? Unfortunately, when you brutally break somebody's brain open, the pineal gland looks like a pine cone, almost precisely. Yeah, yeah. And it's not a guess. This is not us philosophizing. They actually pointed out. The Egyptians actually talked about the seat of consciousness, essentially, within the pine cone or the pineal gland. Why do they think that? Why did they have a sense that that was the seed of consciousness?

24:37Well, they poked things into it through the eye sockets while people were alive. They cut open skulls. South America, we can see a lot of people that have had their skulls cut open and lived in ancient times. And they believe that. We don't know why. We know that maybe from the very basic, we can speculate that proto-doctors were experimenting with people's brains. I don't know how they got people to agree with it. Hey, buddy, let me cut open, you know. Well, they could have been tortured or slaves or whatever. Yeah, it could have been. But why they fixated on that gland is always interesting.

25:21And we can go to certainly Indus Valley, India, and things of that. The Bende is a representation of the third eye. We can go to parts of Asia. Certainly the Greeks talked about it. All of this stuff plays out to the pineal gland. We don't fully understand it. Well, all right, we call it a third eye. Here's what's interesting. There's retina tissue within the pineal gland. Now, we only found that out about 100 years ago, that there's full-on retinal tissue in the pineal gland. So hold it. What's going on? Thousands of years ago, they called it a third eye, but it is in fact an eye embedded essentially within the center of your brain.

26:08And it's not even a part of your brain. It's more of a part of your organ. What does that mean, though, that there's retinal tissue? Does it transmit information to the eyes? No. So that we see things with it? No, it is an eye in and of itself. What's it looking at? Photochromatic discharges of light within the fluid of the pineal gland is a best guess I can give you. Photochromatic and pressure chromatic type of crystalline structures that are in the fluid within. But what does that mean? I don't know. For an evolutionary reason, like why do we need to look at that? No idea other than to look at ancient history.

26:50This is what fascinates me about the frontier of science. James, why are we looking into that more?

27:02What does it represent? So if you were to go to most brain researchers to say the pineal gland is sort of a vestigial organ. When we were low-end reptiles, it may have served some function about mediating your day-night cycle. We do know melatonin is released when the pineal gland is entering into a sort of darker, maybe twilight type of stage. and that people with certain melatonin imbalances tend to have a problem with the pineal gland calcification, things of that level. I don't really talk about this much because it can really go down a deep rabbit hole because we're looking at ancient principles and they're using the crude language of their epoch.