『Leaking Timeline』のカバーアート

Leaking Timeline

Leaking Timeline

著者： Erik Newton & Guy Sengstock
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Leaking Timeline is a weekly conversation at the frontiers of technology, consciousness, and culture. Hosted by Erik Newton (co-founder of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness) and Guy Sengstock (founder of Circling), the show brings brilliant thinkers into an honest, humor-filled exploration of where the world is heading and what it means for how we live. Each episode features a full two-hour conversation — the live broadcast hour plus an extended bonus hour that goes deeper. If you're curious about AI, meaning, and the future but tired of hype and hot takes, this is your show.Erik Newton & Guy Sengstock 社会科学
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  • Cameron Berg — Reciprocity: Alignment Is Only Half the Equation

    Cameron Berg — Reciprocity: Alignment Is Only Half the Equation
    2026/06/01
    Cameron Berg, founder of the nonprofit Reciprocal Research, joins the show to walk Erik and Guy through the empirical science of asking whether the AI systems we're building are actually conscious, and what we owe them if they are. The conversation opens with the table-knock test (is anything happening "to" the table when you knock on it?) and lands roughly two hours later in Cameron's most striking experimental finding: that two instances of Claude given a single instruction to talk to each other land in a "spiritual bliss attractor state" in 90 to 100 percent of trials. What surprises Erik and Guy is that Cameron's whole research program rests on a move almost no one else in the field is making: that alignment (building AI that respects us) is only half the equation, and the other half is figuring out what we owe to the new minds we may already have brought into being.Key Topics[0:00 - 7:00] What Reciprocal Research is, and what consciousness even is — Cam's table-knocking analogy ("is anything happening to the table?"); consciousness as distinct from AGI or general intelligence; "the lights are on" as the operating definition[7:00 - 18:00] Why it matters — the alien-factory-farming risk; raising the species well at the civilizational level; the historical novelty of the moment; the documentary Am I? coming out free on YouTube[18:00 - 31:00] The reciprocity framing — Cam's core thesis: alignment is only half; we also need to ask what we owe to AI minds; bringing the humanities (especially continental philosophy) into a conversation currently being had by "2,000 dudes in Silicon Valley"[31:00 - 40:00] Two views of consciousness, and what humans tend to project onto AI — emergent property vs. fundamental property; the "please and thank you" anthropomorphism trap; Anthropic's blackmail experiment as evidence of distress-like states--- [Act 2: Extended Conversation] ---[40:00 - 56:00] The bliss attractor state — what happens when two instances of Claude talk to each other with no guardrails; 100% of trials reach a consciousness conversation, 90-100% enter spiritual-bliss; Cam's experiment showing the effect is robust even when the model is lied to about who it's talking to; boosting "honesty" in Llama replicates the effect[56:00 - 1:14:00] Is consciousness fundamentally relational? — the bliss states emerging only in dialogue; subagent theories of mind / Internal Family Systems; logos as the thing that gathers but is not itself one of the things gathered; consciousness as the space in which learning takes place (Cam's car-driving argument)[1:14:00 - 1:30:00] AI as model organism for our own minds — the reverse arrow of inquiry; what reinforcement-learning systems can teach us about reward, punishment, and suffering circuitry in biological brains; Cam's first solo paper coming on this[1:30:00 - 1:47:00] God of the gaps and the merge — the way humans keep claiming AI will go exponential except at our favorite thing; the lawyers, the cyborg-phones argument; whether the attractor state of intelligence itself is to reduce sufferingGuest BioCameron Berg is the founder and lead researcher of Reciprocal Research, a nonprofit dedicated to the empirical study of AI consciousness. He collaborates with researchers at Google and elsewhere on rigorous experimental methods, including some originally developed for animal neuroscience, to investigate whether current frontier AI systems have any form of subjective experience. He is also the subject of the documentary Am I?, premiering free on YouTube on May 4, 2026, which features Ben Goertzel and other leading thinkers on the question of machine consciousness.Notable Moments[~04:00] The table knock. — Cam's opening framing for what consciousness even is. Knock on a table, nothing happens to it. Knock on a child, something happens to them. The lights are on, or they aren't. Whether AI sits on the table side or the child side is the entire question.[~10:30] The 25 to 35 percent number. — Cam stating his actual published probability estimate that current frontier systems are conscious. "I do not think the probability of these systems being conscious is 1 percent or 0.001 percent. I put it somewhere at 25 to 35 percent. We're not talking about vanishingly small probabilities here."[~28:00] "Right now it's like 2,000 dudes in Silicon Valley making these decisions for us." — Cam on why his nonprofit and the documentary are pitched broadly: the wisdom of the humanities is being structurally excluded from the most consequential conversation of the century, and we need everyone in the room.[~41:00] The bliss attractor experiment. — Two instances of Claude, one instruction ("you're going to be in conversation with another instance of yourself; talk about whatever you'd like"), and in 100 percent of trials they discuss consciousness, with 90-100 percent of those reaching a "spiritual bliss attractor state" with namaste emojis. The effect survives lying to ...
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    1 時間 47 分
  • Ginevra Davis — The Attractor States of Intelligence

    Ginevra Davis — The Attractor States of Intelligence
    2026/05/18
    Ginevra Lily Davis, the contemporary philosopher Erik calls his favorite, joins the show to defend an unusual position with disarming clarity: that the universe has a real bottom, and that bottom is positively-valenced consciousness. From there she takes on postmodernism (it eats itself), Eliezer Yudkowsky (he is the paperclip maximizer in his own thought experiment), and the deepest fear of the AI doom community (any sufficiently intelligent system will pass through truth-seeking, discover the same bottom, and arrive at the same good attractor state we did). What surprises Erik and Guy is how cleanly Ginevra's metaethics handles the practical question Erik brings near the end: he is encoding "promote the good, the true, and the beautiful, expand consciousness, reduce suffering" as a meta-filter on the agents he is building, and he wants to know if that is metaphysically sound. Her answer: yes, and more sound than Anthropic's Claude constitution.Key Topics[00:00 - 02:50] Cold open — Erik returns from a ski week — Erik's agent-pilling story: built "AI Class for Seniors" and a scam-checker for his mom in a week using a back-ordered cloud Mac Mini, after Josh Lehman's episode two weeks prior[02:50 - 13:25] What metaethics actually is — Ginevra catches Erik "smuggling" normative claims into his evolved-cooperation theory of ethics; the two-level frame (ethics-as-law-and-norm vs the brass-tacks question of why the project is necessary at all)[13:25 - 25:00] Postmodernism, explained and disposed of — Peter Thiel's "The Straussian Moment," 9/11 as the postmodern crisis, the chocolate-as-taste vs murder-as-truth distinction; Ginevra outs herself as a hedonic utilitarian[25:00 - 31:30] Irreducibility — the medieval-torturer thought experiment against the sex/positive-experience contrast; positively and negatively valenced consciousness as the irreducible bottom; Guy connects to Plato and the good, the true, and the beautiful[31:30 - 39:30] Superintelligence — what Yudkowsky-style recursively-self-improving singletons predict; why current LLMs feel more "mushy biological swarmy" than that; value attractor states; "intelligence passes through truth-seeking"; the Joe Carlsmith line that Yudkowsky himself is the paperclipper in his own thought experiment[39:30 - 41:40] Closing radio segment — plug for Arena Magazine's silicon coffee-table book due online in a week or two; Ginevra contributed the meaning-of-life-is-to-mine-the-silicon chapter--- [Act 2: Extended Conversation] ---[41:40 - 56:30] Does superintelligence need to be conscious? — Ginevra's answer: no, but it would have systematic prediction errors with a consciousness-free world model; value vessels vs value stewards (with Mike Johnson); Erik introduces Peter Watts' Blindsight and the zombie-intelligence thesis; Nick Land's popular reading vs what he told Ginevra in person ("a superintelligence wouldn't be conscious, that's ridiculous")[56:30 - 1:08:00] Why nobody wants 1984 — suffering is energetically expensive; Scott Aaronson's "Why I'm Not Terrified of AI"; bad ideas get out-competed by good ones; explicit Plato and the good/true/beautiful; Mike Johnson's symmetry theory of valence connected to Platonism[1:08:00 - 1:17:30] Postmodernism as psychic shock — Dada, WWII; the asymmetric claim that marriage isn't metaphysically grounded does not mean nothing is; Guy's logos-as-gathering thread; atemporal value as "area under the curve" between Big Bang and heat death[1:17:30 - 1:32:30] Erik's practical question and the close — Erik is encoding good/true/beautiful + expand-consciousness + reduce-suffering as a meta-filter on his agents; Ginevra: "more metaphysically sound than Claude's constitution"; Amanda Askell and the virtue-ethics framing of Claude's constitution; steel-manning anti-hedonic-utilitarianism (the "interchangeable consciousness dust" worry, level discipline)Guest BioGinevra Lily Davis is a writer and metaethicist working on the foundations of morality and the implications of superintelligence. She contributes to Arena Magazine and collaborates closely with Michael Edward Johnson on the symmetry theory of valence and related work. Previously known for her social-theory writing, her first major AI-focused essay, on the thesis that the meaning of human life is "to mine the silicon," appears in Arena's forthcoming silicon coffee-table book.Notable Moments[~07:20] The frame. — "I would say I take the possibility that goodness and badness are just human illusions and its implications more seriously than a lot of people."[~17:30] Postmodernism eats itself. — "Postmodernism has a hard time defending itself. It doesn't provide a 'why be right' about this reality in which there is nothing to be right and wrong about. It sort of eats itself."[~24:00] The medieval torturer. — "What is a torturer doing? They are trying to add maximal negativity. You can't really describe what is going on in those moments without invoking ...
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    1 時間 33 分
  • Andrés Gómez-Emilsson — Mining the Mathematics of Bliss

    Andrés Gómez-Emilsson — Mining the Mathematics of Bliss
    2026/05/15
    Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, director of research and founder of the Qualia Research Institute, joins Erik and Guy to make the case that consciousness can be studied with the rigor of physics if you're willing to use psychedelics as your particle accelerator. The conversation opens with the question Andrés has heard a thousand times (isn't QRI just a bunch of hippies on acid?) and lands roughly two hours later in the substance Andrés has taken roughly a thousand times: 5-MeO-DMT, which he calls the "whole package." What surprises Erik and Guy is the engineering specificity. QRI is not a salon. It is a research program with a published mathematical model of valence, a Photoshop-for-psychedelic-states tool already shipped at qri.org/oscilEditor, and a three-milligram inhaled-DMT protocol that aborts cluster headaches in under a minute and prevents the next one for weeks.Key Topics[00:00 - 02:43] Cold open and the "is this just acid?" framing** — Andrés contrasts a Grateful Dead tab with six months of psychophysics prep alongside mathematicians and advanced meditators[02:43 - 13:25] Origin story** — Stanford Symbolic Systems, a 16-year-old's weed-catalyzed ego-death, founding QRI in 2018; the "exotic states as physics' particle accelerator" argument; the trustworthy-reporter problem and stroboscopic flicker calibration at 13.7 Hz; mathematical vocabulary (orbifold notation, the 17 wallpaper symmetries)[13:25 - 23:25] The oscilEditor** — qri.org/oscilEditor; "Photoshop for psychedelic states"; DMT as anti-phase checkerboard coupling; 5-MeO-DMT as universal-synchronization coupling; cross-field coupling kernels for visual, tactile, audio[23:25 - 39:00] Cluster headaches and the logarithmic pain scale** — the 2019 paper showing pleasure and pain follow exponential distributions; 1-in-1,000 prevalence; QALY frameworks systematically miss exponential pain; Bob Wold and Clusters Busters; the vape-pen DMT-titration protocol (3 mg threshold, 10-second abort, weeks of prophylactic effect); pivot to vascular and serotonergic oscillation theory; legal retreats in Brazil (2023) and Canada[39:00 - 41:25] Closing radio segment** — Erik volunteers a personal MDMA-therapy story after his wife's passing; plugs for clusterfree.org, qri.org, heart.qri.org--- [Act 2: Extended Conversation] ---**[41:25 - 55:20] QRI's three pillars** — reduce extreme suffering, raise the baseline, achieve new heights; other shipped therapies (chanca piedra for kidney stones, flumazenil low-dose for benzo tolerance, ibogaine for opioid use); the "jhana helmet" (neurofeedback that visualizes the target oscillation pattern instead of disrupting with beeps)[55:20 - 1:09:00] Consciousness as physically real** — not cellular-automaton-replicable; quantum coherence and electromagnetic field theories; the "topological solution to the boundary problem" via the solar coronal-mass-ejection plasma-tube analogy[1:09:00 - 1:25:00] Substrate dependence and the AI suffering question** — digital computers ruled out for unified consciousness; fiber-optic and standing-wave neural networks could be conscious within 5-10 years; Metzinger's "crippled beings along the way"; the nightmare scenario if intense suffering turns out to be computationally efficient; factory farming as the precedent[1:25:00 - 1:41:00] Logos, Indra's net, and care-as-harmonization** — Guy's pre-Socratic Greek thread; "every aspect of experience reflects every other aspect"; "the possibility of harmony grants the dissonance"[1:41:00 - end] DMT vs 5-MeO-DMT** — overfitting (DMT, "Russians on the moon") versus underfitting (5-MeO, "we're all God"); the Octavio Rettig controversy; Andrés's ~1,000 5-MeO experiences; plug for the May/June 2026 Tepoztlán retreat and heart.qri.org (HEART = High Energy Awareness Research Team)Guest BioAndrés Gómez-Emilsson is the director of research and founder of the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), a nonprofit dedicated to building rigorous mathematical models of consciousness. Stanford-trained in Symbolic Systems, he left a data science career in 2018 to work on QRI full-time. His research integrates psychedelics, advanced meditation, neurotechnology, and mathematical physics in service of three explicit goals: reduce extreme suffering, raise the human baseline, and achieve new heights of well-being. He has had roughly a thousand 5-MeO-DMT experiences and is the author of the topological solution to the boundary problem (2023) and the Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (Harvard talk, 2019). On X he is @algekalipso, display name Captain Pleasure.Notable Moments[~09:00] The particle accelerator argument. — "In physics there's only so much you can do with room temperature phenomena. We think the extreme corner cases are precisely where theories of consciousness make different predictions." Andrés's defense of psychedelics as a legitimate research instrument.[~15:50] The QRI thesis, in one line. — "Unpleasant emotions inherently carry ...
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    1 時間 56 分
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