Unlocking the Real OODA Loop: Cybernetics, AI, and Epstein's Hidden Connections

Strange bedfellows keep shaping the future of intelligence. Neuroscientist Sean Manion joins Brian "Ponch" Rivera to start with a canceled consciousness conference tied to Epstein disclosures, then unravels the threads: cybernetics' origins in Wiener’s teleology and Macy meetings, Boyd’s OODA Loop as a cybernetic descendant, AI’s engineering dominance sidelining broader systems thinking, and Epstein/Brockman networks influencing cognitive science.

We critique LLM reliability ceilings, preprint floods lacking curation, von Neumann’s architectural warnings, Wiener’s governance cautions, and Church-era "limited hangout" echoes in today’s transparency gaps. The conversation pivots to resurgence: analog computing mimicking the brain’s digital-analog hybrid (glia’s role in timing and gradients), memory’s unreliability, LLMs as partners not prophets, and the power of small, interdisciplinary circles for real progress.

A must-listen for anyone navigating AI limits, knowledge politics, or Boyd’s framework in uncertain times. Tune in, subscribe, and share your biggest unanswered question in the reviews.

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Transcript

Reunion And The Epstein Files Shock

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 0:21

All right, Sean. It's been about a year since we last connected. Uh early January, I think it was uh 2025. That's out of the time. So that's yeah. Uh there's not much going on in the world at the moment. Uh you did send me this uh this uh thing from about was it uh how many how old is this uh that's from 2017. 2017. So is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? Now, I'll give you more context on this before we may or may not talk about this. That is uh this was in response to me talking about seeing the Epstein files, at least going through them and looking at some interesting things on complex adaptive systems and cybernetics. And you sent me this, which is just a little unbelievable when you when you stop to think about it. But can you give me some of your insights on uh the connection to cybernetics, maybe the Epstein files, what's going on in the world today?

Consciousness Conference Canceled And Fallout

Sean Manion, PhD 1:12

Sure, sure. And I'll give uh the briefest of backgrounds I've been here before. I'm a neuroscientist by training, worked as a civilian for DOD for a long time, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, moved into tech. So I've seen different parts of the world. And my interest um in psychology, I'm an adjunct at Duquesne University now, has me doing some stuff in in consciousness. And for the first time, I had a consciousness poster uh accepted with a friend of mine for two the largest consciousness conference that's been going on for over 30 years out in Arizona, and we were pretty excited about that, gonna head out there in April, and then it gets canceled. Just boom, thousands of people uh no longer going there. We're gonna refund everything. Uh ASU, I think it is, um, says they're just gonna refund all the money, doesn't give a reason. Ahead of the conference, uh he comes out with a statement that says, Yeah, I took some money from Epstein back in 2017. A number of the people who are who are like the lead speakers are showing up on the files, and so we're going to um we're just gonna cancel the whole thing. So I'm like, wow, this is this is pretty incredible. And that's that's uh I guess you know, it wasn't my first introduction to who Epstein was, but it was the first like real world consequence of everything happening in in the news and happening in the files, the stuff I'm doing. So um I I've I've been tracking what's going on with him for a little while because his overlap with the scientific world has been known, especially in cognitive scientists, philosophy, AI, all the things that I'm interested in. And so it's it's it's been kind of weird for me to say see a lot of these names that I like, respect pop up. And I don't know how deep they are. You know, you you go to a conference, you get your picture taken with someone. Is that gonna, you know, mean you're up to all the no-good that he and some of his cohorts have been up to? Probably not in every case, but maybe in some cases. So I've been I've been paying a little more attention to it since then, and it's it's definitely something that's on top of a lot of minds in a way it wasn't before. But I think the scientific world, especially the cognitive and neurosciences, needs to pay attention to what's going on there.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 3:20

Yeah, no, so just going through the files, like we we try to uh refrain from pushing out lists and things like that, because there are many people listed in there. I mean, Daniel Kahneman's listed in there, but it's a reference, right? There are some very important people in the complex adaptive systems community that are are may be more than just listed in there, like as a reference, may have had some strong interactions. That's not for us to decide. That's for people to dive into that and look at. But one of the things I've noticed when I look through the files is how much information is shared about complex adaptive systems, cognitive science, consciousness, cybernetics. And I think it's fascinating because you can actually go in there and learn a lot about the scientific community and how they're looking at things. And again, I'm not looking at it from let's go punish somebody and all that. I'm looking at it from wow, this is important because if quote unquote the evil side of the world is looking at these things, maybe the rest of us ought to be looking at these things as well. And like I said, cybernetics came up, and I think you shared this with me recently, and we had Bobby Ozarian on the show early, I think in 2024, talking about hopefully I say this right, theology and maybe its connection to cybernetics, which which you recently wrote about. Is that true that they're one and the same or they used to be?

Teleology To Cybernetics: A Hidden Lineage

Sean Manion, PhD 4:28

Well, uh teleology, which is comes from telos, uh the end or meaning. So sort of the study of there being a purpose or there being meaningfulness, is something that's been around since Aristotle, and that there's a you know, a universe or a God-given purpose to our actions, and that drives what our actions are. It had long been sort of separated from science, but back in his younger days, Norbert Wiener, who was the father of uh cybernetics, did some study with Edman Husserl and others who stuff who studied uh phenomenology, talked about the teleology of consciousness, and that philosophy, I think, stayed with him. And I'm doing some research on those archives right now. But when he first came out in 1943 with his behavior, purpose, and teleology paper, along with Arturo Rosenbluth and uh and um uh Julie Bigelow, that paper used that term and just kind of brought it back from from nowhere. It hadn't been used in the sciences. This idea that there is purpose to action, and that dovetailed with McCullough and Pitts having the other main foundational paper. There's a couple other ones in 43 with the first artificial neural network and trying to understand this sort of recursive circuitry that's in the brain, where you don't just have things automatically responding to what happens outside and then moving you. There's internal components to what's going on, and they wanted to map that out. And they and they that circular causality, they called it on McCullough's side, and that teleology that they called it on Wiener's side kind of came together. And there had been uh an earlier conference that the Macy Foundation funded on cerebral inhibition, where some of these ideas first came together in 1942. But it was in 1945 that you had John von Neumann, Howard Aiken, both people doing, you know, work during World War II on developing computers, developing the atomic atomic bomb in von Neumann's case, or at least uh some of the targeting components in game theory. And and Wiener was working with them. And so in January 1945, they hosted a small meeting at Princeton, of which there's not much record because it was during wartime. But you can see the letters that they invited people with. They had people from the White House, they had people from other places, and they called it a teleological mechanisms or the teleology society meeting in 1945. So that was really the first name of cybernetics. Now there was pushback from the White House. They got a letter from the White House a couple days later saying this meeting was great, we want to come back again. But there's some people who think that name might carry some baggage. And so it went away. It came back for the first couple of Macy Macy meetings. They had 10 funded uh Macy meetings, which are called the cybernetics meetings now, but they didn't use the term cybernetics until later, after the teleology name was done, they used circular causality. Norbert Wiener came up with the name for his book, uh, coined it in 47 and published the book in 48. And then after that, it became cybernetics. And so cybernetics was a later addition to what they were what what they were calling that that science of communication and control earlier on.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 7:28

So for the uninitiated in the show, they may not understand why we're talking about cybernetics. For for from our lens, looking at the uh ootaloop and going into the archives like you've done, like you've done going into the archives for Norbert Wiener. Uh, we've done it for John Boyd, and we've seen a connection for cybernetics. And many people don't know that cybernetics heavily influenced John Boyd into eventually sketching what is what is known as the OODA loop in 1995. But this goes back in time, and then you just made a strong connection that there's game theory involved. I mean, there's so many things that are connected. You brought up Von Neumann. You you could just go, you're listing all these names out there that Boyd may have or may not have read, but uh at the end of the day, cybernetics has a huge influence on his work. And today, what we're learning is cybernetics, and from my uh my understanding, has a big impact on maybe consciousness and AI. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure.

Macy Meetings, Von Neumann, And Naming Cybernetics

Sean Manion, PhD 8:18

Um, yeah, and I think, and you even pointed me to some of the stuff last time that Boyd had been looking at, which has been helpful because I've been influenced by Boyd separately, and they they seem like they were aligned. And yeah, he was he was definitely drawing, drawing off of some of these earlier ideas and then himself feeding back into them. There's a there's a circular causality to all of this, and I've been following what's going on with phenomenology and how that's been feeding into what cybernetics started to do and what they've what they were able to influence in the phenomenology side. And so all of these different big thinkers, if you will, are interacting with each other, both directly sometimes, but also reading the works of and being influenced by the same things. AI kind of came out of some of the early cybernetics efforts. There was from 1946 through 1953, 10 meetings to understand how humans and how how machines how they think, how they can act to act the same, how we can program computers to work like humans. Um, and and that that required a lot of interdisciplinarity. They had philosophers there, they had psychologists there, along with mathematicians, engineers, neurophysiologists, and they they made some progress, but they more influenced a lot of people. Well, the Dartmouth meeting in 1956, which was considered the kickoff of AI, um, if you read some of the records there, John McCarthy, he really didn't like Wiener. He said, I don't want Wiener at this meeting to his funders at the Rockefeller Institute. He said, I don't want to bow down to him, nor do I feel like arguing with him. So they didn't have Wiener come. They had one of Wiener's former grad students come, and he tried to keep it very narrow, just based on engineering approaches to subsets of intelligence and called that artificial intelligence. Found some work that Wiener did in 55 the year before that may have influenced even John McCarthy's choice of the term artificial intelligence, but that's another story uh for later. So since 56, we've had a much more narrow band of engineering approaches to how to create a mechanical mind. And that hasn't been unsuccessful, although it's been riding on the successes of a lot of advances in computing power and computing speed. But even though we're at the cutting edge now of things that were not even thought possible five years ago with the generative AI and large language models, they seem to be hitting some limits on what they can do, the mistakes that they make. And while there's hope by some quarters, many of them with money to be made on AI, that what we're doing now will get us to human-level AI or beyond, I think a turn back towards some of the things that were lost when we lost that interdisciplinarity of cybernetics could help inform a broader approach these days that would take the successes we already have in the engineering field and then understand better at the cognitive level, at the neuroscience level, what we don't know about these things yet. More oftentimes, when we talk about neural networks, using an extremely simplistic form of neural networks that was laid out in 1943 and really hasn't been advanced. But the complexity we know about the brain now just isn't captured there. And there was at the Macy meetings, John von Neumann was very animated before his death, unfortunately, early due to bone cancer, that there was uh an oversimplification both at both at the neural net level, but also possibly at the architectural level, what we now call von Neumann architecture, was too overly simplistic to really capture what human minds and human brains are doing. And so there may be some value in revisiting that, but the but AI, along with cognitive science, are really spin-outs of cybernetics and complexity theory and different types of adaptive systems or just other elements that have grown out of there, but aligning those hasn't happened yet.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 11:57

So I want to be mindful of our listeners right now. They're probably going, what the hell does this mean? Uh so I'm gonna kind of uh I'm gonna try something to see if we can make this uh for uh you know more aligned for guys like me that are knuckle draggers. And that is when we take an engineering approach and we try to apply it to a human system, that's probably wrong, right? That's probably not what we want to do. I don't know if it's wrong, maybe just oversimplistic. Okay. So so to me, the engineering approaches to AI have a limit. That's what I'm kind of hearing from you. And maybe a more natural intelligence approach to developing AI, I mean the more we learn about natural intelligence, cognition, neuroscience, the more we learn from there, we'd probably want to start to apply that towards AI. Is that does that sound right?

Sean Manion, PhD 12:40

I think it does. And you kind of put it in a nutshell in a way that I I went on a little bit longer with it. But it's it's if we want to do more, we have to include more perspectives in order to get there. And we've we've maybe hit a ceiling and and bringing some of these more complex solutions to bear rather than keeping it minimal viable product overly simplistic, which our market drives right now, that may get us to that next level. And and that's that's not just me saying that. There's some other thinkers who are along those lines. And and for better or for worse, um, you know, uh it looks like Epstein and some of the people like John Brockman that he was working with, yep, are are the ones who are trying to look at that complexity. And we don't have we don't have the equivalent on the good side, as you as you said.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 13:23

Yeah. Yeah. So uh back to John Brockman. You look at the in the Epstein files, he's everywhere. I mean, he's talking about cybernetics, he's introducing Epstein to folks in all kinds of disciplines. And I'm I'm I you know, I'm not gonna go back and look at everything and say John Brockman's really bad or not. I'm just saying John Brockman's in there. I didn't know who he was until uh I looked at the Epstein files. I'm like, well, this is pretty, pretty important. I want to ask you a question. It's been a year since you we you've last been on the show. Uh we learned a lot about LLMs, or at least I think we've all learned about large language models. There's some amazing things that happened the last year. Uh but can you give us a current disposition of where you think we are with large language models uh at the moment and then maybe what's next?

Sean Manion, PhD 13:59

I think we are hitting some ceilings with their general use. I mean, people are going to find all kinds of clever ways to use them and in generating new things. I saw someone put it the other day. You can put uh any actor or actress into any film that you ever wanted, and it's amazing to do. But if you do a test retest reliability, which is something we do with, you know, cognitive testing and things, it doesn't fare very well. It comes up with different answers, it moves on, it degrades in its quality. Um, as uh as an editor of journals, it makes things up. I mean, it it does things that if I had an undergrad intern working for me doing, they'd get a talking to the first time and they'd be gone the second time. And this thing is just like, yeah, let's just throw it into medical care or throw it into something else. And if you talk to the people on the ground who are, you know, nurses who are trying to work with the LLMs, their administration is making a deal with Microsoft and shoving down their throat, they don't find them to be trustworthy. And some of that is a change management issue. Humans don't like change, but some of it is a quality issue. And there's a, you know, there's a lower level quality that you need in making a video game or a movie than in doing surgery on a person or doing scientific research. And that's why I think there's a gap there with what we currently have.

Boyd, OODA, And Cybernetics In Practice

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 15:09

So in the in the last year, you you know, you do it a podcast. It's one of the things we do. We've learned how to use AI uh the best we can. I mean, today we can take a tr take this transcript, we can combine it with some key documents in Google LLM, and it can generate an amazing uh 14, 15-page PowerPoint presentation or slide deck presentation, great animations, not animations, but uh great one-pagers. And it's it's fantastic for that. You'll still have to go through it and clean it up a little bit, but that is reducing the time that's needed for humans to go in and do that stuff, right? So we can generate that in a few minutes, but it still takes a human in a loop to go back and make sure there's, you know, there's some funky things here and there, but it's still pretty darn good. And the same thing with the writing. So one of the things that I've been using it for is I'll get right here on the screen, I'll have a conversation with myself about things that are on top of mind, and I'll have it organized with thoughts. And it's it's generating, you know, it's people first, so people, ideas, and things. You start there, and and it's creating some, not creating, but taking the information we provide to it and kind of organizing in a way to help us uh improve things. And there are many times where I do that and I don't share it out with the rest of the world, right? I just want to go, okay, uh, this will help. I I think I might be wrong on this. It's helping me think when I had the conversation first and it reflects back to me what it what it thinks I said, right? So any thoughts on that?

Sean Manion, PhD 16:27

It's interesting. And again, uh, you know, there's there's lots of people thinking about it different ways. Uh, you know, the idea that you you write things out um, you know, sometimes can help generate uh ideas yourself, but having a conversation can generate generate ideas too. And if you can have a conversation with um, you know, AI that represents some sort of different ideas that are collected from whatever else is out there, that can spawn new new thoughts that you have as well. Having conversation, and you know, not to take it back to John Brockman, but one of the things he has been doing for years, and you know, even before he met Epstein back into the 80s was getting dinner parties together of people and eventually started having uh Epstein at these dinner parties because having dinner parties together with people, and I think there was a there was a guy he worked with in the 60s, James Lee Byers, who was sort of like an experimental artist, and he said uh he didn't like to read that many books. He liked to, he's like, I want the hundred smartest people I know to get together in a room together and answer questions that they're having with each other. And that dialogue can be really concentrated using LLMs in a way. Um, I think you can you can replicate some of that dynamism because I don't get invited to dinner parties in New York City with a hundred different people all the time. And so, you know, maybe you do, maybe other people do, but having that level of dynamism and back and forth, I think it's good for as well. And I think that's what you're you're you're doing with it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 17:46

And I think I think that's what we're trying to do with the podcast is to have the un unscripted conversations. You know, we don't have a script for today. You and I are just kind of throwing out ideas to see what sticks. And that's that seems to generate uh some of the best insights and make connections. And so so let me take what I said earlier back a little bit, and that is you know, the conversation is me having a conversation, just recording it and then generating the content or the uh the outline. But having these conversations with Moose and our guests are just fascinating. What we're finding is the content in there is just incredible. There are things that, you know, I'll give you an example. Moose will say, hey, let's talk about this and that. I'm like, well, let's find out what this person wants to talk about first, and then we'll figure out where we go. And generally, when we just go unscripted, we we've we uncover things we never, you know, never expected. And that's that's why I like doing this. And I think going back to your point about John Brockman and arranging dinner parties, that's what's happening there. And so if we can capture that in the in this time where we're less or you know, not as likely to be social, you know, because I I think there's a lot of uh bad things going on in the world right now where we just don't engage with uh people that don't act and talk like us and have our same perspectives, that the growth of these podcasts are gonna be incredibly important going forward, if if what they're saying on you know mainstream media about uh AI, where AI is gonna take over the world, and I'll ask you that here in a moment, as we learn more about AI and this threat, possible threat that AI is going to take over a lot of jobs in the complicated domain, if that becomes true, we're still gonna need some type of social contact. So I want to get your thoughts on one thing in particular. AI taking over the world. Tell me about that narrative, plus or minuses, goods or nothers.

AI’s Narrow Turn And Missed Interdisciplinarity

Sean Manion, PhD 19:20

Well, I I I don't I don't think it's gonna be taking over the world anytime soon. What I do think is that people who are utilizing some of the things it can do most effectively, and especially if people are utilizing it in a closed system way that only benefits a few people, I think it can do a lot of damage to the world in the short run. I think you could have corporations that kind of dictate the terms of what everybody sees and does and listens to. And you can also have the, you know, the concerns about what sort of operational surveillance of everybody's day-to-day governments and other people can have. Funny, bringing it back to cybernetics and Norbert Wiener, after he wrote his cybernetics book in 48, he wrote a book in 1950 called The Human Use of Human Beings, and the last chapter of that warned of this exact thing that governments, corporations, you know, he didn't like the Soviets or the FBI because they both hated him. And so he warned that all of these things could utilize technology for surveillance, and can you utilize technology for manipulating people? And I think that's the danger of it, is less about AI taking over the world as people utilizing some of the most advanced AI in a closed, closed uh, you know, uh fashion could could do damage to the world for a long time.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 20:35

So go ahead. So the surveillance state thing uh or idea, I've done this in the last few weeks, and I've done it for you know, looking at my what I put out on social media, what I put out there, and I just want to see the hypocrisy between what I profess and what I put out there. And there's not a huge gap, but for others there is. So it's it's to be it's a warning that, hey, if you're professing one thing and doing another, there's probably a time that's coming real soon where anybody can do what I'm doing today and just kind of look at your own portfolio and go, hey, this is, you know, give me a good understanding if if I'm being hypocritical on a few things. So I've seen that. And of course, the uh surveillance state, uh surveillance capitalism in the news today. There's some stuff about Palantir. You know, there's some goods and others that are happening at the moment when it comes to the use of AI, but I think we have to be mindful of what we put out in the environment, right? Any thoughts on that?

LLM Limits, Reliability, And Trust

Sean Manion, PhD 22:24

Well, yeah, I mean, you know, someone who's out there right now, some of the preprint servers, so in scientific literature, you ideally want to have a good peer review of articles to make sure they're refined and then screened out and curated so that what goes out to the population is ideal. That's that's a system that's been falling apart for years and has a lot of problems, but it's better than any other that we have. But there's there's a there's a newer system of preprints, which is in some studies a precursor to peer review literature. In some places, it's just as is. Computer science doesn't need to, you know, take it all the way to the end. But those have been flooded with AI generated materials. And so I think that the flooding with extra unnecessary materials has clogged those channels up. And I think that we need to be careful about volume in putting out as much as we can about everything. Someone wants to publish a thousand papers in a year, they can do it, but it's just it's it's not helping in the long run. Run. So we want to be, we want to be careful about that volume. We want to be careful about the quality of what we're putting out. I think the reverse, though, and where humans still play a role, is in the value judgment and the curation that occurs. I mean, you can train an LLM on all of the neuroscience material that's out there on a specific topic. But when I've overseen or been involved in systematic reviews, you get a group of three, 30 people around, depending upon the volume that you're dealing with. And you have to make decisions on what's quality, what's not, sort that from an evidentiary standpoint. And that process takes months to years. And that process can be can be slow, but it is what gives you the higher quality of we've refined this. A lot of times 95% of the literature goes away for those final questions and decisions. If you're training an LLM, it's making no discernment. And it's it's it's like dumpster diving for high quality food. You're you don't know the quality of what you're getting. I mean, we what we want is in medical, medical um decision making, you know, clinical research tools, we want to have, you know, the bench to bedside, farm to table type. Where does all this information come from? Who's refined it? And it's the best we can trust, not, hey, I just read every paper that's ever been written on this, and I don't know if they're garbage or not, but here's the conglomerate. And I think that's where we want to be careful, both on what we put out, but also on what we take back in.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 24:37

Uh curious about what what are you excited about on new types of AI? We talk about AGI, but what's what what what what's exciting to you at the moment? What do you what are you seeing on the horizon? But the old being new again.

Sean Manion, PhD 24:48

Um, the some of the analog things coming back, analog computing is starting to make a comeback. If you look at some of the early cybernetics stuff, the realization in the 1950s really that the brain is not a digital computer, that it's a digital analog hybrid of high complexity was something that we've known for 70 years, and yet we're doing everything digitally because Turing theoretically said it could happen. And we have no idea what it would take to make that happen. It might take a computer the size of the universe. But if you start to bring the analog to bear, and there's a friend of mine who said that, you know, analog is the poor man's quantum, you start to get a much more dynamic system that you can create. And because our manufacturing has gotten a lot more sharp and better than it used to be, analog tools are not as hard to manufacture with reliability. And so there's some analog companies that are doing things that I think if we understand the brain and cognition a little bit better, and we uh and we have tools that have more dynamism to them than just digital, I think that's that's pretty exciting. But it's going to take some work to make real.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 25:52

So I want to talk about this analog uh digital thing or uh the connection. And I'll let me give you some background. So back in the day I flew the F-14, which was an analog aircraft, you know, uh it it became digitized. They put digital flight controls on a little bit later on. They started to do a lot of things to that. So we lived uh in both worlds. And then analog would be, you know, let's go back to a record player back in the day or having tubes and things like that. That's one-that's one thing about analog. You know, back when I was younger in the 80s, you learn about uh analog capabilities. But what do you mean by analog in in today's uh AI space? That's what I'm trying to figure out.

Sean Manion, PhD 26:25

Well, uh one of the one of the things that it brings an advantage is uh in just power usage. Um there's a lot more dynamism you can do with analog. So there's I've been to I have been invited to some, you know, 40-person dinners like they used to do with the Brockman dinners, and it's always fascinating. And you see, you don't meet everybody that who's at the dinner, but I have had some interesting conversations down at the research triangle with people at UNC who are doing things to develop more effective ways of doing AI at the edge so you don't need high computing costs. And doing that with analog gives you that power dynamic that's uh that that's a difference from digital. And so there are there are looks at how you do analog AI at the edge. Analog in general gives you a wider array of options in any type of um you know simulation or representation. You have you have gradients that you can do rather than either or. Um so it changes some of the dynamics of how you can process things, how quickly and with what what compute cost. And I think that's where a lot of the interest is. There's some new startups that are popping up that are out there, but I've seen some university research that's going on as well. And so I think that's useful because it's going to take a while, and we don't really know. We've you know been doing neural nets that are go no-go for 70 or 80 years, and that's an oversimplification of how neurons work, and we don't even know what the glia is doing, and there's more glia cells in our brain than there are neurons. And so, you know, how a glia supports a go-no-go with um changing the outside environment across a couple of variables along a gradient may look to be an analog and digital hybrid if you're trying to re-represent what uh a neuron can do. Um, and so I think that those are some of the things that I would like to see explored.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 28:06

Oh, yeah, let's unpack this a little bit more. I I'm I'm curious because I want to make sure I get this right. Is analog tied to natural intelligence where we're learning from the brain, or I again, I'm just trying to put my finger on this.

Using AI As Thought Partner, Not Oracle

Sean Manion, PhD 28:19

Well, I think analog compute is it is its own thing, but uh provides different power dynamics, some different energy dynamics, different um speed and decision-making dynamics. The brain has analog components and digital components to it. So the electro chemical gradient along a neuron when it's deciding to fire or not fire, the fire not fire is digital, but how quickly it fires, whether or not it fires, can be changed by varying variable gradients that are that are um in its environment along the way. These are maintained and controlled by glial cells that we've long thought to be just support and packing material. But now as people are starting to understand how memory works and and and how parts of the brain work better, they're realizing they may play even more powerful in a role in the timing of firing, in the sequence of firing, whether or not something fires. And so those can be simulated or represented with analog computing in a way that's easier to do and faster than digital computing at the scale that you need to to say represent a whole brain. There's a lot of people who say they're representing a whole brain, but they're doing it a very, not very granular scale, I would say.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 29:29

So you you brought up something I never heard before. Is it glia?

Sean Manion, PhD 29:32

Is that is it?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 29:33

Glia. Okay.

Sean Manion, PhD 29:34

So there's there's different types of um uh neurons. You know, you have um uh you know 80 billion neurons in your brain, and you probably have 80 to 100 billion uh glial cells in your brain. And so these do everything. There's uh different types of glia. Saw my cat in the room a little while ago. His name is Ollie, he's named after oligodendrocytes, which is one of them. I have another cat named astro after astrocytes, which is another type, Schwann cells, and so forth. Some of them wrap around the neurons. Um that's the sort of the insulation that helps them fire better. But some of them also sit in the environment. They do things like take up extra neurotransmitters that didn't signal. So the signal happens and then and then stops because they're like janitorial function. And they're they've long been thought to play some of these insulating, janitorial, um, you know, metabol uh metabolobic or metabolomic um uh functions, metabolic functions. That's what I was trying to say. But but now what we're realizing is they may be more critical to proper functioning memory and how the brain works than than we thought before. They aren't just background, they're they're part of the part of the Okay.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 30:43

No, now I'm gonna go off the AI for a little bit. Um is it I've read that the ex the extended mind, you get into for e-cognition, that memory may not only be stored in our brain housing unit. Is is that what are your thoughts on that?

Sean Manion, PhD 30:57

We don't have a full grasp on where it's stored. And there's I've seen some theories out there on non-local storage of memory, along with non-local, meaning outside of your head, ideas of consciousness, which are actually somewhat more prominent and tie back into everything from metaphysical to different types of bioelectricity and and and energy network components. There's there's hundreds of different theories of consciousness, uh theories of memory. Uh, you know, there's an interesting, if you ever want to Google memory engram, that's uh that's that's an interesting term. That's like where things are recorded or how they're recorded in the brain. And we only have a scant understanding of of where the uh where the recording starts to take place, but where that retrieval comes from, where the storage is happening, we don't have that down very well. And so there are theories that it could be non-local, but those are you know requiring support and evidence, just like everything else. The absence of information makes people look at look at the edge things, look at the weird things, and that, you know, that's that's what everyone from Epstein and John Brockman to different parts of DARPA and ARPA H to you and me and people who are interested in the topics you cover all kinds of topics that touch around this. So it's uh it's it's you know, it's interesting at the edge, if you will.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 32:11

Just out of curiosity, have you seen Michael Levin's work on the platonic space? Any thoughts on that? Because I'd I'd I've been uh I I'd say I'd probably put about five to six hours in it so far. Any thoughts on that?

Sean Manion, PhD 32:22

It's it's interesting. He he and others have have a lot of unique ideas and and doing a lot of hard work to try and support those. I haven't seen one idea that stands out amongst the rest, but he's he's interesting, and I follow his work and other people I know. A friend and colleague and I are having a small consciousness-based meeting, which was supposed to be the start of four or five meetings that we were going to report on at the big consciousness meeting, but that got canceled. Yeah. Um, but we're still gonna proceed. We're trying to bring a little more of the, you know, we call it the neurobiological, the philosophical, or phenomenological, the metaphysical, but also some of the computing, we call it mechanical consciousness uh possibilities together. And Michael Levins and some of the others are the ones we want to have represented. We're not we're not proposing a new theory so much as trying to connect a lot of the different, you know, not so much ivory towers, but uh cognitive towers that are out there. At the same time, where each of these fits into a framework of the world, I don't think we have a good grasp on. 30 years we've spent studying neuroscience in a neurobiological way for the past uh, you know, several decades hasn't given us consensus on one theory. It's given us more and more small little pieces of theory. And so getting those pulled together and integrated is something that I'm interested in. But yeah, Levin is definitely one of the leaders in that area.

Will AI Take Over? The Real Risk

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 33:37

So since looking at Markov blanket's free energy principle and then the platonic space, you know, and you look back at the Oodle loop and we put a boundary around it, a blanket around the internal states and external states, and you look at how a living system interacts with the external environment, that outside information that's on the left side of the oodle loop could potentially be, you know, the Akashic field, it could be the Muse, it could be the platonic space. We don't know, right? It's it's but it's to me, it's referenced as these are things we need to explore. I think it's safe to say that we do not, it's my understanding of the brain and the mind is we don't record in our minds like we would in a digital record, you know, like a digital recorder. It's not a hard, hard-coded. What I'm hearing is it's kind of possible that when we have hear a song or something, that it triggers a couple places in the brain or neurons to kind of fire together to help us remember something. And then as time passes, we misremember the past, right? We don't, we really can't reconstruct what happened 20 years ago or or yesterday. Uh, that are is this is this all true or resonating with you that that's it is.

Sean Manion, PhD 34:38

I mean, you know, we layer down, it's almost multiple tracks. One of the things I did, you know, my my grad school at Uniform Services University was studying post-traumatic stress disorder, and your your hippocampus is recording the details of what's happening, but your amygdala is recording the emotional content of what's happening. And depending upon whether or not there's positive or especially negative emotional content, you're gonna have an easier time remembering it, but that doesn't mean you're gonna remember all the details right. And so do the do the mistakes happen in the retrieval, do the mistakes happen in the storage? Those are some of the things we're still trying to understand. And there's a lot of great work going on, but it really, you know, it gets back down into science becoming too fractionalized, the replicability of some of these things, what's which ones we can trust more than others. You know, if you if you look at a field, you almost need to do a systematic review and do that evidence grading that right now an LLM can't do to get a good sense of what to trust and what not to trust from that field. There's a there's a there's a gap that we have. And when science was smaller and not as scaled, we kind of use the interpersonal component to be the check and balance. And it was probably imperfect. It of course was imperfect. But as we've scaled up and we have information just flowing around and you know, five million science papers published a year or more, no one's got a handle on that. The tools we've used to automate it don't have the ability to sort through it. And so so you're you're exactly right that there are major gaps in what we know about memory, about our understanding of the brain. We we are confident always that we know exactly how the world works until it changes, and then we're like, oh, I guess we were wrong. That's yeah, that's how humans are. That uh that's how scientists humans are, that's how non-scientists humans are. We we like to convince ourselves otherwise, but you know, you look at memory studies and memory tests, and people people are just bad at remembering things the right way.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 36:28

Yeah.

Sean Manion, PhD 36:29

But it's how it is.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 36:31

I'm hearing that we need to take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how the world works. Uh so with that being said and the conversation about John Brockman's dinner parties and things like that, let me ask you this given an opportunity to bring, I'll say, four to ten folks to a table that are still alive today or maybe in the past, who would you bring to a dinner party tonight to have a conversation about anything? I'm I'm kind of curious.

Information Floods, Preprints, And Curation

Sean Manion, PhD 36:55

It's interesting because I am I am having a somewhat small all-day discussion and then uh dinner party afterwards. Uh we're calling it concientia, which is the original Descartes term that precursored our modern thinking of what consciousness is. And we're trying to keep it small, not unlike I I've just found out today that Brockman had a meeting to try and recreate the Macy meetings in 2019 and got Epstein to fund it and had some of my heroes at it, Daniel Dennett and others. I I'm gonna take a different approach though. I don't need the tops in all the field. Not that they aren't smart, not that they aren't right about some things, but everyone knows what they're saying and what they're thinking. Consciousness is something that we all have some level of experience of, you know, and yet we we we think about it only at this top layer, only the smartest people can think about it. What are, if you if you take some people from different fields who are reasonably smart, but also curious and willing to work together, what can you find out, given that we have such information at our fingertips in the fees in the Macy meetings, you needed the smartest of the smart to be there because you didn't have computer access to all information that was available. But now having people who are more creative, writers, artists, musicians, poets, I'm gonna have some of them there. I'm gonna have scientists there, I'm gonna have people who with a theological background and a metaphysical focus on consciousness. I want that diversity of thought in a deep way, along with a base level of interest, intelligence, and a willingness, curiosity and a willingness to get along. And that's that's my dinner party. So there's there's thousands of people who fit that bill. I've I've tapped a few people who I I know and are are are interested. But for me, it's more about the dynamic the dynamism than than the specific personality.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 38:41

So you're not going after experts, which aligns well with what John Boyd puts out there, is you don't want experts, you you want probably generalists, which probably a little bit more aligned to what you just said. People that are curious.

Sean Manion, PhD 38:51

Generalists with the right safeguards, the right facilitation, and the right processes, I think. Um really if you do it right, and I've I've I've studied, you know, McCullough's letter to the Macy group on the failures of that group, um, are fascinating, read, more so than even some of the Macy meetings themselves, because it said, this is what we got right, this is what we got wrong. Sometimes they couldn't agree. Sometimes when you get the most the best expert in the world, they are too sure of themselves to be willing to open up to something else. They've been spending 30 years arguing with the same person. If you put those two people together, you're gonna get the same argument. And I can I can watch them have that argument over and over again. I can have an LLM trained on that argument, and we're probably gonna have an agent there that's been trained on a lot of the consciousness research to be part of our group. And that that's something that you can bring to bear and have at the fingertips of those those people who are part of that discussion. So I think I think having a dinner party with people who are excited, people who are interested, people who haven't given up hope, and people who are fascinated and and able to navigate the current environment of information that we have out there is what I like.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 40:01

I wonder if the same would be true if you were to say uh if you're gonna hire a group of folks for a new company, would you say the same? Would you be looking for experts or the same type of people?

Sean Manion, PhD 40:09

I think I think I would like uh, you know, call it a crowdsourced advisory group along with the experts in that case.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 40:16

Okay.

Sean Manion, PhD 40:17

It's kind of what I've seen for if you look at especially when you get into ethical or regulatory components, there's membership on the institutional review board that oversees clinical research. They have experts on that panel, but then they have representatives from the community, the common person, if you will. And I think we can we can empower maybe, maybe not just the average person on the street, but someone who's met some sort of filter by being interested in a topic and done some stuff on the topic. We can facilitate them with more information at their fingertips to empower them. But I think if you're working towards an immediately actionable goal, which you need to in business, having that balance of expertise with that, call it anti-expertise or open source community crowdsource component is something that I think would be more valuable for shorter-term decision making.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 41:06

All right. So what else is on your mind? You had a few other ideas that you wanted to throw out there. I'm just kind of curious. Uh, what are we missing in this conversation?

Analog Computing’s Return And Why It Matters

Sean Manion, PhD 41:15

Like I said, I found this um John Brockman in 2019 had this event. He he would he would ask people questions and they would do books on them, but he decided he wanted to have a return of the Macy meetings. He originally wanted to call them the Brockman meetings, but uh called them called them uh possible minds, this one he did in 2019. And I found the email he wrote to Epstein saying, here's what we're gonna try and do. And Epstein says, I'll fund this whole thing. And and they had this in 2019, a few months before Epstein was was uh was arrested, um, and that nothing else has happened. I think uh Brockman's been kind of he's in his mid-80s, so it might just be health, but he's been kind of uh away from the public since then. Uh I've I'm fascinating in two ways. I'm fascinating on where where that came from and where that relationship happened because I feel like Epstein drew some of his curiosity and interest from Brockman. Brockman was his brother worked for NASA from early on, like back in the fees. And so he got he got exposure to science back then. He was he was hobnobbing in New York City, and his later wife and girlfriend put him into literary world because her her dad was an agent. But you know, there's pictures of him with like Dylan and Warhol, and he used to promote all kinds of different art and and music events there. And then he started focusing on science, and then he started focusing on just bringing the best thinkers he could. There was something called the reality club that he started in 1981, along with uh Esther Dyson, who is the daughter of Freeman Dyson, who was involved in a lot of these things. Um, and and you see this thread throughout the 80s and 90s. You turn that into edge.org, which has a fascinating website. But you see you see Epstein, they kind of they tried to scrub him from the website, but he see he's popping up in pictures and back in back in '99 at the billionaires meeting, uh dinner they would have, and they would have millionaires' dinners in the 80s. So I don't know if he was there because there's those pictures. But there's this thread of all of these dinner parties and all of these informal gatherings. And that mirrors what the Macy meetings were doing. That mirrors what in Britain they were doing with the ratio club, which was Alan Turing and Donald McKay and others who were having these, they called them dinner parties, and they would have beer and they were in the basement of a hospital to get people kind of like ready to talk, and then they would have people present stuff. Um, Alan Turing's 1950 paper that gave us the first idea of machine intelligence was was presented there for the first time. And so these informal gatherings, um, the the the Macy meetings were contained, they were interdisciplinary, but they were contained in size. The ratio club was informal. If anyone became anyone else's boss, they had to quit. You didn't want any hierarchy there. And so I think there's value in having people socialize with each other, having uh, you know, multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary dialogue. So you learn things you don't expect to learn. I love a good conference, don't get me wrong, but most of them are very narrow in scope. Everyone has the same background, everyone's thinking the same way. Getting dialogue that's much more mixed and much more dynamic, and not being afraid of the noisiness and sometimes disagreement that happens, that's something that I think needs needs to happen more. And I think, you know, podcasts like this, I mean, you're not you're not a one-trick pony. Yeah, you have a an interest in Boyd and it's kind of sets a foundation for all you do. But the I I look at the the topics you cover, the guests you have, you have a wide array of interests. And so even like what what you were talking about earlier, we can't all be out, we can't all interact with everybody, but we have this shared online environment. And finding ways to tap things like this, resources like you have, tap some of the tools, the automated tools, AI that we have, and then connect with other people to ask the right questions and get those questions answered and refined down into actionable intelligence. That's that's what I'm excited about in the future. I don't think we've really fully understood how to do that yet, because we're still in the early stages of this experiment. Most people have only been online for maybe the last quarter century, which seems like a really long time. But if you start looking at history, that's a generation. It takes a lot longer for new dynamics to be created. It takes a lot longer for new patterns of information sharing, new patterns of extracting and testing and relying on information to even happen. I think the business model we have has been unfortunately limiting in our current environment. It was very good for the 90s and the hardware system and moving things out quickly. It worked well for some of the software plays, but I think it's giving us weak products now because it's all about what's sells well. And what sells well can be influenced in a lot of different ways. And just like the marketing in the feast, um, you know, is taking precedence over the quality of what we might need in the long run. So finding someone other than people on a, you know, some strange island in the in the middle of the ocean with untoward activity going on in the background to be the ones facilitating this type of dialogue, tapping into this entire network that we have worldwide. That's what I want to see more of. And you play a part in that, I play a part in that, we all play a part in that.

Glia, Memory, And Hybrid Brain Computation

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 46:31

We talk a lot about complex adaptive systems and you know, system stride behaviors. And you wrote about the church report that you looked at that recently, or a book on that. Uh, and then on the Epstein files, just talk about this briefly. When I went through them, yeah, I wasn't looking for all the ugliness. I was just kind of interested in the conversations, these conversations that he had with Gilman, right, from the Santa Fe Institute and the other relationships he had from the Santa Fe Institute, which is fascinating. I also saw that he tried to buy uh papers from Mandelbrot like two weeks before Mandelbrot died. And and there's a there's uh you go on X and you see Nassim Taleb writing in 2019. I tried to warn um uh Mandelbrot about visiting with uh Epstein. You know, I'm like, this is fascinating. There's a history out there that that uh involves so many people that we respect, right? And again, some folks are listed in the Epstein file, I was just referencing there as just great thinkers. And so there's some others are doing some interesting, have interesting engagements. But is there a connection back to the uh church report or church commission in your mind?

Sean Manion, PhD 47:32

Uh and unfortunately, there probably is. I mean, the church report, for those who don't know, Frank Church was, I think he was an Idaho senator who headed up a commission in 75, 1975 was called the Year of Intelligence. Only they meant intelligence like CIA, intelligence, community intelligence, because there had been a lot of shenanigans going on. Um, and there were several smaller commissions after JFK, after after things that had happened with the FBI and Martin Luther King. And so this commission was looking at a broader array of what the CIA, the FBI, the intelligence community had been up to and where they had been behaving badly. And they spent uh a huge amount of time, uh, Mondale was on it, and other people were on it, going through a lot of records and a lot of records they didn't that that probably some people like Hoover never thought would see the light of day, and found a huge array of bad behavior by these groups. I found it interesting for, you know, the early MK Ultra and even the precursors to that, Project Artichoke, Project Bluebird, there was an MK Naomi, an MK Delta. There were a number of different projects looking at manipulations of behavior, um, both how to be resistant to them, people get captured by the Soviets, but also how to manipulate people's behavior that really went on for years. And and I'm gonna, I'm gonna just read you a brief portion from this because it's just it stuns me that this just happened and we let it go. But in January 1973, MK Ultra records were destroyed by the Technical Services Division personnel acting on the verbal orders of Dr. Cindy Gottlieb, uh Sydney Gottlieb, Chief of TSD. Dr. Gottlieb has testified, and former director Helms has confirmed that in order ordering the records destroyed, Dr. Gottlieb was carrying out the verbal order of DCI helms. From the highest level, they just straight destroyed the records. And so we have a sampling of what happened, and you probably are very familiar with the term limited hangout, which is if I get if I get busted eating cookies, um, and also the jelly beans are gone and the chocolates are gone, and I can get away with just being like, well, I just ate the cookies, you know, and it was my sister who ate the jelly beans, and that was probably dad last night who ate the ate the chocolate. I'm gonna I'm gonna own up to the thing I'm already caught at, and then I'm trying to pretend nothing else happened, and then everyone just kind of walks away and forgets about it. This level of bad behavior was going on in the 50s, the 60s into the 70s, and 50 years ago, we had a major coming to, you know, Jesus Muhammad, whatever kind of moment you feel like having, that said there were these things going on and they were horrific, and then everyone just kind of moved on. And I think we're seeing that moment right now. There are some people who care about these things that have gone on, the connections that have been made, the records that have been released are fascinating and there's a lot of stuff to dive into, but they that most of them don't meet the level of actionable evidence to prosecute anybody. And yet there's stuff that has been withheld. There's been indications that, you know, oh, well, there's, you know, child sexual abuse in this thing, so we just didn't scan it. Well, someone knows more. We're not acting on these things. They probably touch on, you know, uh, you know, I forget, I forget who said it after Epstein, you know, was was arrested and, you know, uh died in or didn't die or killed himself or didn't kill himself or whatever what you think think happened, that some very good people we know are gonna be in this. And, you know, I've I've watched people I know, um, well, not people I know, but people I know of, Daniel Dennett, people I've met, people I've been inspired by, be tied up in this. And some of them are completely peripheral, like you said. If you were on an agenda that got sent back and forth and I've found this, your name is showing up in there, but you had nothing to do with it. Others are very much squarely involved, and others, it's kind of in a gray area. How and where we correct ourselves is is important. And I don't know that we're gonna do it any better than we did with the church report. But on the flip side, all of these ideas we're talking about, all these important and valuable things that are humanity trying to understand itself, trying to understand the world around it, can be controlled by those who mean to do personal gain only with it, or it can be controlled by those who are trying to help humanity. And getting that back into the hands of those trying to help humanity is something I think we should want to strive for as well.

Extended Mind, Engrams, And Memory’s Gaps

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 51:57

Uh, there are some uh disturbing things in there uh that I've found. Let me just see if I can bring this one up. Yeah, uh things that are dangerous and forbidden. Here's where we can put CRISPR and other weapons of mass destruction. I don't know how the source on this, but it's it's things like that that are in there. You're like, hold on a second. Things that are relatively harmless but forbidden, psychedelics are in there, right? It's I mean, again, this is just a good place to go understand what we talk about on the show, I guess. And I hate to say, hey, if you want to go learn about the things we talk about on the show, go look at the Epstein files. It's manipulation and leadership, right? We're looking at it from how do we understand the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in the environment, and how do we navigate this uncertainty so we can survive and thrive on our own terms. That's what we want to help people with on this show. If you look at the Epstein files, they're looking at how do we take that advantage away from those that are trying to do this on their own, right? And I think this is a relatively new way to look at the Epstein files is hey, there's an opportunity to understand what corruption and evil may look like and the tools and techniques they're using. You can use them too to defend yourself and to survive and thrive and you know, find flow, flourish, whatever you it may be. AI, too, right? There's a lot of great connections there. We've we did a quick look at uh who's been on the podcast and who's in the uh files. I'm not gonna say names, but I'd say the majority of them have little interaction with Epstein, but they're they're referenced in there. And it's just, you know, I know people get excited about ah, the so-and-so is listed in there 400 times or 300 times. Yeah, but there's many duplicates in there, and it may just be them being referenced by a book they wrote, right? So you got to be real careful with that. And I see a lot of people pushing that around on on online. I try not to, but yeah, anything else that you you want to share before we uh close up?

Sean Manion, PhD 53:36

I think going back to you know, the original article that you you put up, it was, you know, the staggeringly profitable scientific publishing industry. It's been falling apart for years. We need to do better. But if you look back to it, it was a way of controlling science by primarily Robert Maxwell, whose daughter, uh, you know, it was inspiration for the boat he died on, and we don't know if he killed himself or how he died, but uh it does seem like, you know, uh Gislaine, uh Gelaine, I don't I don't know exactly how to how to pronounce it if you're not in France, but uh, you know, she and uh the person she introduced to her father introduced her to um in in Epstein were were trying to control science in a similar way, maybe not centralized in trying to control all the IP, but they were trying, they were whining dining scientists exactly as Robert Maxwell did. And scientists are great people, but they're oftentimes very focused on the thing that they're working on, and they're they're socially awkward and oblivious to how they might be manipulated. And how and where we allow scientific access, help facilitate science being done, is a very important thing. And if we if we let it get taken over by business interests or or you know uh untoward interests for other reasons, bad things happen. Whereas if we can help science become something that continues to progress and prosper, you don't have scientists desperate for $50,000 in a way that they take that in 2017, and now the largest conference on uh uh on uh consciousness has been canceled and probably won't be coming back. I don't think everybody who's involved in that decision making knew what they were doing, but scientists looking at looking for when when scientists have to, you know, scrounge around for funds, you're gonna have people who've got a little bit of money to burn and and not the best interest in mind fill in the gap. And I think that's something that as a society, we can do better. We can decentralize science, the tools are there, we just need the right governance, and that governance comes back down to you know, cybernetics is the where the term governance comes from. And so looking back to the past and figuring out how to apply that in the future is uh is is how we get there, I think.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 55:49

Well, I think this is a timely and uh insightful conversation on world events, what's going on in AI and what's going on in the Epstein files. I want to thank you for coming on on short notice. It's been awesome. Uh we'll try to get this out as fast as we can because of the context of our time. It's very important. And for me, I think what we're experiencing at the moment is the Epstein files kind of reveal us, it's a soda straw look at what's going on globally. I mean, that there's it doesn't mean this stuff isn't happening now, but we got to be mindful of of what's going on all around us. And, you know, I've been reading a lot of books lately on have have a responsibility to question just about everything. You know, challenge assumptions and all that doesn't mean pushback on your parents, or if my kids are listening to this. But yeah, uh again, really appreciate you coming on on short notice, and I'll try to get this out uh as soon as possible.

Sean Manion, PhD 56:33

Outstanding. Always a good conversation. Keep on doing awesome things like you are.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 56:37

I appreciate it. I'll keep you on here for a moment.