What It Means To Be Human in the Age of AI: A New Beginning
I am relaunching my podcast with a new name and a broader focus! Starting this week on this same feed, the show will be called Cosmic Intelligence and explore fundamental questions about philosophy, artificial intelligence, consciousness, cosmology and what it means to be human in this new age. We will delve into philosophical ideas, spiritual practices and reflections on how technology is shaping the human experience. Our goal is not just more knowledge or productivity but greater insight, imagination and fulfillment. I believe that ancient contemplative traditions fused with cutting-edge insights from science and AI can illuminate the path ahead. This show is for anyone curious about humanity's place in a world of accelerating change. Join me as we seek revelation and renewal at the intersection of Silicon and Soul.
The new show will include all the existing content around spirituality and spiritual practices but also the implications of the AI revolution as it accelerates the consciousness revolution. I will continue to offer my uniquely balanced, open-minded, discerning, and grounded perspective.
I am also available for consulting and speaking engagements on AI, philosophy and consciousness.
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Find me on Instagram @cosmicwit and YouTube @cosmicwit.
Topics
The Podcast Relaunch
Who I Am, What Is This?
“Cosmic Intelligence”
My Vision & Mission
Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness
Artificial Intelligence
The Possibility of “Superintelligence”
What It Means To Be Human
Spirituality & Practices
Kriya Yoga & Classical Tantra
Technology’s Potential
Transcript
In this age of artificial intelligence, it's crucial to cultivate wisdom, discernment, and awareness. This podcast will explore fundamental questions about consciousness, ethics, and what it means to be a human in this new age, we will delve into philosophical ideas, spiritual practices, and reflections on how technology is shaping the human experience. Our goal is not just more knowledge or productivity, but greater insight, imagination, and fulfillment. I believe that ancient contemplative traditions, fused with cutting edge insights from science and AI can illuminate the path ahead. This show is for anyone curious about humanity's place in a world of accelerating change. Join me as we seek revelation and renewal at the intersection of silicon and soul.
About the Name & Broader Focus
I am starting a new career as an AI philosopher and ethicist, and, appropriately, I'm in grad school, for philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness. So, because of all that, and because we've entered this AI revolution, I am relaunching the podcast with a new name: Cosmic Intelligence. I’ll get into my thinking behind the name in a minute. But there's going to be a new broader focus alongside the new name. And that is: the existing content from before, which was consciousness, spirituality, and spiritual practices, but now also bringing in transformational technologies like artificial intelligence.
This is exciting for me, because, I'm coming full circle to how I started in the 90s, with my first career. But not a circle. An accumulating, exponential spiral. Anyway, back then, I was in grad school, working on a master's in electrical engineering and artificial intelligence. And so I'm coming back to my roots in a new, broader way, incorporating all the experiences and wisdom I have gathered in the intervening three decades.
On the podcast, I want to interweave AI and use AI as a kind of jumping off point to explore other topics, which I'll talk about in a second. The bottom line though, for me, is that I want to stress the importance of thinking more holistically about AI systems and how, for example, we can help them become wise elders. Rather than make AI some sort of Messiah that will solve all of our problems, let’s view it as a capable advisor helping us to solve our own problems.
If you're new here, I'm Chad, a philosopher, technologist, product manager, and attorney based in Los Angeles. As an attorney and product manager, I have been fortunate to work at places like Twitter, Google, Meta, and Airbnb. I am also a master spiritual teacher within the Yogananda, classical Tantra, and Himalayan Kundalini lineages, as well as a jñāna yogi of Yog-Vedantic wisdom who has trained yoga teachers at academies and ashrams across the U.S. and in India.
On this podcast, we explore philosophy, cosmology, consciousness, and technologies of the sacred through the lens of current technological developments, including artificial intelligence. We also talk about worldviews and spiritual practices that are relevant to expanding consciousness and shifting worldviews.
My mission is to inform and comfort people through discernment, wisdom, and spiritual practice. My aim is to bring a grounded, balanced, fun and no bullshit view to the subject. In this episode, as I relaunch my podcast, I will explain the pivot and talk about what I'm going to talk about.
I just finished watching the Apple announcement about its AR + VR headset, the Vision Pro, and I'm so wildly impressed by it, although it does have a lot of complicated implications. But we'll have to talk about that another time.
Today, I'm talking about my new podcast. It's been a while since I've put out a new episode. And that's because, on the one hand, I've been really immersed in this graduate program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, in philosophy, cosmology and consciousness, which has been so rich, so rewarding, so intellectually stimulating, and such a growth vehicle. But also because I have been retooling myself and relaunching myself, in response to what I see as this AI revolution that's happening. We're living through what I think is going to be known as the Age of AI.
So I've been returning to my roots where I started my whole career back in the 90s with AI, and bringing that into the things I was already talking about before — it's just been a process of rethinking some things and changing my orientation. So I'm renaming the podcast from Spiritual But Not Ridiculous, which is a name that I love, and will miss. But, to broaden the focus, I need to broaden the name. And so the new name is Cosmic Intelligence. I like that because it brings in this idea about philosophy, cosmology, and spirituality, combined with artificial intelligence. And for me emphasizes the need to shift the focus in these conversations about AI to something more holistic, and to think about not simply an artificial intelligence, but a conscious kind of cosmic intelligence. And even the word intelligence, I think, is potentially problematic. I think we should be using the word wisdom, but I think that ship has already sailed.
So yeah, the name is Cosmic Intelligence. You don't have to subscribe to a new feed; I'll use the existing podcast feed.
I have always said in my podcast intro that I'm a yoga teacher, attorney and technologist. So with this relaunch, I'm leaning into the technologist part a bit more. And again, the broader set of topics that I want to explore on the podcast include philosophy—both Western and Vedic—artificial intelligence, including implications for consciousness, cosmologies, and for humanity as a whole. And in particular, AI safety and responsibility within that AI conversation.
I want to talk about consciousness and what that means. Cosmology and the importance of worldviews is another thing I want to explore. And I want to continue to talk about spirituality and spiritual practices, which I'm referring to as “technologies of the sacred.” And I want to kind of just explore the way that these various topics can intersect. And the way that we can think about it as technologies of the mundane and the sacred.
Again, I will retain all my existing content: I'm going to continue talking about spirituality and consciousness. But I'm going to bring in more from the technology and the AI in particular. So again, if you're already a subscriber, you'll get the podcast and the existing feed. If you're not, then I, I invite you to subscribe to the podcast. And I promise you that I will approach all these topics, from my usual grounded and discerning, but also open-minded perspective.
My Vision and Mission
Now I want to talk a little bit about my vision and mission, because I think that is going to drive the content of this podcast. For a long time, I thought that going into law was the way to make a difference in the world. And I think it is for some people . . . it can be. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, it's actually philosophy and spirituality that will make the biggest change in the world. Because you can't convince people to change their behavior or change the way they feel or think, if you don't first shift the way they see the world as a whole. So again, here we're talking about philosophy and spirituality, but also worldviews, which is a word I keep saying, and I want to really get into that topic later. It all comes down to worldviews and meaning for me, especially in this age, where there's a dearth of deeper meaning and a lot of fear, and misinformation. And there's really nowhere for people to go to make sense of the world. So in that sense, philosophy is not some frivolous humanities degree that doesn't really have a purpose. But it's actually the most essential thing we can be doing; at least some of us who are inclined in that direction.
So my mission is to help people who are worried about a future that's going to be shaped in large part by AI and other technological changes, like VR headsets, and societal decay, and division and fear. And I want to help these people, help people in general, to feel more optimistic, calmer, because they're more informed, and because they're more discerning and more wise, and they have the tools, and they know how to feel their feelings. And so I want to help people connect with their inner wisdom and to create a more conscious world in that way. In short, my mission is to inform and comfort people by offering grounded wisdom, reliable information, and spiritual practices.
philosophy, cosmology and consciousness
In terms of philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness, when I reflect back on my life, I realize that my interest in philosophy really started when I was a teenager, reading a lot of philosophical science fiction like the Dune series, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein. And then it really deepened in college when I was reading a lot of books about the intersection of spirituality and quantum physics like The Tao of Physics. But my interest in philosophy really deepened in law school because, as they say, law is applied philosophy. And so I started to study jurisprudence in some of my courses, which is the philosophy of law. And I was taking constitutional theory, and I was just thinking about some of these deeper questions that drive legal policy. And then in my free time, partly through the influence of my good friend, James, I was reading the entire history of Western philosophy. I don't know how I did it, I didn't really have any spare time. I suppose there were a lot of tobacco-fueled late nights in the backyard thinking big thoughts.
Then, after law school, once I had a successful career and I started to have some free time, I started traveling to India and studying Yog-Vedantic philosophy. Over the course of a decade or two, I was really immersing myself in Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy, and that's all come to a point of profound fusion with this graduate program.
Again, I think philosophy is increasingly relevant and even crucial for our time, with humanity facing several catastrophes at once, including climate change and political division, and now potentially an existential threat posed by AI. As my professor Richard Tarnas likes to say, worldviews create worlds. What this means for me, and we talk a lot about this in my program, is that it's necessary to shift the materialist paradigm which has, in my opinion, lingered long past its expiration date.
Scientific materialism is the worldview that we're all indoctrinated into in school. Materialism is the dogmatic belief that says that all phenomena can be explained by physical processes and the laws of nature, without any need for metaphysical or spiritual explanations. It says that mind and consciousness can also be explained purely using physical processes, such as electrochemical signals in the brain. And materialism contends that there's really no intelligence to nature, just a mindless working out of deterministic processes.
I find it deeply strange that materialism still the predominant worldview, because it ignores the numerous earth-shattering developments of the 20th century. For example, subatomic physics contradicts the materialist worldview. So does depth psychology. So do the transcendental experiences that more and more people are having with sacred plants, psychedelics, breath work, and other holotropic practices. All these developments undercut the materialist worldview. But materialism continues to inform so many things in our world. Mass media still stands up and reports within that worldview, and so do our approaches to artificial intelligence, as I'll talk about in future episodes. AI systems are, in large part designed on the idea that consciousness and the mind are epiphenomena of the brain. But that theory has not been empirically proven. Granted, there is obviously a correlation between brain function and mind. But that’s not causation. This is what's known as the hard problem of consciousness in philosophy, and also cognitive science, and in artificial intelligence.
Basically, as listeners know, all these topics I've been mentioning, are my favorite topics, and I'm so excited to discuss them in greater length on future episodes.
artificial intelligence
In terms of artificial intelligence, in particular, again, I started my career in the 90s, during what they call the second AI winter, working on early neural networks and genetic algorithms applying these to the game of Go, decades before AlphaGo finally beat the best Go players. I was so early that I got bored; it didn't seem like we were anywhere close to achieving the goals that I wanted to achieve. Part of that was the rudimentary state of technology then, and limited access to datasets pre-world-wide-web. But part of it was that I was more interested in the bigger questions around AI and cognitive science. Questions like, What does it mean to be conscious and intelligent? How do people think exactly? Where is the mind? And this is where I think it makes sense that I'm approaching it from a more of a philosophical angle, because for me, these are the questions that we need to answer to ensure that AI systems reflect the greatest potential of humanity, and don't cause harm; basically, that they are aligned with human interests. And this is where I think our shared worldview is going to be increasingly called into question or become more crucial to sort out. If we continue with this materialist worldview, I think we're going to kind of run into the limits of that in terms of development of these AI systems.
After grad school, just to complete the picture, after working as an engineer, I went to law school and I worked as an attorney in Silicon Valley, and also a product manager. I was lucky to work at a lot of great companies, like Twitter in the early days, and Google and Meta and Airbnb, and some startups. So I had a really fun and fulfilling career in Silicon Valley.
And now I'm in grad school for philosophy, cosmology and consciousness to complete the spiral. My plan with this degree is to begin speaking and writing more about responsible AI, even wise AI; about questions of consciousness that relate to the implications of AI for humanity, and that kind of thing. As AI systems are designed they necessarily reflect the mentality and disposition of their creators. So that's why it's so crucial to have people who are thinking a bit broader about these questions, helping to design these systems. I've noticed that most AI ethicists, for example, who are working in AI today have graduate degrees in some kind of engineering, rather than a humanities degree. We need to balance this out. We want our AI systems to think like wise elders, not engineers. We want them to have a much broader and deeper view of the world and to reflect a worldview that as a lot more humanitarian and generous than I think, is baked into the kind of default curriculum of most science and engineering programs.
Again, what are the implications for humanity of these artificial intelligence systems? How can we design AI systems to reflect to facilitate the greatest potential of humanity? That is one of the many questions I'm interested in exploring. I'm also interested in exploring questions about consciousness. The possibility, for example, of artificial general intelligence or super intelligence, I'm really interested in thinking about how likely that is — what is the timeline there? There are so many differing opinions about this. I want to look at that.
And I think the language here is important. When we say "superintelligence,” what does that actually mean? Intelligence is so narrow. And, again, what about wisdom? Or supreme intelligence, as they call it in the yogic tradition. Plus, there are so many related questions; if you create a superintelligence, what are its motivations? What are its desires? How do desires arise within the system? Do they arise organically? Do they have to be programmed? What are the sensing functions have this intelligence? How is it connected to the world? How can it interact with the world? There are so many different facets of this that I'm really excited to explore, as well as more present-day, practical considerations like AI safety, responsibility, and alignment are important to talk about. I want to encourage responsible AI and AI safety by design, similar to how we have “privacy by design” today.
This whole conversation also raises the question of what it means to be human in the 21st century. And I want to talk about that. All this has me very excited, I can't wait to start speaking more, and even doing some consulting work around responsible and humane AI. I'm thinking seriously about continuing my graduate studies to get a PhD in some a combination of philosophy and artificial intelligence.
And like I said at the beginning, I want to continue talking about the things I have been talking about on the podcast. As a master yoga teacher with over a decade of teaching experience in the US and in India, I want to continue sharing everything I've been talking about before, and offering for the past few years, which includes Vedic wisdom, Vedic cosmology, various spiritual practices, including practices for calming the nervous system, managing stress, developing discernment, expanding consciousness and ultimately feeling more radically alive. I love sharing these practices.
This ties back into my mission to inform and comfort people. For example, this year, I'm going to be offering a kriya training module for teachers, and a mantra training module for teachers. Kriyas are powerful and transformational yogic practices that combine breath, movement, and sometimes mantra and mudra.
I am also planning to offer a classical Tantrik goddess initiation this year that works with the archetypes of ten Tantrik goddesses. Classical Tantra is a set of spiritual and philosophical traditions that originated in northwest India around the 6th century. In contrast with the Vedic tradition, which is more patriarchal, classical Tantra is focused on the Divine Feminine and the goddess archetypes. Classical Tantra is the tributary of yoga where we get meditation mantras, the chakra system, and sacred rituals. It has almost nothing to do with the Neo-Tantra that originated in California a century ago that’s focused on sacred sexuality. This classical Tantra practice that I offer is by far the most powerful practice I have ever experienced.
To summarize, this podcast will continue the larger themes that I've been exploring, which is offering a discerning, expansive perspective, optimism, comforting people who need comfort, thinking in different ways about worldviews, but also now bringing in this these other concepts, these other topics about potentially existential threats of AI and how AI is going to impact humanity. So that's the new direction.
As always, I will continue to offer my uniquely balanced, open-minded, discerning and grounded perspective, no bullshit. Between the artificial intelligence revolution and the consciousness revolution that we're going through, I think we live in deeply strange and even increasingly psychedelic times. If you look at generative AI, or even products like the VR + AR headsets that are coming out, it's like we live in the future. And the future is deeply strange and surreal. And I think that's cool, and exciting.
I'm excited to serve as a guide through this surreal new journey.
I do believe that technology can better humanity, but only with the active participation and engagement of humans who are conscious and individuated. So, rather than making AI some sort of Messiah that's going to solve all our problems and save us, let us see it as a capable advisor that's helping us to solve our own problems.
I'm available for speaking engagements and consulting as an AI philosopher and ethicist. You can find me at cosmic dot diamonds or, if you’re a millennial, you can follow me on my Instagram, which is @cosmicwit. You can find related content on my YouTube channel, which is also @cosmicwit.
If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast. My email newsletter will be linked in the show notes; I’ll be sending out some emails about related topics and new episodes and that kind of thing.
Thank you so much for listening. I can't wait to explore all these topics in future episodes. I'm very optimistic about the future. I think it's going to be exactly what we make it; so let's create a brighter future together.
