The Future of Psychology w/ Dario Krpan

Dr. Dario Krpan is an Associate Professor of Behavioural Science at London School of Economics. His research focuses on social and cognitive psychology, and behavioural change in response to new technology.

He recently published From Nexus to the Tower of Babel: On Truly Human Psychology in the Dawn of AI, and agreed to speak to me about it. I recommend you check out the full paper this weekend.

(I’m trying to get more used to recording myself, still not used to it, but striving to improve)

Timestamps:

0:00 Stefan and Dario say hi

4:55 Extreme progress and Einstein-level ideas

9:00 The Nexus and Babel metaphor

11:20 Dario lays out full argument for psychology’s future

19:45 Iain McGilchrist and the hemispheres

23:30 Humans aren’t constant

25:45 Mathematics is well-scoped in a way Psychology is not

26:45 Nexus isn’t necessarily a route to a complete Psychology anyway

29:40 History in social science is written by the winners

33:10 Positivism vs the inner world as source of data

39:45 Scientific truth always ends up at personal truth

40:45 Mechanistic viewpoints lead to mechanistic societies

45:30 Finding more inspiration from older Psychology writing

50:40 What if AI starts understanding things that we don’t?

56:00 Collective Unconscious, Ingressing Minds, Morphogenic Spaces

1:02:15 What Psychologists are going to as AI gets better

Links to things mentioned in order:

• Einstein on his thought processes

• From Nexus to the Tower of Babel: On Truly Human Psychology in the Dawn of AI — Dario Krpan

• The Tower of Babel — Genesis 11

• AlphaFold

• Codex Seraphinianus — Luigi Serafini

• The Voynich Manuscript

• Finnegans Wake — James Joyce

• The Tibetan Book of the Dead

• The Master and His Emissary — Iain McGilchrist

• The Matter with Things — Iain McGilchrist

• The Red Book — C. G. Jung

• The Black Books — C. G. Jung

• Paul Feyerabend

• Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences — Abraham Maslow

• Rollo May

• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind — Julian Jaynes

• Liar’s Bar

• Dogs Playing Poker — Cassius Marcellus Coolidge

• Ingressing Minds: Causal, Non-Physical Patterns In-Form Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments — Michael Levin

• Morphic Resonance — Rupert Sheldrake

• The Fermi Paradox

• Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations — Nikolai Kardashev

• Robin Carhart-Harris

• Traces of the Other: Are DMT Entities Real? — Andrew Gallimore, Niffe Hermansson and Donald Hoffman

• Christof Koch

• The Entropic Brain: A Theory of Conscious States Informed by Neuroimaging Research with Psychedelic Drugs