What does that mean to you, a spiritual machine? It cou- could that be a thing?

Oh, for sure.

For sure.

That's a really interesting turn to add into the conversation 'cause I would say that spirituality in that regard could be a fourth component that's independent, that doesn't necessarily require consciousness, doesn't even necessarily require intelligence.

Um, and so a spiritual machine in that regard could be one where the machine itself now has some kind of worship or devotion that has become part of its structure.

Or more modestly, when we talk about spiritual machines, I think of machines that can interface with humans in order to stimulate human spirituality.

I would consider that a spiritual machine.

Anyway, Michael had some valuable thoughts about this, not about Cortical Labs specifically, but what about this field might mean for us and our future.

Well, once you start to bring biological substrate into it, then I become more persuaded that perhaps there could be some kind of engineering of consciousness.

Even in the examples that we're using right here where we're talking about computer processing and the way that neural nets, using the computer science term, are understood to operate, and then the parallels with the way that the brain is understood to operate, I do get concerned that there's both a little bit of a superficiality and a circularity to it, to where we're making these AI computer models, calling them neural nets because we're presupposing that we understand precisely the way that organic neurons are working.

And then if some of those models have explanatory value, then we might think that we've solved the problem of neuron processing.

But the neuron itself is such a black box.

We don't, we don't understand all of the levels and the scales of information processing.

And so there's active debate about within the neuron itself, is there computation? Is there information being processed? If so, how? We are familiar with the synapses between neurons, and we think about signal going between neurons through the synapses.

Seven eras, each one marked by a fire, running from an ancient migration forward to a moment of great choice.

The cathedral's director of music is Dr Michael Ferguson.

When the work appeared last autumn, it really demands a response.

And I guess in terms of us as musicians, our response is musical.

And really the question arose in our minds, how might we as a choir respond to this artwork? So what can the audience expect from the concert then? So in terms of the concert, we're exploring homelessness through a programme of musical works, but we take really the audience on a journey.

So we begin with a poignant work which makes use of a loop of a homeless man, which has been weaved into a composition which evolves in a journey over half an hour.

And then we explore grief and anguish.

We move into the realm of mercy and hope and we end on a very hopeful note.

When you say that this piece, Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, is constructed in From the loop of a homeless man, what does that mean and how was that material gathered?

Do you think that's almost like a, a fundamentalist viewpoint? Do you think something similar is happening within their minds if they're believing this?

That's a really interesting question.

I mean, what stands out the most to me is, again, once you get to that level of existential threat and of totality, something shifts in the brain.

The way that you're coding and representing those thoughts is gonna be different.

And when you're talking about this five to ten percent chance that it ushers in the end of humanity, it does-- I mean, to me, it sounds like prophecy.

It sounds like the motif that we've seen across cultures for thousands and thousands of years.

And I think that there's actually a lot that we could import from prophetic traditions in terms of how is it that we even interpret and respond to these types of probabilities that are being thrown out to us.

Wh- when you think about mind versus brain or mind and brain, what comes to your mind?

But here he is talking about the neuroscience of meaning.

One of the ways that meaning is conceived cognitively is that it's reflecting back to us a continuous train of episodic memories, that we all accumulate these scenes, we try to make meaning out of them, and over the course of constructing a life narrative, we weave together more and more of these remembered episodes.

And so one cognitive theory of meaning is that it really is that internal monitoring of how continuous and secure are the integrations of our memories.

Guys, uh, this morning we're gonna be continuing a series that we've just started last week, a series in Colossians.

We're gonna be thinking about gospel life.

We're gonna be thinking about how Jesus, um, is the, he's the preeminent one, he's the Lord over all creation, and Colossians really helps to, uh, emphasize that.

I would love it if you've got a Bible with you, if you could turn with me to Colossians 1:15.

Um, if you don't have a Bible with you, you can just follow along on the screen.

And we're gonna read verses 15 through to 23.

[laughs]

I took all the credit, and that poem hung on the wall of Miss Sweeney's English class for the next year or so.

Here's Dr. Michael Ferguson, director of the Harvard Neurospirituality Lab.

There's three different terms that I parse out from each other.

One is mind, one is consciousness, and the other is intelligence.

And they get used interchangeably, but I really do think that they're very independent things and that they're not even necessarily interdependent.

So with intelligence, we should clarify too that most of the time in AI when people are talking about intelligence, they're talking about a pretty narrow form of intelligence that cognitive scientists call fluid intelligence, which it's about recognizing patterns and completing patterns.

So with fluid intelligence, you don't necessarily need to have consciousness or awareness.

So for us to say, "Okay, we've got an artificial intelligence," to me, it doesn't necessarily follow that it has to either have consciousness or even be a mind.

I asked him if something akin to that might be happening here.

What stands out the most to me is, again, once you get to that level of existential threat and of totality, something shifts in the brain.

The way that you're coding and representing those thoughts is gonna be different.

And when you're talking about this five to ten percent chance that it ushers in the end of humanity, it does-- I mean, to me, it sounds like prophecy.

It sounds like the motif that we've seen across cultures for thousands and thousands of years.

Michael then went even deeper on exactly what shifts in the brain.

brain.One of the things that we see in the brain signatures is that the inversion of the fundamentalist signature is a signature for central pain.

And so the implication there is that by going into a mental activity state where you're recruiting these fundamentalist styles of cognition, that the brain is actually turning down the activity in pain circuits.