#262 Deepak Chopra: How to Use AI to Expand Human Consciousness

AGNTCY - Unlock agents at scale with an open Internet of Agents. Visit https://agntcy.org/ and add your support. Can AI expand human consciousness? Or is it just a simulation of wisdom? In this mind-bending episode of Eye on AI, host Craig Smith sits down with world-renowned spiritual teacher and author Deepak Chopra to explore the future of Artificial Intelligence, consciousness, health, and spiritual awakening. Deepak unpacks the ideas behind his latest book, Digital Dharma, and shares how his team built a small language model—DeepakChopra.ai—designed to serve as a digital health and spiritual guide. Together, they dive deep into quantum theory, the illusion of the physical world, and why consciousness is not something AI can ever possess—but it can help us reach it. Whether you're an AI enthusiast, a spiritual seeker, or simply curious about the future of human evolution, this episode will challenge your assumptions and expand your perspective. Stay Updated: Craig Smith on X:https://x.com/craigss Eye on A. I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI (00:00) Why Deepak Chopra Is Entering the AI Space (04:05) The Promise and Peril of the AI Revolution (09:47) How Deepak Chopra Built His Own AI Model (13:58) Is AI the Future of Human Evolution? (15:39) How the AI Landscape Has Evolved Over Time (21:22) AI in Preventative Healthcare (24:49) Key Insights from "Digital Dharma" (25:40) Using Prompt Engineering for Inner Growth (38:28) Exploring Human Potential Through AI (43:16) Can AI Understand Human Emotions? (47:00) Spiritual Awakening in the Age of AI (50:54) The Future of AI and Consciousness

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Either we adapt to new technologies or we become extinct. There's no choice. And like any technology, it has both divine and diabolical applications. AI can't give you the experience, but AI can create a map for you to go your route that you want to. So there's nothing behind consciousness. It's fundamental. It's without cause. It's outside of spacetime. It is spaceless. It is timeless. It is infinite. It is beyond imagination. It is incomprehensible. Spiritual awakening is to go beyond all human constructs and know your fundamental identity

• 0:42Speaker 00

  as what spiritual traditions call the soul or the spirit. But let's just call it consciousness or awareness without any human construct.

• 0:52Craig S. Smith?

  Building multi-agent software is hard. Agent to agent and agent to tool communication is still the Wild West. How do you achieve accuracy and consistency in non-deterministic agentic apps? That's where AGENCY, A-G-N-T-C-Y, comes in. The AGENCY is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents. And what's the Internet of Agents? It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other and work across frameworks.

• 1:30Craig S. Smith?

  For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for inter-agent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows. Build with other engineers who care about high-quality multi-agent software. Visit agntcy.org and add your support. That's A-G-N-T-C-Y dot O R G. Visit them today to support high-quality multi-agent software. Deepak, if you could introduce yourself to listeners.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  My name is Deepak Chopra. I'm a medical doctor trained as a neuroendocrinologist who got interested in integrative medicine.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  I have written about ninety-six books. Uh, my newest book is Digital Dharma, How to Use AI for Well-Being and Spiritual Intelligence. I have my own AI, which is called Deepak Chopra.ai, which is a health coach and a spiritual coach, with me as being the coach. And it's available in four languages now, English, Hindi, Arabic, and Spanish. And I'm engaged mostly in writing books. I'm licensed to practice medicine in three states in California.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  I'm an adjunct professor at University of California, San Diego, and Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, and also University of Central Florida, where I teach medical students about integrative medicine.

• 3:22Craig S. Smith?

  Well, you're one of those guys that are busier than I am, and I'm always perplexed at how somebody can do all those things at once and write a book. Uh, actually, I've got to ask you right away. Did you use, uh, any AI in the writing of the book?

• 3:41Speaker 00

  So far, I haven't. On Digital Dharma, I wrote ninety percent of the book, uh, myself, and then the ten percent I told readers how to use prompts.

• 3:57Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  For that, I used the AI, you know, to, uh, to give some examples of how to use the prompts.

• 4:05Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. Um, let's start with the AI revolution. I mean, you're, you've written a lot about, uh...

• 4:15Craig S. Smith?

  You know, health and well-being and spiritual well-being. A lot of people see artificial intelligence as dehumanizing or replacing human connection and see it as a threat to spiritual well-being as a result. You've embraced it. Can you talk at all? I mean, we all know that young people in particular are suffering from a digital addiction and the problems that come with too much exposure to social media,

• 4:58Craig S. Smith?

  particularly for adolescents. But you've embraced this. Is it? Is it because you see it, artificial intelligence, and particularly the generative AI that's been around now for three or four years, as different and useful? Or is it simply we can't fight progress? So figure out how to make the most of it?

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Craig, let's just delve a little bit into human history. So about forty thousand years ago, humans, Homo sapiens, took a different route from all other species in that we started to use language to communicate with each other. All biological organisms have a language for three things. One is mating calls. The second is danger calls. And the third is food calls, food. So that's how we work along with other species. But then forty thousand years ago,

• 6:16Speaker 00

  plus minus a few decades or centuries, we learned how to communicate the way we are communicating right now in terms of narrative and story. And then over tens of thousands of years, um, we actually improved our language models in the sense that we created not only narrative language, but language for biology, language for physics, language for mathematics, language for chemistry, language for astronomy, language for philosophy, language for religion, language for spirituality.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  So with the current models that we have, we have access to what it says, multiple languages, large language models. And therefore, we have access, any single human being now has access to the entire database and knowledge and even wisdom of all of humanity combined. No human being that can come close to it. At the same time, AI is built on algorithms. You know, I like to think of AI as uh, extended human intelligence. And even there, it has selection bias

• 7:40Speaker 00

  because after all, it's programmed by human beings. Nevertheless, it's the best instrument we have to tap into the wisdom of the ages and also the health span longevity. So when I wrote my book and also when I created the AI, I focused only on health span, longevity, well-being, physical, emotional, spiritual and spiritual intelligence. So my AI is not a large language model. And what I found is actually young people are very comfortable using it because they don't feel judged. And my AI is a personal AI.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  It's got my voice, it's got my mind. And so, you know, they feel very much engaged. And I agree with you that we are in a very critical time. You said generative models have been around for three, four years. But AI as a large language model has only been around since the year two thousand twelve, so it's not even twenty years. And either we adapt to new technologies or we become extinct. That there's no choice. And like any technology, it has both divine and diabolical applications. So you can use AI literally to cause human extinction, if you know how you to use it.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  Or you can use AI to create a better world, healthier world, a more joyful world, more sustainable world, a more just world. That's my dream. So when I started this project, I engaged with Sam Altman and, you know, OpenAI and he said, I said, is it worth trying to use AI for health, well-being and reaching a critical mass for well-being and spiritual enlightenment? And he was totally enthusiastic about the idea. And that's how it came about.

• 9:47Craig S. Smith?

  And the training, you're you're you're fine tuning a base model, is that right, for for Deepak Chopra dot AI?

• 9:57Speaker 00

  The training is entirely through my team, not through ChatGPT or any of the others. So it's not a large language model, it's a small language model. It doesn't hallucinate and it's very personal. It gets it gets you and me engaging. Right now, for example, even this conversation will be fed into my AI to generate new applications. It also has what we call the RAG model, regenerative augmentation generation. So we stay current.

• 10:35Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, you know, I've I've been talking to

• 10:41Craig S. Smith?

  he's Indian, actually, the head of

• 10:45Craig S. Smith?

  The tech practice at Boston Consulting Group for North America. And he has this fascinating idea of doing what you've done, but training the model on all of the religious texts of of the world. The original texts, not the commentaries and interpretations and and all of that. Do you have have you done anything like that?

• 11:16Speaker 00

  I have. So you know what I do is, by the way, you can get commentaries of the original texts on any AI, you know, and go to perplexity.

• 11:28Craig S. Smith?

  Sure.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  Chat GPT. And I think those are very good, by the way. The what the material there on religion, spirituality, philosophy is very good. What they don't do is, which I'm attempting to do, is say, OK, you know, if Jesus Christ and the Buddha and I met together and I had the opportunity to ask them questions, how would it go? And at the end of this, I'll send you three videos that I just produced through AI. Three conversations with the Buddha on the nature of reality, enlightenment, etc.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  But now I'm expanding that. I can do that with the Kabbalah. I can do that, you know, Judaic and and Vedic cognition, etc. And that's a very creative way to show the commonality of spiritual experience. How did? You know, if there's one thing in common, or two, three things in common, spiritual experience, not, I'm not talking about dogma or philosophy, but the experience. There are three things. One is transcendence. The second is the loss of the fear of death. And the third is the emergence of platonic values like truth, goodness, beauty, harmony,

• 12:56Speaker 00

  love, compassion, joy, equanimity. So I asked myself, how can we maximize that experience for everyone else? AI can't give you the experience, but AI can create a map for you to go your route that you want to. You know, there are many maps for me to go from New York to, say, even Boston. I can take a roadmap. I can take a contour map. I can go by air. I can go by ship, et cetera. I can go by helicopter. So each of us has different routes to the same destination.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  But then you look at the comparison in these routes and then you realize that all these different traditions ended up in the same destination, although they took different cultural and mythological pathways to it, you know?

• 13:57Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, that's, that's interesting, although one thing I'll probably, the only thing I learned in college is that meaning lies in difference, not in similarity. And so what interests me is where those religious traditions would differ or where they would contradict each other.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  That too can be done, which is, I'm not doing that right now where they contradict each other. I'm saying, where do they agree so we can have some? You know, reconciliation and the turbulence of the world, which is all about dogma. Right now, religion, dogma, and, uh, and you know, different ways of looking at the same situation. So if you wanna bring more peace, conflict resolution, it's important to focus on the commonalities as well.

• 14:54Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, uh, there was a guy at the very early on during, you know, AI went through the supervised learning phase. I mean, it's still a big part of AI, but before generative AI, just pattern matching. And there was a lot of enthusiasm among the AI community. It hadn't really penetrated the public consciousness yet. But there was a guy who created a church of AI. I don't know what happened to it, but.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  I saw that and Yuval Harari is also talking about, you know, the church of AI, etc.

• 15:34Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  This is evolved ultimately.

• 15:38Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, it will. It's interesting because, I mean, we're so early days, but you have your AI. I actually have my AI. I haven't put it out to the public yet, but, uh, eventually we're all going to have a digital twin. Uh, and

• 15:59Craig S. Smith?

  it'll help us explore, for those that want to explore, uh, some of these issues. Some of the religious traditions that people follow. And I mean, there's already a decline in, in, uh, in religiosity or, or organized religion, uh, at least in industrialized countries. Uh, and you can imagine that the day will come when traditional religion is, is kind of this archaic artifact. Uh, but as you said, the convergence of all of this, uh, human, uh.

• 16:38Craig S. Smith?

  Exploration, the spiritual exploration is codified in in AI and AI becomes the spiritual leader or the the the religion, so to speak, for for people. I mean, have you looked into the future and imagined that?

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Yes, I think we could call it spiritual experience rather than religious dogma. And we can draw the best from all traditions. But, you know, as we speak to you and a lot of people watching us, I'm sure there is more interest right now in health span, longevity, prevention of disease, reversal of disease, things like that. And although the information is available on on the internet on through various AIs, what I'm focused on, just as you mentioned, you have your digital twin.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  I'm now engaging and helping, actually, other physicians create their own digital twins. So I'm working with a physician surgeon in Mount Sinai, who's an expert on men's health, another who's an expert on cancer, another who's an expert on mental well-being. And then we all have these twins and we create an ecosystem of these digital twins that do grand rounds, you know, like when I was an active physician, when we had difficult patients, difficult means, you know, difficult to treat and seemed to be almost no one knew what to do with them.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  Then, you know, once a week, we all got together from different specialties and we tried to solve the issue, the difficult diagnosis or treatment, et cetera.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  And invariably, when you brought together a lot of experts together, and you had them, you know, give their point of view, somehow a solution emerged. So right now, what I'm doing is creating an ecosystem of digital twins that will talk to each other. So if you say Craig or somebody, Steven says, I have diabetes, I'm forty-four years old, I've tried this, this medication, it hasn't helped me, and could you help me? So then these digital twins get together, and they actually look at your problem in a unique way, in a way that regular AI doesn't do right now, you know,

• 19:21Speaker 00

  because I'm, I have diabetes, I'm dealing with this cancer. The normal AI will not ask you how your marriage is going along, or are you stressed about your finances? Or do you have a problem with your kids? Or how do you sleep? You know, these are the things that are missing right now in the holistic management of chronic disease. We now know that, you know, only five percent of chronic disease is fully predictable through gene mutations. The rest, ninety-five percent, is what we call epigenetic, influenced by lifestyle.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  And unless you go deeply into the history of a patient, which a normal doctor doesn't have time to do, and even AI doesn't do. It doesn't ask you about your life, about your social interactions, about your marriage, about your children, about so many things. You know, every day we go through eating, breathing, digestion, metabolism, elimination, sensory experience, emotions, thoughts, desires, memories. So all of that contributes to our well-being. And I believe that the future of well being can be very personal, very predictive, very preventable.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  And it along with your participation, we can probably handle more than ninety five percent of all issues, medical and psychological and mental. That's where it's going to go anyway. So I thought, let me embark on that, you know, I also know on my, I am in the process of putting these digital devices, these, you know, wearables that can correlate your question, your lifestyle with what's happening with your heart rate, your blood pressure, all of that. So we're looking at a very interesting future.

• 21:22Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, yeah, the wearables is a fascinating, there hasn't

• 21:29Craig S. Smith?

  really developed to the degree that it could. Uh, but, but even at the current, you know, being able to track blood oxygen, for example, or or heart rate.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:45Craig S. Smith?

  The, uh, let's talk about the book. Uh, you talk about, for example, of uh, the art of the prompt. I mean, there is an art to, to working with AI. Uh, and there are a lot of, you know, prompt lists out there. Uh, but my experience is you, you, you really need to engage on a daily basis to begin to understand uh, what works and what doesn't work and what's a good response and what's

• 22:25Craig S. Smith?

  uh, you know, a weak response. Uh, can you talk about that, about how, how do you teach the art of the prompt? Can you?

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Yes. So, you know, you're very right that it takes, you have to engage with it daily to get into how to master the art of the prompt. You start with a generic question. And then when you get an answer and you're not happy with that, you say, can you actually reframe your answer in terms of spirituality or in terms of epigenetics or whatever? And then you you start engaging with it in a conversation. And ultimately, actually, what is so interesting about these generative AIs,

• 23:17Speaker 00

  you can finally get it to engage with you in a way which is non-confrontational, but leads to a creative insight, both for you. And you realize that AI, it doesn't have a fixed mind, you know? You that the prompts, when you use the prompts in an intelligent way, you actually become much more creative, you know?

• 23:44Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  The day a Oscar-winning director called me a few months ago, when AI just was coming and there was a strike going on and all of that. And he said, you know, it seems like my chef will be able to write a better screenplay than I do. And I said, that's not true. He'll be able to write a better recipe than you can. But only you, only you with your experience, will you know how to use the AI for screenplays better than your chef? He'll know how to use it better than for cooking meals or developing better cuisine.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  So actually, it makes us more creative and it helps us. And the more experience we have in our field, it enhances our creativity and our imagination.

• 24:37Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 24:40Craig S. Smith?

  So, so you know, you active engagement is important. Uh, the, uh, in the book you talk about, and I have to confess, I haven't read the book, so I'm reading uh, a summary. AI summary.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  You can just go to my AI and ask it any question without getting the book now.

• 25:03Craig S. Smith?

  I did, but I hit the paywall, which I was a little dis- disappointed by.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  Well, let me tell you about the paywall.

• 25:11Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  So it costs us three to five cents to answer the questions.

• 25:16Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  So what we have is, you know, up to a certain amount. It's free and then, uh, you know, we have to cover our costs.

• 25:25Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  That, that, that's where the paywall comes. And now we've created something called super tab. So you can run a tab and you pay when you can. You know, you don't, you can just say, uh, run me a tab for $5.

• 25:39Craig S. Smith?

  Right, right. I see. Yeah, I, I didn't explore. And I saw that the price is, is minimal. It just, it was, uh.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  After a point, you have to pay for the service, right?

• 25:51Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, yeah. But, uh, but you were talking about, um, uh, in the book again, uh, how AI can help unravel the mysteries of consciousness. Uh, and that's something I wanted to talk to you about. I know you've, you have this, uh, quantum, uh, explanation or quantum theory of consciousness. Uh, that's, uh, that a lot of physicists and quantum physicists have been critical of. Uh, I had recently a guy named Stuart Hameroff. He's a, an anesthesiologist.

• 26:32Craig S. Smith?

  Oh, is that right? He's a fascinating guy. Uh, I haven't had Stuart Penrose on, uh, partly because I'm not sure. I could manage the conversation. Um, but, but Stuart was wonderful. Uh, talking about the potential of a quantum connection, you know, through the microtubules and neurons in the brain. Uh, between the, the physical construct of the brain and the the immaterial construct of, of consciousness. Uh, where do you stand on that?

• 27:17Craig S. Smith?

  Uh, do you, do you believe, and I was actually uh, asking your digital twin this, this is, I couldn't get a straight answer, to be honest. Uh, as to whether or not you believe consciousness is an emergent property of the physical uh, biology, or whether there is a separate but, but related uh, paranormal, para, you know, uh, non-physical realm uh, in which consciousness exists. Um, yeah, I'm just, you've certainly thought about all these things, so I'm, I'm interested.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  So here we are. You know, those who criticize me for my quantum models actually haven't read or watched my videos on YouTube on these matters. They just are dismissive because I use the word quantum and I'm not a quantum physicist.

• 28:19Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  I have never claimed, never claimed that quantum mechanics is the key to consciousness. Quantum mechanics is a model that explains experience in consciousness. So when you say is there, is it an emergent property? The answer is no. Matter is an emergent property and matter is actually doesn't exist. What, it's a human construct. So when you say matter, you know, let's pick up anything that is material right now. Let me pick up, uh, my iPhone. Okay, so this is a piece of matter, right? But how do I know?

• 29:03Speaker 00

  What this is, not through physics, not through biology. I know it through a direct experience, which is sensation, which is color, which could be sound, which could be taste or smell. So the way I know any object is through my five senses, which in turn are activities in what we call perception. And perception is an activity in consciousness. So everything that we call matter is actually a human construct for a perceptual activity in consciousness. Now you say, where is this consciousness? If it's not emergent, where is it?

• 29:48Speaker 00

  And the simplest answer is, it's not in space and time. And the reason it's not in space and time is, it doesn't have a form. If you had, if your consciousness had a form, you'd be able to see it or touch it, okay? But you can't, so it doesn't have a form and doesn't have a border. So it's infinite and it's spaceless and it's timeless and it's outside of space-time. This is a very mind-boggling idea, that people who are watching this program or listening to this conversation, they think this experience is happening in their brain. But there is no sound in the brain. There's no color red of the spectacles they are wearing in your brain.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  There is nothing that you can call experience in your brain. All there is in the brain are what are called neural correlates of consciousness, which means they are the electrochemical activity that correspond to sensations, images, feelings and thoughts. But the brain doesn't have any sensation, image, feeling or thought. In fact, if you put a knife through the brain, the brain can't experience its own experience. The brain doesn't have any experience. It's a computer that correlates.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  Experiences with electrochemicals and the electrochemicals are also an experience in consciousness. So, there is nothing behind consciousness, it's fundamental, it's without cause, it's outside of spacetime, it is spaceless, it is timeless, it is infinite, it is beyond imagination, it is incomprehensible. And everything that we call technology or quantum mechanics is a model, mathematical model, to predict the outcomes of experiments, no more, no less. So, on a deeper level, I mean, you know, Stuart's a great friend of mine,

• 31:44Speaker 00

  Sir Roger Pendrose is a Nobel laureate, what they're saying is also misunderstood. So, you know, if I, let's say, take an analogy, the analogy is electricity, okay? And so, that electrical field is powering my, my... Yep. It's powering my devices, it's powering my light bulb, it's powering my, my TV set, the microwave oven in my kitchen, and all the devices I have here. Now, if my device shuts off, let's say the light bulb fuses,

• 32:29Speaker 00

  that doesn't do anything to the electricity, okay? The electricity is there and all the information that electricity is capable of expressing through various devices is also there. So, your brain is a particular device that consciousness uses to have a human experience, and only a human experience. What you call the physical world is also a human construct for human experience. A bat would not be experiencing right now what you and I are experiencing because it experiences the echo of ultrasound. A bird navigates through ultraviolet.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  An insect with a hundred eyes, I don't know what it sees. So, where I'm coming from is...

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Consciousness is fundamental and actually there is no physical universe. There is no such thing as a physical body or a physical brain or DNA or genetic material. These are symbols for modes of knowing and experience in consciousness that humans have given names to, just like we give a name to latitude, longitude, Greenwich Mean Time, dollar, yen. These are all human constructs without which, by the way, life would be impossible. If you didn't have latitude, longitude, Greenwich Mean Time, you wouldn't be able to take a plane from New York to Botswana. But the fact is, we made it up.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  The Greenwich Mean Time is not Botswana Mean Time, it's Greenwich Mean Time. Latitude and longitude are human constructs. Botswana is a name for a particular experience. So is New York a human name for a particular experience? Once we get this, we'll solve the hard problem of consciousness. But nobody is listening because they're also interested in their models of reality and they confuse the models of reality with reality. Reality is incomprehensible, incomprehensible. You know, if you go on the internet right now and say, what are the 125 open questions in science? The first open question is, what's the universe made of?

• 34:49Speaker 00

  And the shortest answer is, made of nothing. Then the second open question is, what's the biological basis of consciousness? It's the wrong question. There's no biological basis of consciousness. Consciousness, biology is an experience in consciousness. How do you know there's a brain? What is it that knows the brain? What is it that knows the body? What is it that knows emotions? What is it that knows AI? Nobody is asking it. You know, we experience the world, what we call the world is our five senses. But there's something that knows the five senses, the mind. And there's something that knows the mind is consciousness. Now, this is my take on it.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  And you know, all those critics talking about, you know, he's talking nonsense, quantum mechanics, et cetera. I'm not saying quantum mechanics can explain consciousness. What I'm saying is nothing can explain consciousness. Because it is outside of spacetime. This conversation you and I are having is being computed outside of spacetime. Now, that's a mind-boggling idea. And people are not ready to accept it, although right now, the conversation is emerging in that direction. Simulation, that the world we live in is a simulation. And that is where AI comes in, because AI will extend. AI is not where it is going to be now.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  With VR, with XR, with MR, with immersive experiences. You'll be extending the range of your experience to the point where you'll be able to experience the world through the nervous system of a bat, or a bird, or an insect with a hundred eyes, or a dolphin. You know, because technology is actually proving, what I've been saying for a while, that the physical world is actually a simulation. It's a perceptual activity. It's a human construct for sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. So I got it out of my system.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  I'm not creating a new model for consciousness. You can create models of consciousness, but consciousness is ultimately not computable.

• 37:05Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, never be conscious in that sense. It doesn't feel hunger, or have sexual urge, or fear death, or have existential problems. You can simulate all that, but we are only a simulation.

• 37:20Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, it's an interesting idea. I mean, the one thing about... I mean, a couple of things come to mind. I interviewed Albert Hofmann before his death.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  Who?

• 37:33Craig S. Smith?

  Albert Hofmann, the guy who synthesized LSD 25. And I was at his home in Bern, Switzerland, up on a mountain top. And he was talking about how how beautiful the world is, but that it's all exists in your mind, that there is no color. You know, the color is, is a, is a

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, color is not a property of the physical world, nor is sound a property of the physical world. Nor is texture, nor is fragrance, nor is, you know, what we call taste. These are subjective qualia in consciousness and not properties of the physical world. So we navigate something called a physical world, but all the time it's a controlled hallucination.

• 38:28Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and something else I read recently, and I'm slowly getting interested in quantum mechanics. I was listening to somebody talk about the collapse of the wave function, which I won't get into, but

• 38:47Speaker 00

  You can.

• 38:49Craig S. Smith?

  But it's, you know, there are multiple possible states. And when you, in perception, collapses them to a single state, right? That's a simple way to describe it. And

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Every perception is a snapshot of infinite possibilities.

• 39:09Craig S. Smith?

  That's right. But what the explanation I heard, which really made sense to me, is that we are surrounded by radio waves. We, we, we don't perceive them, but if you have a receiver and you tune, you can tune it to one frequency and you can hear that frequency. You don't hear all the other frequencies. And that the, the, the wave function is like that. There's That there are all these possible worlds, we're tuned to one possible world.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Right, so those who are watching us are tuned into this. There are other people watching, you know, White Lotus or something.

• 39:56Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  And that's not part of our reality at the moment.

• 40:00Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a fascinating idea. However, when you were saying that, you know, the physical world is a manifestation of our perception, you held up the iPhone or AI. We're able to manipulate something outside of ourselves, the physical world, to create technology that can give an experience that's shared across all humanity. So there is, there is something outside of our perception that we're able to physically manipulate, you know, whatever you want to call that.

• 40:45Craig S. Smith?

  It's not only consciousness.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  We have the ability to manipulate the simulation through our technology. And what we call the laws of nature are the regularities of experience in consciousness. That's all they are. So we objectify the regularities of experience as the laws of nature. The sun rises every day, closes every day. And based on where we are, our premise is that the Earth is spinning on its axis, is going around the sun, but that's only from this location. Okay, so all these things are very relative and they are actually useful to codify into constructs.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  And those constructs are what we call the laws of nature. But we actually codify them, okay? Just like we codified money. I mean, there was no such thing and yet it runs the world right now. Okay, the money is a human concept. Nations states are a human concept. Colonialism is a human concept. Everything that you can give a name to is a concept. Because otherwise, that's what a name is, is a concept. So ultimately, everything is a concept. But the source of all these concepts is what we call pure consciousness.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  Now, the quantum model is very interesting because it simulates how the mind works. Before you have a thought, it's in superposition with infinite thoughts. Okay, you can jump from one thought to another thought. I say, think of the Empire State Building. Now, think of your mother. There's no connection, but you move from here to here instantly. That's like, you know, quantum tunneling or quantum leaps. Then there's the uncertainty principle. You don't know what the next spacetime event will be. Only you can predict it with Schrödinger's equation, the statistical likelihood. Same thing with your thoughts. If I asked you, what's your next thought going to be? You have no idea.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Okay, so the mind is modeling the principles of quantum mechanics. But neither the mind nor quantum mechanics is reality. Reality is just pure consciousness.

• 43:16Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. You talk about the limitations of AI, that it certainly lacks consciousness for the reasons that you've just given. And it lacks a general, I'm sorry, genuine spiritual wisdom.

• 43:37Craig S. Smith?

  Are you saying that things like empathy are...

• 43:48Craig S. Smith?

  Qualities of this infinite consciousness that we are channeling as

• 43:59Craig S. Smith?

  individual entities.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Empathy is entanglement, similar to quantum entanglement. You know, when you have a, you look at a child and you hurt a dog or a cat or whatever, the child winces, okay, and cries because it feels viscerally the pain of another. So it's a natural phenomenon for consciousness. After we get bamboozled by social constructs, we lose that. But, you know, mammals particularly are naturally empathetic, not just human beings. Monkeys and elephants and giraffes

• 44:44Speaker 00

  and all mammals have empathy for their kind, but even for other species. You can have a relationship with your dog or with your cat, et cetera. And the cat can also read your moods and knows how to, or the dog. I mean, there's lots of evidence of that. So empathy is a property of consciousness. So is compassion. So is love. So is joy. So is kindness. These are evolutionary qualities of consciousness. Now, can they be simulated? Yes, I mean, I did an emotional chatbot a while ago, helping teens with suicide ideations.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  And we intervened in about 6,000 suicide ideations. The teens were more comfortable talking to the chatbot because it was totally empathetic simulation, but also non-judgmental. It would ask questions and not judge. So actually, we got better results with the emotional chatbot than with therapists. Now, of course, in the background, we always had therapists. Because you need at some point, human intervention. And then we realized there are people who are doing much better job than I was doing. And so I stopped, I stopped that particular aspect, you know, suicide prevention.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  But it's on the way and you will see that, you know, you will have chatbots diagnosing mental, physical problems better, giving better advice. And always a consortium of physicians or health workers in the back, you can't do without them. But, you know, it will accelerate our ability to diagnose. I know a robotic surgeon who lives in Abu Dhabi. And, you know, he sits in front of a computer and does robotic surgery in Chicago. So all he's doing is moving electrons on his computer. And the robot in Chicago is doing a better job than any cardiac surgeon. So we are in a very interesting time.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  And, you know, wait a few years, we'll have a cultural, social, biological leapfrogging in our evolution.

• 47:00Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, yeah, well, actually, that was leading my next question is, you talk about AI fostering a spiritual awakening. And we talked a little bit about that at the beginning, how, you know, that there is the potential for, for everybody to explore human, the history of human spiritual thought through chatbots. And that, that because of the,

• 47:33Craig S. Smith?

  all of the contradictions and conflicts that, that over time between different religious traditions that should be resolved into a cohesive, coherent

• 47:50Craig S. Smith?

  religious thought or religious.

• 47:55Craig S. Smith?

  Theory that everyone can can participate in. Can you talk about what you see coming in the future? As as AI, what do you mean by a spiritual awakening?

• 48:10Speaker 00

  Spiritual awakening is to go beyond all human constructs and know your fundamental identity as what spiritual traditions call the soul or the spirit. But let's just call it consciousness or awareness without any human construct. That's a field of infinite possibilities. That's a field of infinite self-regulation, infinite organization and self-evolution and self-regulation. It connects everything with everything else. And you could call pure consciousness if you wanted to, God. But you know, that's a kind of a very

• 48:54Speaker 00

  dicey term to use because as soon as we say God, we have an image of God. And then it's not God. To define God would be to limit God. Okay, so if the the infinite cannot be compromised. Having thought about this, I came up with my own mathematical formula, which is zero is equal to infinite is equal to one. So you know, the universe is a is created in a digital workshop outside of space and time that is spinning out zeros and ones in different combinations. Some of them appear as Craig and some of them appear as this iPhone and some of them appear as a computer.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  But this cosmic mind, which is infinite, has the capacity to spin out infinite combinations of zeros and ones. And the difference between you and a mountain and the moon and the stars is just a different combination of zeros and ones in an infinite mind, which is incomprehensible. Now that's my framework through which I start. And then I say, what did the great spiritual traditions? Do in order to experience this blissful, all encompassing LSD like psychedelic experience? And then there's meditation, there's awareness of the body, there's interoceptive awareness,

• 50:21Speaker 00

  there's breathing techniques, there is transcendence, there's mantra practice, there's prayer. How can I take all this body of knowledge and actually say, Greg, what do you want to know tonight? You know, you want meditation for sleep or you want meditation for giving you a glimpse of who you really are? You say, yeah, I want this, I can create that for you. And then it's up to you to when you take the journey or not, but I can show you the map. And then you can say, oh, maybe I'll take this journey.

• 50:54Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, I have to ask, do you actively meditate?

• 50:58Speaker 00

  I actively meditate two, three hours a day. And, you know, I'm seventy eight plus, so I don't work that hard. Even though I write all these books because that, you know, it's just what I do. But yeah, and I meditate now more than ever on my death as my next chapter and what lies beyond.

• 51:25Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, okay. And you regard digital Dharma as a guide or is it a thought experiment?

• 51:35Speaker 00

  It's a user's menu.

• 51:37Craig S. Smith?

  Hmm, okay. I'm gonna have to read it and I apologize for not reading it.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  Hang up. I'm going to send you three AI created videos of my conversations with the Buddha. And if you like them, show them on your program.

• 51:55Craig S. Smith?

  Okay, absolutely, I will, yeah. And where are you based, Deepak?

• 52:00Speaker 00

  My body is in New York and I'm outside of Space Island.

• 52:04Craig S. Smith?

  Okay, I'd love to meet you someday. I live in Westchester County.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  Oh, we will get together for sure.

• 52:11Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. Building multi-agent software is hard. Agent to agent and agent to tool communication. Is still the Wild West. How do you achieve accuracy and consistency and non deterministic agentic apps? That's where AGENCY, A G N T C Y, comes in. The AGENCY is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents. And what's the Internet of Agents? It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools,

• 52:55Craig S. Smith?

  seamless protocols for inter-agent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows. Build with other engineers who care about high-quality multi-agent software. Visit agntcy.org and add your support. That's A G N T C Y dot O R G. Visit them today to support high-quality multi-agent software.