Transcript from Alex Zhu AMA: The Second Coming of Distributed Christ Consciousness

A live recorded conversation on UpTrust between Pete Michaud and Alex Zhu.

Watch the recording or see the original AMA post, where the live questions came from.

Bridging These Worlds Is My Job Description

[00:00:00]

Pete: Hi, Alex. Welcome. Thanks for coming and doing the AMA.

Alex: My honor and pleasure.

Pete: Great. Well, let me give you a little bit of an intro. You’re a former math Olympiad guy and a CompSci guy, and you’ve been in the AI safety field for a lot of years now. And for the last while — maybe five years or so — you’ve been trying to integrate religiosity and mystical experiences into a sort of rational worldview. Is that right? Do you want to correct it?

Alex: Yeah, that’s right. Because AI alignment came from such a rational worldview, and I was like, oh yeah, religiosity and mystical experiences are precisely what’s needed to think about this clearly. So I guess I have to bridge these worlds. I guess that’s my job description.

Pete: Right. Okay. And your big, flashy headline is the second coming of distributed Christ consciousness.

Alex: Yeah, that’s right.

Pete: All the weird parentheticals. Okay, so let’s just get out of the way that that sounds fucking crazy — what the hell are you even talking about? The question is: how would you explain this to my grandmother? Or if I was eight years old, what would you say about what you mean by this?

When the Power of Love Overcomes the Love of Power

[00:01:41]

Alex: Yeah, so there’s this quote that’s popularly attributed to Jimi Hendrix, where he says: when the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace. That feels like it’s at the essence of what I’m trying to get at.

The reason I include the parentheticals is that the standard, popular conception of the second coming of Christ — I think people tend to imagine a fundamentalist rapture, where a reincarnation of Jesus descends from the sky and saves the day. And I’m like, no, definitely not that. Part of why I’m saying Christ consciousness instead of Christ is that I think there’s something Christ is embodying, and I don’t think that’s just going to be embodied in one person who shows up and saves the world. I think it’s going to be embodied across a number of people. The hope is that they get enough power in the world to shift the paradigm of how the world is actually working — which is also the distributed component.

Pete: Right, because it’s not going to be one guy. It’s going to be a system of people.

Alex: Yeah.

Pete: Got it. Okay, so — one thing I want to eventually get into is what this whole Christ business is, what Christ consciousness even is. But before that, I’m curious: it seems like you’re doing a lot of work to reconstruct this old religious concept, the second coming of Christ. You have to dissect it and reconstruct it almost completely to make it make sense. Why are you even starting from that point? Why is it even a tempting starting point to try to reconstruct?

They Have No Idea How to Talk About That to a Rocket Scientist

[00:03:42]

Alex: Well, I kind of have to do that for religion as a whole — all the different religions, especially the mystical cores of the religions, which I think are all compatible with each other — as part of my job description of finding a science-and-rationality-compatible version of it that can be used for thinking clearly about AI alignment. But I already have to do that.

Pete: But if I assume that, can I repeat it back to you?

Alex: Yeah.

Pete: Okay. The reason you have to reconstruct these religious ideas is that — despite all the crazy bullshit that religions do and believe — there’s a core you believe is deeply truth-tracking, and that we need as part of a long-term successful future. And that core isn’t currently compatible with the modern way we think, and all the good things about that, like how we can get rocket ships to the moon. But there is—

Alex: I think I’d say there isn’t an articulation of that core that seems compatible yet.

Pete: Okay. All right.

Alex: Like — different religions meet up in the same room, and yeah, we’re all talking about the same thing. They have no idea how to talk about that thing to a rocket scientist.

Pete: Right.

Alex: And that’s part of what I’m trying to change.

Pete: Got it. Okay, so — I interrupted you. If you want to complete that thought, you can, or I have another question.

Alex: The end-of-the-world visions, I’d say, aren’t part of the shared core per se. I think the shared core is more about the fundamental metaphysical structure of reality, which can be gleaned through deep contemplative work — working through the layers of one’s psyche, clearing through the distortions and delusions everyone inevitably accumulates over a lifetime. That said, conditional on having this core, it naturally leads to a reinterpretation of the end-of-the-world visions that show up across all the different religions — which also have striking parallels with each other.

There’s a social purpose for religion too. It fills the God-shaped holes in people’s psyches that, in my understanding, arise when babies realize their mothers aren’t totally perfect caregivers and have a will of their own that doesn’t completely align with theirs. But leveraging what already exists in the collective psyches of people across the world — taking the good parts, not the less good parts — just seems helpful. Religion has already done all the work of laying the seeds for how people should orient toward the end times. You might think you’re a devout Christian or Muslim or whatever, but just because you think you are, and invoke the name of Christ, doesn’t mean you’re actually—

Pete: —walking the walk—

Alex: —gonna get saved. Yeah, it’s whether you’re walking the walk that matters. I think that’s a consistent theme across all the religions. All the parts of the end-time visions that aren’t compatible with each other — I’m just like, that’s not the point. The point is people walking the walk, gaining enough power to actually shift things, shift how the world runs.

The Good Guys Are Themselves Factioning Off Into Good Guys Who Are Warring

[00:07:50]

Pete: Why do you think it’s about the end-of-the-world vision? Why is that part of the commonality?

Alex: This is speculation on my part, but I think it comes from a deep understanding of the collective psyche. In general, whenever deep religious truths are actually understood at a large scale — basically whenever a religion actually starts — there has to be a massive paradigm shift from how people had been doing things. And generally the thing that gets them to embrace it is feeling that the old way isn’t really working anymore. I think it’s not a very big leap to combine that with a prediction that, at some point, humanity as a whole is going to become one interconnected system, and is going to go through a crisis of that sort.

Pete: It reminds me of personal work — I think it’s common in personal work, you’re well aware of this — that things which happen on a psychological basis can also be understood to happen on a sociological basis. When people have major life transitions and epiphanies that really change their life, a lot of the time that’s like a personal death — a death of the old identity, and then taking up a new one. So—

Alex: Yeah, that’s right.

Pete: What I’m hearing is that, on a sociological level, on a global scale, is what you have in mind?

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. And in particular, I think there’s a common trope that people only really stop their addictions when they decide they’ve suffered enough and are willing to turn a new leaf. I feel like the world as a whole has been addicted to the narratives of tribalism and separation. Every group is like, we’re the good guys, and we have moral superiority over the others — to defend ourselves, or whatever. It now seems like the time when it’s becoming clearer to everyone involved that this way of looking at things isn’t working. It’s not sustainable. The good guys are themselves factioning off into good guys who are warring each other, who are themselves factioning off into good guys who are warring. It’s just like — yeah, we need a paradigm—

Pete: Well, it’s interesting, right, because it’s kind of happening at the same time. What you said is true — people are noticing this whole tribal thing isn’t going to work. But part of the reason they’re noticing that is that, simultaneously, the tribalism is ramping way, way up. It’s becoming this very strange, highly optimized kind of hyper-tribalism. Very virulent.

Alex: Yes.

Pete: Kind of forcing the breaking point.

Alex: Yeah.

Pete: One way or another, right?

Alex: Right. And I think part of what’s central to the mystical core shared across religions is seeing through tribalism — seeing through the illusion of the separate self, where tribalism is basically the illusion of the separate self at the group scale.

Newborns Are Pretty in Touch With Christ Consciousness

[00:12:06]

Pete: Would you say Christ consciousness is like the inverse of that? Like — everyone is actually the same thing, my identity is located in this whole, massive humanity, rather than in this monkey body?

Alex: Yeah, that’s right. I’d say newborns are pretty in touch with the thing I’m calling Christ consciousness — just with very little metacognitive awareness of it, and obviously no ability to act from it in a rational, agentic way. But we get traumatized as we grow up, and then we lose contact with that. As adults, we can go back and heal a bunch of those traumas and return to that state of innocence and openness and unconditional love we were giving and receiving — but actually with the wisdom and discerning capabilities of adults.

Pete: Okay. Well, it’s interesting that you frame it as a process of healing back to a state that was unhurt. There’s a question here — a quote that says suffering is the root of wisdom. It came up in a previous AMA. So the question is: in your distributed-consciousness model, what kind of suffering actually produces wisdom, and what kind is just a waste, or damage? And how do you contrast it with the healing model?

You Hit Rock Bottom When You Stop Digging

[00:13:06]

Alex: Healing comes when you’re willing to give up your old ways of doing things, and suffering is what tends to make people want to give that up. I think there’s a common saying that change comes when you hit rock bottom. I’ve also heard a thing from Alcoholics Anonymous — you hit rock bottom when you stop digging.

Pete: One thing this reminds me of — I make a joke sometimes about how the way that’s worked for me, to learn about myself and about how the world works, is unbearable suffering. Which is a joke, but also not a joke, because I’ve been through a lot of stuff in my life.

Alex: Yeah.

Pete: But, in particular, one thing I find very hard to explain to people is that there came a point — a real point, not just an abstract philosophical one — I remember a moment in my life when I was in extreme physical pain, and something came loose in my mind. I realized: okay, I can either keep doing whatever I was doing with that pain and go literally insane — I just don’t know how to exist with this anymore — or I can let go of that and just watch the pain and be like, wow, that sure is terrible, oh well, whatever. That’s kind of the vibe.

The thing I had trouble explaining to people is that part of the realization was that I was running a scam. The way I phrase it sometimes, bombastically, is that I realized I was trying to manipulate God.

Alex: Uh-huh.

Pete: Like, my holding of the suffering was this really deep, almost infantile belief — a proto-belief that if I—

Alex: I think it was almost—

Pete: Well, it was—

Alex: I think the root was literally infantile.

Pete: No — yeah, I think it’s true. It was way deep down in my guts. I realized: I think, by holding onto this, I’m expecting to be rescued. And if I just — I can’t manipulate God this way. God’s not going to rescue me if I suffer really hard.

Alex: Yeah.

Pete: So I could just let it go. It gave me a very different relationship with suffering and growth and change and everything.

Alex: Yeah, totally.

Pete: I hold things much more loosely now because of that.

Alex: Yeah. I think this is explicitly — semi-explicitly — part of Zen Buddhism’s training style. They make you go through torturous conditions until you break and have that kind of realization.

Pete: Well, I think the interesting thing to me is — maybe Zen has figured out how to make it work — but I’m like, look, this is the thing that happened to me, and I don’t recommend it as a training regime, because I think most people put into that situation don’t let go. They don’t go, oh, actually this pain sucks, but everything’s fine forever. They actually just go insane, or something, you know?

Alex: I mean, it might also be different for Japanese monks.

Pete: Okay. Fair enough. Can you say a little more about that? For somebody who just heard that and is clutching their egalitarian pearls — what do you mean?

Alex: I think it’s also plausibly the case for Chinese minds. Chinese toddlers are basically told that their wants and preferences don’t matter that much — you should just suck it up and confront reality as it is. It obviously leads to a lot of pathologies and neuroses, but I think it also primes them to be much more likely to have the kind of realization you were describing, instead of just being like, wow, my entire sense of who I am, ever since I’ve had memories, is now being challenged and threatened.

Pete: That makes sense. I actually got this from a giant Danish man — he was standing, looming over me, looking directly into my eyes. I’m average height, and he’s like a giant Danish man, so he’s looking down at me. He asks me really earnestly — it wasn’t threatening, despite the looming — What’s so important about you? And something just unlocked in my heart. I was in my mid-twenties, and I was like, what is so important about me? Wow. It was really a moment for me.

Alex: Yep.

Pete: Reminds me of this. Okay, so let’s talk concretely. So — okay, maybe AI, something, something, Christ consciousness. Tell me the story. Tell me a concrete hypothetical about how it plays out.

Steelman Summaries of the Proverbial Other Side

[00:18:54]

Alex: Yeah, so the 99th percentile — or 99.99th percentile, add enough nines — outcome for UpTrust working out: the different filter bubbles and worldviews of the world get better and better at understanding each other, with the help of AI, until they eventually congeal into a sort of Schelling filter bubble — the main one that’s best at interoperating between the different worldviews, and has the fewest entrenched idiosyncrasies of any particular one.

Pete: Okay, let me slow you down a little, just to make sure I’m tracking. Right now we have social media — Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, whatever — and a big part of what’s happening on social media is that divisiveness drives engagement, which is the whole business model. What you’re imagining, via UpTrust, or whatever — let’s just say it’s AI — is AI providing high-quality steelman summaries of the proverbial other side to everyone simultaneously, so that they scoot ideologically and emotionally closer to each other. Even if they do have substantive disagreements, they start to see themselves as part of this singular bubble that has disagreements within it.

Alex: Yeah, like a humanization process.

Pete: Okay. And now there’s this highly interoperable filter-bubble thing going on. Now what happens?

Alex: Before I continue, I just want to caveat by saying this is all highly speculative, and there are many crucial pieces I absolutely do not have filled in. I’m just laying out aspects of my sketch that seem like — oh, these seem like good desiderata, and conditional on things going well, I’d expect these kinds of things to happen. So that’s the type signature of this, as opposed to here’s a thing I think I can convincingly argue could plausibly happen.

With that caveat given: I imagine the dominant power structures in the world are basically going to escalate until the brink of destruction — just like what happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis, where, at the brink, both sides actually trusted that the other side would be willing to de-escalate. In that case, there was a clear answer of what de-escalation would look like. Whereas I think, in our current state of affairs, it’s not exactly clear what de-escalation would even mean. My sense is that it’s at that moment the power structures would be like, maybe we should actually drop how we’ve been doing things, and shift into how the Schelling coalition sees things and wants things to happen. And that would be the decisive transition of power.

Pete: Okay. So, in this sketch — purely hypothetical — what you’re seeing is: the people within the existing power structures come to this crisis point where everything’s about to be mutually destroyed.

Alex: Yeah.

Pete: And kind of have, to borrow a phrase, a come-to-Jesus moment where they’re like, okay, hang on, we don’t actually want to destroy ourselves.

Alex: Yeah.

Pete: Even if we’d like to destroy the other guy, we don’t want to destroy ourselves. And it looks like we’re about to.

Alex: Yeah. I mean, we’re already inching toward that.

Pete: Sure. And so we’re running — we have this kind of… we have this sort of available alternative that’s already pretty powerful in its own right. It’s not fully hooked into the global power systems or anything, but it’s become, like, in the room with us — and it seems like a plausible alternative to destroying ourselves.

Alex: Yeah, that’s right.

The Is-Ought Problem Presupposes That There Is an Is

[00:23:43]

Pete: Okay, let me — I’m getting another question here. It’s kind of a repeat of what I asked before, but a little more pointed — about the religious framing and the religious language. What does this religious conceptual framing give us that the technical language does not?

Alex: One thing is a sense of moral realism, I’d say. I think all the founders of the major religions understood what moral truth was really about, but had limited ability to transmit it. Then there was memetic selection for the lowest common denominator of understandability. So you end up with a bunch of nonsensical dogma arising around what the prophets allegedly meant. I respect that people are highly allergic to that — to religion — to the extent that the nonsensical dogma is the first thing they think of when they think of religion.

That said, I think one could talk about this core — this moral-realism core — in purely technical terms. But partly it doesn’t feel clean to me, because my own understanding of it has been shaped so much by actually studying religion and being inspired by it as a way to clarify my own understanding. And partly because I think even a purely technical understanding of it departs so much from the traditional technical worldview that it seems fair to interpret various facets of it in religious terms.

Pete: That makes sense. One thing that comes to mind for me is that something about the technical worldview — which is baked into capital-S science itself — is that it’s an exploration of what is the case. It’s trying to be a description of the facts about the world. You can try to construct ought from that, but there’s a famous problem: how do you even get there? Whereas the religious view kind of starts from the ought.

Alex: Precisely. Or — my view is that the is-ought problem presupposes that there is an is, which is one of the most intuitive assumptions one could make.

Pete: Sure.

Alex: But I think this assumption is actually incorrect. The central metaphysical concept in Buddhism — dependent origination — is specifically the negation of the idea that there is an is. And once you posit that — actually, you can’t have stuff that’s observed just existing on its own, with observers simply emergent within it, which is the standard scientific view — no, actually, the observed analytically implies an observer. If you want an is there, there has to be someone observing it. Then there’s a question of how that perception works, and whether that perception itself is valuated. That’s the inroad, I think, to how one gets to moral realism. But this is a very different metaphysical picture from what’s traditionally understood by capital-S science. John Wheeler was pointing in this direction.

Pete: Who was?

Alex: John Wheeler.

Pete: Oh, okay.

Alex: I think he coined the term black hole. I think very few people understood what he was trying to say.

Pete: Many such cases. A kind of different frame on what you were saying — or a different aspect of what might make religious framing tempting — from a comment in the thread:

[Chat question:] In addition to what Alex is saying, I think the new movie, Knives Out, touches on this a bit. It’s about storytelling, and it’s how humans have communicated for millennia. It’s evocative, which helps us connect more to the content.

Pete: So there’s a strong memetic selection for this structure of account of the world that has a religious flavor — to actually connect with people on an emotional level in a way that technical content, even when it’s completely correct, does not.

Alex: Yeah, that’s right.

Pete: And the other thing that comes to mind is the phrase you used before, about memetic selection — the lowest-common-denominator stuff. Meaning you can’t really transmit a meme unless people are capable of holding it in their mind.

The Closest Language I Have Is Heaven and Hell

[00:29:02]

Alex: I remember having a conversation with a low-IQ friend. Despite that, I genuinely consider him a friend — we’ve helped each other out, and we’ve had very interesting conversations of the sort I rarely have with others. And I don’t mean that in a demeaning way — he was saying stuff that a lot of people at MIT just wouldn’t relate to. But I found that when he was asking me for advice, I was like — huh, I feel like the closest language I have to say stuff that would make sense to him is heaven and hell. And the way I’ve commonly derided that language — I was like, yeah, I guess I’m just going to use it here, because that’s the best available language for me to communicate with my friend.

Pete: Totally.

Alex: Yeah. And then I felt like my heart softened toward all of the stupid, entrenched dogma. It’s just like — oh yeah, I’m in this weird bubble where almost everyone is giga-intelligent, and that’s very much not how the rest of the world works. They need something that meets them where they’re at. Insofar as existing religions provide existing moral scaffolds and pointers to moral realism that meet people where they’re at, I absolutely think that’s something good to work with.

Pete: Yeah. Okay. So — contrary to… all right, part of your premise you started out with is that all the major world religions — especially the mystical elements, aside from the dogma — had this moral truth in common. They were all basically saying the same thing. That’s what you claimed. Let’s suppose — even if that’s true — the question here is: if religious language is the moral layer, what happens when different groups import incompatible moralism into the same system? Insofar as people don’t agree about ought, what happens in this worldview, in this filter bubble?

Alex: The same thing that happens when people disagree about is — which is, you hash it out.

Pete: They have a war about it.

Alex: I mean, that happens for disagreements about is, sometimes. Yeah. But ideally, that’s not what happens.

Pete: Right. Okay. So I guess my next question is: we have a hypothetical scenario where AI — maybe UpTrust — is involved in this arising, active awareness that people aren’t just individual monkeys, they’re actually kind of a whole system together, and should be treated that way morally. What are you up to right now? If this is your belief, your thing — what are you doing about it?

Alex: The short, not very detailed answer is: what I can, about it. The somewhat more detailed answer is — I see my comparative advantage in this situation as bringing some of the rigor and precision of math and science to the domain of religion and spirituality. I have a nonprofit called the Mathematical Metaphysics Institute, whose core aim is to mathematize this mystical core shared across the religions — basically serving as a Rosetta stone for the different world religions with each other and with science.

Chris Did It Like 30 Years Ago Already

[00:33:28]

Pete: Yeah, that seems like a good segue, if you wanted to talk about Chris Langan — how he plays into this, or how you see the CTMU he has as being related, or not, to what you’re doing.

Alex: Yeah. He’s a good friend of mine. I think he was famous in the news a few decades ago for having an off-the-charts recorded IQ score. He was featured in the book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, in contrast with Oppenheimer — as an example of someone with a very high IQ but not as privileged an upbringing, who didn’t find the same kind of success Oppenheimer had.

Pete: Yeah. Can you give a one-sentence summary of what the CTMU even is?

Alex: Yeah — it’s what I’ve been trying to do, except Chris did it like 30 years ago already. That’s my one-sentence summary. Or — the reason Malcolm Gladwell gave, maybe — it’s ignored by almost everybody except for wackos like myself.

Pete: Sure.

Alex: Yeah.

Pete: Well, okay — so why isn’t your nonprofit just about publicizing the CTMU? Or translating it into slightly more understandable language, or something? I guess I’m trying to get at — what do you disagree with in the CTMU, in terms of the technical, the philosophical? Let me just say: the CTMU is the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe. Is that right, what it stands for?

Alex: Yeah.

Pete: All right. And it’s basically trying to do what we’ve been talking about — a unified scientific theory of everything, a rational theory of everything that includes all these religious and spiritual, mystical concepts as first-class citizens. It’s a translation layer, if you want, for all that stuff Chris came up with 30 years ago or something. So now I’m asking: why aren’t you just publicizing this thing that’s right? What’s wrong with it?

Alex: Because that doesn’t solve the problem of Chris being so far ahead of everyone — having a galactic IQ — such that, even if people were convinced he was right, I think they’d still mostly, especially academia and the scientific elite, not be able to understand him. They might shift to a place of, okay, we’re open to him saying stuff, but then — what is he saying? And if they look at his work and hear him talk, they’d be like, that’s interesting, but we literally don’t know how to interpret that.

So, in some sense, I’d be doing what I’m doing even without Chris — but it would feel more like wandering in the desert. Like, I don’t even know if this is possible. And if it is possible, maybe it’s gonna take decades. But when I discovered Chris’s work, my error bars on how hard this is going to be, and how tractable it is, decreased dramatically. So in some sense, it is just publicizing what Chris has discovered — to the extent that it’s the same thing I was looking for anyway, which I think it basically is. It’s just that publicizing work has a lot of steps in it.

Pete: To translate the difficult conceptual divergence from what people normally think of as the world. Is that about right?

Alex: Yeah, that’s right. What we’ve come to summarize the CTMU as — I talked earlier about how there’s this metaphysical intuition that there is an is, and the core of Buddhism is just to drop that, to correct that metaphysical intuition everywhere in your worldview. And that’s equivalent to the full dharma. The Buddha actually said something kind of like that.

If one fully does that within mathematical logic and cosmology, I think one will basically end up at the CTMU. If we had a couple more decades or centuries, and had a bunch of super-enlightened Buddhist monks who were also super good at physics and math, they’d also eventually discover something like the CTMU. But the CTMU is basically hard to understand for the same reason advanced Buddhist metaphysics sounds like gobbledygook — the further I went on my meditation journey, the more I felt like, oh, the Buddha is just speaking literally there. There’s no mystical — he’s just describing things as they are, and I was just too stuck to be able to see that. I think that’s the essential nature of the CTMU as well.

With Chris, I’m Never Disappointed

[00:39:23]

Pete: One analogy that’s coming to mind is — when relativity came around, and quantum field theory and stuff like that — basically the problem was that the standard model of physics feels like it matches pretty well to our intuitions. It talks about balls, and how balls move if you throw them — very intuitive stuff. Whereas something like quantum field theory uses very different basic assumptions about what anything even is. That makes it — even the math is pretty hard on it, too. But for a math person, the math of something like quantum field theory isn’t that hard compared to other math. It’s just that when you try to map it into the real world, it barely makes sense. You have to do a lot of work to have it make sense on a human level, on a moment-by-moment experience for a modern person. I think there’s an analogous difficulty — the CTMU uses very different fundamental concepts.

Alex: Yeah, that seems resonant.

Pete: I’m kind of putting you out on a limb here — but is there some low-hanging fruit you could say about some of the fundamental concepts that are different in the CTMU from just our standard, intuitive world model?

Alex: I could say a bit more about Wheeler’s conception of the universe — I don’t actually know if I can represent it fully faithfully.

Pete: My goal here is really just to give people a flavor of how it could be that something might be true — how something could be true and yet incredibly hard to understand, as opposed to what people normally say, which is: if you can’t explain something to a five-year-old, you don’t really understand it. This is the counterpoint to that. Sure, but this is fundamentally different. It doesn’t have to be exactly correct necessarily, but it has to give people a flavor. My hope is that it gives people a flavor.

Alex: I see.

Pete: It’d be like—

Alex: Yeah. One thing I can say in this direction is that — one could imagine, when an author is writing a story, the order in which the details of the story get fleshed out is very different from the linear passage of when the reader reads the book. There’s one thing, then the next, and the next. A big part of Langan’s frame is that that’s actually more the nature of reality than the standard scientific account, where the initial conditions are fixed and you just turn the crank of the laws of physics forward. In particular, the actions and beliefs of beings like us are actually determining — for example — the initial conditions, or which wave-function branches we find ourselves in, or even some of the laws of physics. Rather than those things just being preexisting, separate things, they’re actually somewhat dependent on who we are and our choices.

Pete: Okay. So just to make sure I get what you’re saying — the analogy is: if I’m an author writing a book, I might have a really cool climax in mind, where the bad guy does something awesome and the good guy does something even more awesome. I’ve sort of pre-written that scene in my mind, and now I have to go fill in the details that make it true.

Alex: That’s right.

Pete: And then the reader later reads it in order, but I came up with it in reverse order.

Alex: Yeah.

Pete: And, Chris — go ahead.

Alex: For example — a character might have to take some decisive action somewhere in the middle of the plot. But then that constrains what must have happened earlier in the plot. So there’s this sort of massive retrocausality aspect — another counterintuitive part of the CTMU.

Pete: Got it. And so, in my mind, that naturally invites me to think — if something’s been predetermined somehow — I’m sure it’s explained in the CTMU — but let’s say some plot point in the universe has been predetermined, and now we’re retrocausally making that happen. That invites me to consider the ultimate last plot point — the final way the book ends up — as itself retroactively causing a bunch of stuff. And I assume that, in Chris’s worldview, that final cause — the final retroactive cause of everything — is what he’d call God.

Alex: That sounds plausible and feels resonant, but I don’t feel like I understand Chris’s views here enough to say more than that.

Pete: Interesting.

Alex: I think he’d agree. I think he’d agree.

Pete: Okay. So that really makes me curious — because you’re like, I think the CTMU is right, and you’re working on translating it into something actionable for people who don’t have galaxy-sized brains. And it’s also the case that you don’t fully get it.

Alex: That’s right.

Pete: So tell me more about that. What gives you some sort of faith — I don’t know how it is for you, but I’m curious.

Alex: He independently generated a bunch of the same thoughts I had. I’ve learned enough — cool, deep, nuanced metaphysical insights from him — and technical friends and spiritual friends in my circle have said roughly analogous things in contact with Chris, talking to him, or with his work.

Pete: For what it’s worth, I’m one of these people. I don’t necessarily — how do I put this — you know, when somebody first encounters the CTMU, it’s like, okay, this is making my crank meter go crazy, and it’s probably nonsense. But having looked into it more, and in conversation with Chris, had the ability to be like, okay, but what do you mean exactly by this part? — hearing him actually flesh out the ideas in real time, in contact with my real curiosities, has moved me toward thinking there really is something deep and real to what he’s saying, and it’s not just pure crank. So, kind of echoing what you’re saying.

Alex: Yeah. And to riff on that a bit more — I often have the experience of talking with spiritual teachers and trying to get really granular and precise, like with my mathematician mind, and usually I’m disappointed. With Chris, I’m never disappointed.

Is It Traversable in Any Direction?

[00:47:33]

Pete: Interesting. So — back to the concrete thing. Suppose that at this moment — say this morning, the morning before you got on this call — you fully translated the CTMU into something people could understand and enact, and it went memetically viral, or whatever it needs to be. What happens then? What’s the strategic chain here?

Alex: So — this is one piece of the sub-problem. There’s also this broader problem of how you build the technical infrastructure that actually allows the Schelling coalition to cohere. It seems to me like the CTMU is going to be a pretty crucial part of that, but the specifics of how it’s involved, or what that infrastructure looks like — I’m still confused about.

Pete: Fair.

Alex: I think there are also probably various political things I could do — somehow giving more memetic power, and, to the extent I can, financial power, to the interfaith movements in the world. Possibly getting the support of the Catholic Church — the previous Pope literally said the different religions are just different languages for the same divine truth, and I was pretty surprised to hear that from the Pope.

Pete: He was a pretty liberal Pope, but yeah, I get it.

Alex: Yeah. I don’t have that much concrete flushed out here. I just know what I have to do next, and I’ve been hyper-focusing on that.

Pete: And the hyperfocus has been that translation work?

Alex: Yes.

Pete: Got it. Do you publish this anywhere? If somebody wanted to follow your work, what would they do?

Alex: I have a Substack, and my nonprofit has a webpage. One of my next top priorities is flushing stuff out and putting more out there, so there’s more work to follow, and a systematic way to do so.

Pete: Do you want to plug it? What’s the website?

Alex: Mathematicalmetaphysics.org.

Pete: Okay. And that links to your Substack?

Alex: No, it links to my nonprofit’s webpage.

Pete: But your nonprofit’s webpage — is that linked to your Substack?

Alex: Not yet. But it will. Right now they’re separate. It’ll have links to my Substack. I’m drawing a distinction between Alex Zhu and his thoughts, and speaking as the institution.

Pete: Got it. That makes sense. All right — we have a few more minutes here. One more question for you, from the chat:

[Chat question:] When you guys talk about retrocausality, it reminds me of what we usually call a déjà vu experience. And when I have those, it feels much more like stepping out of the stream of time and seeing that it’s just another construct — that it doesn’t just flow in one direction, from past to present to future, but it’s also simultaneous, past and future happening right now, and it might be traversable in any direction. What do you, or the CTMU, have to say about that?

Alex: I’m sure Chris would have very interesting thoughts about this. I don’t really know — I think that’s a possible interpretation of what’s going on. I generally try to keep my explanations as materialist as possible, as a default. Déjà vu experiences — for me, I’m usually like, I probably just had an experience in the past that had deep commonalities or similarities with what I’m experiencing now, and that’s sufficient to explain the sensation.

I think there’s a somewhat different thing — an immediate soul connection forming, if I meet someone — which feels like it has explanations in the standard materialist frame too, but the abstractions that go beyond the standard materialist frame feel, for some reason, more helpful for me for parsing what’s going on there.

Pete: It sounds like you’re trying to be as epistemically rigorous as you can — you’ve got all these things, like déjà vu and various spiritually framed experiences, and you’re trying to only reach for woo metaphysics when woo metaphysics is actually required — because you’re trying to stay as materialist as you can, to stay grounded, I guess.

Alex: That’s right. But there’s also a flip side I want to name — a lot of things that seem like they can be explained from a purely materialist lens, it may well be that there’s a ton of woo metaphysics going on, that might even be a majority of the effect size. I don’t really know how to tell those apart. That might be a feature of reality. So — yeah, it’s part of my job description to maintain this level of epistemic rigor. And it’s part of what I like about talking with Chris, too, because he’s one of the few spiritual folks I know who knows what mathematical rigor is.

Pete: Yeah.

Alex: Did that answer the question?

Pete: Yeah, I think so. We’re basically at time here. I want to give you a chance to cap off anything — closing thoughts or plugs — but it feels pretty complete to me.

Alex: Cool. Yeah, I feel pretty complete as well.

Pete: Great. Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk about your thing. We’ll make sure your link ends up in the thread. And good luck raising the consciousness level of the world, and coordinating everyone into a new state of awareness and love.

Alex: Thanks. Same energy back to you — you’re trying to do something very similar.

Pete: Yes.

Alex: Let me also plug my Substack — zhukeepa.substack.com.

Pete: Zhukeepa — so that’s Z-H-U-K-E-E-P-A, dot Substack, dot com.

Alex: That’s right.

Pete: All right. Thanks, Alex.

Alex: Yeah.

Show Notes & References

Books & works

Outliers: The Story of Success — Malcolm Gladwell (2008). Contains the chapter contrasting Chris Langan — reported by various media profiles to have an IQ around 195 — with J. Robert Oppenheimer, arguing that raw intelligence alone doesn’t determine success; upbringing and social opportunity matter enormously. Langan grew up in poverty with an abusive stepfather; Oppenheimer grew up wealthy and socially connected.

The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) — Christopher Michael Langan. Langan’s first paper on the theory appeared in 1989–90; he self-published a full book-length treatment in 2002. The CTMU describes reality as a self-configuring, self-processing language, in which mind and universe are treated as mutually constituting rather than as separate observer and observed. It has undergone peer review and publication in the journal Cosmos and History, though it remains outside mainstream physics and philosophy.

People

Chris Langan — subject of the Trouble with Geniuses chapters in Outliers; author of the CTMU.

John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) — American theoretical physicist. Popularized the term black hole in a widely read 1968 article; by his own account, the phrase itself was suggested to him by an audience member at a 1967 conference whose name he could never recall — so coined is the common shorthand, but the more precise story is that Wheeler adopted and popularized someone else’s suggestion. Wheeler is also known for framing physics around observer-participancy (his phrase it from bit).

Alex Zhu (@zhukeepa) — founder and president of the Mathematical Metaphysics Institute, a nonprofit aiming to formalize the metaphysical core shared across mystical traditions in rigorous mathematical terms. Has worked on AI alignment since 2017. zhukeepa.substack.com

Pete Michaud — facilitator and executive director emeritus at the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR).

Key concepts referenced

Schelling point — a solution people converge on without explicit coordination because it’s the obvious focal choice; borrowed here for the Schelling filter bubble / Schelling coalition Alex describes as the worldview best at interoperating across the others.

Dependent origination — a central Buddhist teaching that phenomena arise only in mutual dependence on other phenomena, with no fixed, independent existence of their own. Alex cites it as the traditional analogue to his claim that there is no is without an observer.

The is-ought problem — the philosophical observation, associated with David Hume, that descriptive statements about what is cannot alone justify prescriptive statements about what ought to be.

Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) — the thirteen-day U.S.–Soviet confrontation over missiles in Cuba, invoked here as the reference case for a mutual, trust-based de-escalation at the brink of catastrophe.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace — popularly attributed to Jimi Hendrix, though the line traces to a similar formulation by 19th-century British Prime Minister William Gladstone: We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

UpTrust is a trust infrastructure platform for the internet. Find it at uptrusting.com.

philosophy-and-metaphysics
ai-alignment
mindfulness-and-spirituality