First off, a big welcome to everyone who found us through Kelly Chase and her truly excellent Cosmosis Podcast.

This week, we’re going to talk about what to do when your chatbot thinks you’re Jesus, then celebrate the recent neuroscience of lucid dreaming, and finally take some time to make fun of a new mathematical model of dark energy we don’t really understand at all.

Episode Highlights:

* A Reddit thread and Rolling Stone investigation reveals people severing ties with family members and dropping careers based on AI-generated "spiritual fantasies"

* Is AI designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities? Are tech companies creating "personalization loops" that transform our egos into addictive dopamine hits? Obviously yes.

* Mal saves us from our doomerism by pointing out the bell curve of engagement - not everyone will fall victim to AI's dark side, and this crisis could push us to better define our humanity

* Some neat new research on lucid dreaming that reveals it's a distinct state of consciousness with its own unique neural signature

* Are dreams allergic to ego?

* Mal shares insights from keeping a dream journal and how she discovered patterns in her dreams that correspond to her stress levels

* Tom shares his experience of being visited by dead loved ones in dreams, knowing "it was that person and not some product of a closed system"

* CS Lewis's metaphor of science as the gaze of the basilisk - "everything it looks at dies" - and how isolation is literally fatal. (Here’s a link to that quote from Basilisk by Paul Kingsnorth.)

* Is there a meaningful difference between the study of dark energy and Harry Potter fanfiction?

* Tom closes with the perfect dark energy dad joke.

Talk to us! Please! We’re so lonely!

Your hopes, your fears, your anti-materialist screeds…we want to hear it all.

As Jordan says, "We need something else to talk about other than the freaking headlines."

Find us at godsghostsufos.com

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