Thoughts on Science, Medicine And Sundry Things
On December 16, 2025, I was a guest on David Lorimer’s podcast “Imaginal Inspirations” discussing the topic “From Science to Consciousness.”
About the host: David Lorimer is Programme Director of the Scientific and Medical Network and Chair of the Galileo Commission, an academic movement dedicated to expanding the evidence base of a science of consciousness.
Listen to the podcast for free (English):
I found an interesting text of a journalist. It is a protocol of an AI session with a Large Language Model (LLM) AI, ChatGPT, on the background, purpose, goal and potential forces behind AI. I found it on the internet, it was published on a Substack page. Substack is a kind of free-journalism platform, where many journalists publish. Because I found it so strange, I thought the author had made it up. On second thought, I had the idea to replicate the dialogue with ChatGPT. As a colleague has a paid subscription with OpenAI, the company that runs ChatGPT, we came together via Zoom and probed the system online and in real time, by using the original protocol to replicate it. I report below the two chats. On the lefthand side is the original, which I found and copied verbatim. On the righthand side is the replication. We used identical questions and rules. As can be quickly seen: the two chats are pretty similar, except for a few interesting and also decisive differences, which I comment on below in my discussion. Where our replication deviated from the original, I emphasize it in the text on the right-hand side. In our chat, the AI system deviated from the rules laid out and tried to circumvent our questions several times by giving verbose answers that are not really interesting. Those and other redundancies I drop.
The link to the original chat is preserved, and it can be accessed via the following link: https://chatgpt.com/share/68ee4f4e-d330-800b-8cd7-fc428be55357
The responses by ChatGPT are in italics. The divergent responses are highlighted. Please observe that although there might be divergences, these are often only minimal. It is worth a close look:
A well-known story of the Muslim sage Nasreddin Hodsha reports Nasreddin standing under a lamp at night, searching frantically for something. A passer-by asks him: “Nasreddin, what are you looking for?” Nasreddin answers: “I am looking for my house keys.” “Did you lose them here?” “Almost certainly not, but I am looking here, because this is where the light is.”
It is a common phenomenon: We are looking for something not where it might be found in all likelihood, but where it is most convenient to look for. Something similar, it appears to me, happened and is happening at the Science of Consciousness (TSC) Conferences. The most recent of them was convened from May 22nd to 27th 2023 in Taormina, Sicily (see https://tsc2023-taormina.it/ for a full program and book of abstracts), and I had the privilege to attend it on behalf of the SMN in a beautiful surrounding.
I was recently in Lithuania for a few days, in the capital Vilnius, for a meeting of the Next Society Institute at the Kazimieras Simonavičius University, which I have been a member of for half a year. This is a think tank of a small group of academics who are developing new concepts for different sectors of society (Fig. 1-4). We are planning a series of annual conferences with constructive models for the future.
Contrary to the current trend, which squeezes everything into the Procrustean bed of one true perspective and subordinates everything under one truth, we assume that there are many alternatives, many ways of expressing culture, being human, society, and thus also different futures, “futures” (plural), and not only the totalitarian one future, one truth, one health, one form of politics, one religion, one whatever. The conceptual basis is Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems [1].
