YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Schmachtenberger

lines on the record: 278
first: 2021-06-14
most recent: 2021-06-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I know my best model of it is a model where I tried to make some kind of predictive capacity by reducing the complexity of it to a set of stuff that I could observe, and then a subset of that stuff that I thought was the causal dynamics and then some set of mechanisms that are involved. And what we find is that it can be super useful. Like Newtonian gravity can help us do ballistic curves and all kinds of super useful stuff. And then we get to the place where it doesn't explain what's happening at the cosmological scale or at a quantum scale and at each time what we're finding is we excluded stuff. And it also doesn't explain the reconciliation of gravity with quantum mechanics and the other kind of fundamental laws. So models can be useful, but they're never true with a capital T, meaning they're never an actual real, they're never a complete description of what's happening in real systems.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not bad. Okay, I take, I have no idea if it was intended this way, and so I'm just interpreting it away I like. The commandment about having no false idols. Me, the way I interpret that is meaningful is that reality is sacred to me. I have a reverence for reality, but I know my best understanding of it is never complete.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's assuming a designer. I would say I don't think it sucks. I think it's not only beautiful, but maybe necessary for beauty”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The model of reality could never be reality. The process of modeling is inherently information reduction. And I can never show that the unknown unknown set has been factored”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not that we stay away from them, it's that we know that the model of reality is never reality. That's the key thing.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is why I say we have to be careful with taking an idea that seems too explanatory and then taking it as a given and then saying, well, now that we're stuck with the fact that conflict is inexorable because memetic desire and therefore how do we deal with the inexorability of the conflict and how to sublimate violence? Well, no, the whole thing might be actually gibberish. Meaning it's only true in certain conditions, and other conditions it's not true. So the deeper question is under which conditions is that true? Under which conditions is it not true? What are those other conditions make possible and look like?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, kind of. I just had such a funny experience with someone critiquing Jared the other day in such an elegant and beautiful and simple way. It's a friend who's a Aboriginal, Australian, is a scholar of Aboriginal social technologies. And he's like, nah, man, Gerard just made shit up about how tribes work. Like we come from a tribe. We've got tens of thousands of years. And we didn't have increasing conflict and then scapegoat and kill someone. We'd have a little bit of conflict and then we would dance. And then everybody would be fine. Like we'd danced around the campfire. Everyone would like kind of physically get the energy out. We'd look in each other's eyes. We'd have positive bonding. And then we were fine. And no scapegoats.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's always artificial because the cause of the conflict in Gerard is the mimesis of desire itself. And how do we attack that? How do we attack that it's our own desire? So this now gets to something more like Buddha said, right? Which was desire as the cause of suffering Gerard and Buddha would kind of agree in this way”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so the rest of the argument goes you learn to want what other people want, therefore fundamental conflict based in our desire because we want the thing that somebody else has. And then people are in conflict over trying to get the same stuff, power, status, attention, physical stuff, a mate, whatever it is. And then we learn the conflict by watching. And so then the conflict becomes mimetic. And we become on the Palestinian side of the Israeli side or the communist or capitalist side or the left or right politically or whatever it is. And until eventually the conflict energy in the system builds up so much that some type of violence is needed to get the bad guy, whoever it is that we're going to blame. And Gerard talks about why scapegoating was kind of a mechanism to minimize the amount of violence. Let's blame a scapegoat as being more relevant than they really were. But if we all believe it, then we can all kind of calm down with the conflict energy.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh wait, hold that question because I want to come back to it, but this brings us back to Gerard, which we didn't answer the conflict theory. About how to get past the conflict theory.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, this goes back to the question of do I see us as one being or 7.8 billion? If I'm overwhelmed with my own pain, I can't empathize that much because I don't have the bandwidth. I don't have the capacity. If I don't feel like I can do something about a particular problem in the world, it's hard to feel it because it's just too devastating. And so a lot of people go numb and even go nihilistic because they just don't feel the agency. So as I actually become more empowered as an individual and have more sense of agency, I also become more empowered to be more empathetic for others and be more connected to that shared burden and want to be able to make choices on behalf of and in benefit of.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I want to, and I'm going to keep trying better too. And then I want to across them. And then I want to say is there a way we can forward together and not have to be in war? It has to be something that could meet the values that everyone holds, that could reconcile the partial sense making that everyone holds, and that could offer a way forward that is more agreeable than the partial perspectives at war with each other.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shared pathos, right? Creates a certain sense of kind of shared bonding and shared intimacy. So empathy is actually feeling the suffering of somebody else and feeling the depth of their sentience. I don't want to fuck them anymore. I may hurt them. I don't want to behave my proposition to go through when I go and inhabit the perspective of the other people if they feel that's really going to mess them up, right? And so the rigorous empathy, it's different than just compassion, which is I generally care. Like I have a generalized care, but I don't know what it's like to be them. I can never know what it's like to be them perfectly. And there's a humility you have to have, which is my most rigorous attempt is still not it. My most rigorous attempt mine to know what it's like to be a woman is still not it. I have no question that if I was actually a woman, it would be different than my best guesses. I have no question if I was actually black. It'd be different than my best guesses. So there's a humility in that which keeps me listening because I don't think that I know fully.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I remember last night you told me when we first met you said that you looked in somebody's eyes and you felt that you had suffered in some ways that they had suffered and so you could trust them. Sure.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Set of understandings that could fulfill the values of and synthesize the sense making of all of them simultaneously. Maybe I won't get it, but I want to be seeking it and I want to be seeking progressively better ones. So this is perspective seeking, driving perspective taking. And then seeking synthesis. I think that one cognitive disposition might be the most helpful thing.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To where individuals are creating holes that are better for conditioning other individuals. Can we make it to where we have holes that are conditioning increased agency and sovereignty? That would be the synthesis. So the thing that I'm coming to here is if people have that as a frame, and sometimes it's not just thesis and antithesis, it's like eight different views, right? Can I steal man each view? This is not just can I take the perspective, but am I seeking them? Am I actively trying to inhabit other people's perspective? Can I really try to essentialize it and argue the best points of it, both the sense making about reality and the values, why these values actually matter? Then, just like I want to seek those perspectives, then I want to seek is there a higher order?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then the higher order thing would be well, it seems like the individual does affect the commons and the collective and other people. It also seems like the collective conditions individuals at least statistically. And I can cherry pick out the one guy who got out of the ghetto and pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but I can also say statistically that most people born into the ghetto show up differently than most people born into the Hamptons. And so unless you want to argue that and take your child from the Hamptons and put them in the ghetto, then like come on, be realistic about this thing. So how do we make, we don't want social systems that make weak dependent individuals, right? The welfare argument, but we also don't want no social system that supports individuals to do better. We don't want individuals where their self-expression and agency fucks the environment and everybody else and employs slave labor and whatever. So can we make...”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to screw those people because there's truth in it, right? And I'm not going to go back to war with them, I'm going to go to finding solutions that could actually work at a higher order. If I don't go to a higher order, then there's war.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The unit of choice, and so we want to increase the freedom and support of individual choice because as they make more agentic choices, it'll produce a better whole for everybody. The other side saying, well, the individuals are conditioned by their environment, who would choose to be born into Darfur rather than Finland. So we actually need to collectively make environments that are good because the environment conditions the individuals. So you have a thesis and an antithesis. And then Hegel's idea is you have a synthesis, which is a kind of higher order truth that understands how those relate in a way that neither of them do. And so it is actually at a higher order of complexity. So the first part would be, can I steal man each of these? Can I argue each one well enough that the proponents of it are like totally you got that? And not just argue it rhetorically, but can I inhabit it where I can try to see and feel the world the way someone seeing and feeling the world that way would. Because once I do, then I don't want to.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think one of the fastest things people can do to improve their learning and their not just cognitive learning, but their meaningful problem-solving communication and civic capacity, capacity to participate as a citizen with other people and making the world better, is to be seeking dialectical synthesis all the time. And so in the Hegelian sense if you have a thesis. You have an antithesis. So maybe we have libertarianism on one side and Marxist kind of communism on the other side. And one is arguing that the individual”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you definitely want that all of the dialectics would be balanced. So, if you have Someone who is extremely oriented to self empowerment and someone who is extremely oriented to kind of empathy and compassion both, the dialectic of those is better than either of them on their own. If you have both of them inhabiting being inhabited better than you by the same person, spending time around that person will probably do well for you. I think the thing you just mentioned is super important when it comes to cognitive schools, which is”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To become more self-determined is to be self determined about the environments they want to put themselves in. Because to the degree that there is some self-determination and some determination by the environment, don't be fighting an environment that is predisposing you in bad directions. Try to put yourself in an environment that is predisposing the things that you want. In turn, try to affect the environment in ways that predispose positive things for those around you.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as libertarian and self determining and sovereign as we'd like to be, everybody, I think, knows that if you got put in the maximum security prison aspects of your personality would have to adapt or you wouldn't survive there, right? You would become different. If you grew up in Darfur versus Finland, you would be different with your same genetics. There's no real question about that. And even today, if you hang out in a place with ultra marathoners as your roommates or all people who are obese as your roommates, the statistical likelihood of what happens to your fitness is pretty clear, right? Like the behavioral science of this pretty clear. The whole saying we are the average of the five people we spend the most time around. I think the more self-reflective someone is, the more time they spend by themselves in self-reflection, the less this is true, but it's still true. So one of the best things someone can do”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, thoughts that are very compelling, that seem like their more absolute than they actually are end up also being dangerous. I'm going to discuss here where I think we need to amend this particular theory. But specifically, you just said something that everyone who's paid attention knows is true experientially, which is who you're around affects who you become.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they learn what to want. They learn desire by watching what other people want. And so intrinsic to this, people end up wanting what other people want. And if we can't have what other people have without taking it away from them, then that becomes a source of conflict. So the mimesis of desire is the fundamental generator of conflict. And that then... The conflict energy within a group of people will build over time. This is a very, very crude interpretation of the theory.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now Gerard specifically was looking at when we Watch other people talking so we learn language. You and I would have a hard time learning Mandarin today, or it would take a lot of work. We'd be learning how to conjugate verbs and stuff. But a baby learns it instantly without anyone even really trying to teach it just through mimesis. So it's a powerful thing. They're obviously more neuroplastic than we are when they're doing that and all their attention is allocated to that. But they're also learning how to move their bodies and they're learning all kinds of stuff through mimesis. One of the things that Gerard says is they're also learning what to want.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To that particular time. So our mimesis is not unique to humans, but the total amount of it is really unique And this is also where the uniqueness can go up, right? Is because we are less just the result of the genetics, and that means the kind of learning through history that they got coded in genetics, and more the result of it's almost like our hardware selected for software. Like if evolution is kind of doing this, think of as a hardware selection, I have problems with computer metaphors for biology, but I'll use this one here that we have not had hardware changes since the beginning of sapiens, but our world is really, really different. And that's all changes in the software, right? Changes on the same fundamental genetic substrate, what we're doing with these brains and minds and bodies and social groups and like that. And so...”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because did we just move from the savannah to the Arctic and we need to learn new stuff if we came genetically programmed, we would not be able to do that. Are we throwing spears or are we fishing or are we running an industrial supply chain or are we texting? What is the adaptive behavior? Horses today in the wild and horses 10,000 years ago are doing pretty much the same stuff. And so since we make tools and we evolve our tools and then change our environment so quickly and other animals are largely the result of their environment, but we're environment modifying so rapidly, we need to come without too much programming so we can learn the environment we're in, learn the language, right? Going to be very important. Learn the toolmaking, learn the. And so we have a very long period of relative helplessness because we aren't coded how to behave yet, because we're imprinting a lot of software on how to behave that is useful.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, we can say that plants are mining the resources of their environment in a particular way using photosynthesis to be able to pull minerals out of the soil and nitrogen and carbon out of the air and like that. And we can say herbivores are being able to mine and concentrate that. So I wouldn't say mining the environment is unique to predator. Predator is... Generally being defined as mining other animals. We don't consider herbivores predators, but which requires some type of violence capacity because animals move, plants don't move, so requires some capacity to overtake something that can move and try to get away. We'll go back to the Gerard Zing, then we'll come back here. Why are we neotiness? Why are we embryonic for so long?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An orca can eat one big fish at a time, like one tuna, and it'll miss most of the time, or one seal. And we can put a mile long drift net out on a single boat and pull up an entire school of them. We can deplete the entire oceans of them. That's not an orca, right? Like that's not an apex predator. And that's not even including that we can then genetically engineer different creatures. We can extinct species. We can devastate whole ecosystems. We can make built worlds that have no natural things that are just human built worlds. We can build new types of natural creatures, synthetic life. So we are much more like little gods than we are like apex predators now, but we're still behaving as apex predators. And little gods behave as apex predators causes a problem. Kind of core to my assessment of the world.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and nothing else can do that kind of thing. There is no other apex predator that see the other apex predator is only getting better at being a predator through evolutionary process that's super slow and that super slow process creates co-selective process with their environment. So as the predator becomes a tiny bit faster, it eats more of the slow prey, the genes of the fast prey and breed and the prey becomes faster. And so there's this kind of balancing. We, because of our toolmaking, we increased our predatory capacity faster than anything else could increase its resilience to it. As a result, we started outstripping the environment and extincting species following stone tools and going and becoming apex predator everywhere. This is why we can't keep applying apex predator theories because we're not an apex predator. We're an apex predator, but we're something much more than that. For an example, the top apex predator in the world in Orca.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Modifying So, as soon as we started tool making, we were able to change our environments. Much more radically. We could put on clothes and go to a cold place. And this is really important because we actually went and became Apex predators in every environment. We functioned like Apex predators. But Polar Bear can't leave the Arctic, right? And the lion can't leave the savannah and the Norca can't leave the ocean. And we went and became apex predators in all those environments because of our tool creation capacity. We could become better predators than them adapted to the environment or at least with our tools adapted to the environment.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you're in LA, you fly into LAX and you look at the just orthogonal grid going on forever in all directions. And we've recently come into the Anthropocene where the surface of the Earth is changing more from human activity than geological activity and then beavers. And you're like, okay, wow, we're really in a class of our own in terms of environment.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I couldn't keep growing inside and actually ever get out with big heads and narrower hips from going upright. So, here's a place where there's a co evolution of the pattern of humans. Specifically here are neotany and what that portends to learning with our being tool making and environment modifying creatures, which is because we have the abstraction to make tools, we change our environments more than other creatures change their environments. The next most environment modifying creature to us is like a beaver”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think this is a place where humans really show up radically different than everything else. And you can see it in the neotny, how long we're basically fetal, that the closest ancestors to us, if we look at a chimp, a chimp can hold on to its mother's fur while she moves around day one. And obviously we see horses up and walking within 20 minutes. The fact that it takes a human a year to be walking and it takes a horse 20 minutes and you say, how many multiples of 20 minutes go into a year, like that's a long period of helplessness that wouldn't work for a horse, right? Or anything else. And not only could we not hold on to mom in the first day, it's three months before we can move our head volitionally. So it's like, why are we embryonic for so long? Basically, it's like it's still fetal on the outside. Had to be.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, imitation is not unique to humans, right? Monkeys imitate. So a certain amount of learning through observing is not unique to humans. Humans do more of it. It's actually kind of worth speaking to this for a moment. Monkeys can learn new behaviors. We've even seen teaching an ape sign language and then the ape teaching other apes sign language. So that's a kind of mimesis, right? Kind of learning through imitation. And that needs to happen if they need to learn or develop capacities that are not just coded by their genetics, right? So within the same genome, they're learning new things based on the environment. And so based on someone else learn something first. And so let's pick it up. How much of a creature is the result of just its genetic programming and how much its learning is a very interesting question?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think uniqueness is evolving. Think that hydrogen atoms are more similar to each other than cells of the same type are. And I think that cells are more similar to each other than humans are. I think that highly K-selected species are more unique than our selected species. So they're different evolutionary processes. The R-selected species where you have a whole lot of death and very high birth rates, you're not looking for as much individuality within or individual possible expression to cover the evolutionary search space within an individual. You're looking at it more in terms of a numbers game. So yeah, I would say there's probably more difference between one orca and the next than there is between one Cape Buffalo and the next.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the interesting things there is that their uniqueness is extremely low. They're basically fungible within a class, right? There's different classes, but within a class, they're basically fungible. And their system uses that very high numbers and lots of loss, right? Lots of death and loss.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who some people call the father of anthro complexity, or what is the complexity unique to humans? He says something to the effect of that modeling humans as termites really doesn't cut it. Like we don't respond exactly identically to the same pheromone stimulus using stigma G like it works for flows of traffic and some very simple human behaviors, but it really doesn't work for trying to make sense of the cysteine chapel and Picasso in general relativity creation and stuff like that. It's because the termites are not doing abstraction forecasting deep into the future and making choices now based on forecasts of the future, not just adaptive signals in the moment and evolutionary code from history. That's really different, right? Like making choices now that can factor deep modeling of the future. And with humans, our uniqueness one to the next in terms of response to similar stimuli is much higher than it is with a termite.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you look at, say, Santa Fe Institute, one of the co founders Stuart Kaufman, his work, you should really get him on your show. So a lot of the questions that you like, one of Kaufman's more recent books after investigations and some of the real fundamental stuff was called Reinventing the Sacred, and it had to do with some of these exact questions in kind of non-reductionist approach, but that is not just silly hippie-ism. And he was very interested in highly non-ergotic systems where you couldn't take a lot of behavior over a small period of time and predict what the behavior of subsets over a longer period of time would do. And then going further, someone who spent some time at Santa Fe Institute and then kind of made a whole new field that you should have on Dave Snowden.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am not anywhere near as well versed in the cutting edge of cellular automatas as I would like. Unfortunately, in terms of topics that I would like to get to and haven't liked, ETs more wolframs, a new kind of science. I have only skimmed and read reviews of and not read the whole thing or his newer work since. But his idea of the four basic kind of categories of emergent phenomena that can come from cellular automata and that one of them is kind of interesting and looks a lot like Complexity rather than just chaos or homogeneity or self-termination or whatever. Think this is very interesting. It does not instantly make me think that biology is operating on a similarly small set of rules or that human consciousness is. I'm not that reductionistly oriented.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we can see that something like flocking behavior, the murmuration, can be computer coded. It's not a very hard set of rules to be able to see some of those really amazing types of complexity. And the whole field of complexity science and some of the subdisciplines like StigmarG are studying how following fairly simple responses to a pheromone signal do ant colonies do this amazing thing where the what you might describe as the organizational or computational capacity of the colony is so profound relative to what each individual ant is doing.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Famous neuroscientist at Stanford just passed away recently who did a lot of the pioneering work on glial cells and showed that his assessment glial cells did a huge amount of the thinking, not just neurons. And it opened up this entirely different field of like what the brain is and what consciousness is. You look at Damasio's work on embodied cognition and how much of what we would consider consciousness or feeling is happening outside of the nervous system completely, happening in endocrine process involving lots of other cells and signal communication. You talk to somebody like Penrose who you've had on the show. And even though the Penrose Hammerhof conjecture is probably not right, is there something like that that might be the case where we're actually having to look at stuff happening at the level of quantum computation of microtubules?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now let's take that one step further. There's some assumptions built in there. The assumption is that one, what the brain is doing is just computation. Two, the relevant computations are synaptic firings and that there's nothing other than synaptic firings that we have to factor. Forgetting his name right now. There's a very”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very interesting, even with the brain. But the brain does give hardware capacities that if conditioned in relationship can have interesting things emerge. So do I think that the human biology Types of human consciousness and types of social interaction all co emerged and co evolved, yes.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do I think that it seems relatively likely that more advanced neural networks have deeper phenomenology, more complex, where it goes just from basic sensation to emotion to social awareness to abstract cognition, to self-reflexive abstract cognition? Yeah. But I wouldn't say that's the emergence of consciousness. I would say it's increased complexity within the domain of first person corresponding to increased complexity. And the correspondence should not automatically be seen as causal. We can get into the arguments for why that often is the case. So would I say that obviously the sapient brain is pretty unique and a single sapien now has that, right? Even if it took sapiens evolving in tribes based on group selection to make that brain. So the group made it, now that brain is there. Now, if I take a single person with that brain out of the group and try to raise them in a box, they'll still not be.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Higher capacities of consciousness. Emerge in relationship with. So it's not first person as a category emerging from third person, but increase complexity within the nature of first person and third person coevolving.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ontologically orthogonal to each other, not reducible to each other. They're different kinds of stuff. And so I think about the evolution of third person that we're quite used to thinking about from subatomic particles to atoms to molecules on and on. I think about a similar kind of and corresponding evolution in the domain of first person from the way Whitehead talked about kind of prehension or protocolia in earlier phases of self-organization into higher orders of it and that there's correspondence, but that neither like the idealists do we reduce third person to first person, which is what idealists do. Or neither like the physicalists or do we reduce first person to third person. Obviously Bohm talked about an implicate order that was deeper than and gave rise to the explicate order of both. Nagel talks about something like that. I have a slightly different sense of that, but again, I'll just kind of not argue how that occurs for a moment and say, so rather than say, does consciousness emerge from, I'll talk about do”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to state a position and not argue it because it's honestly like it's a long, hard thing to argue and we can totally do it another time if you want. I don't subscribe to consciousness as an emergent property of biology or neural networks. Obviously, a lot of people do. Obviously, the philosophy of science orients towards that. Not absolutely, but largely I think of the nature of first person, the universe of first person, of qualia as Experience sensation, desire, emotion, phenomenology, but the felt sense, not we say emotion and we think of a neurochemical pattern or a endocrine pattern. All of the physical stuff, the third person stuff, has position and momentum and charge and stuff like that that is measurable, repeatable. Think of the nature of first person and third person”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I guess there's a bunch of directions we could go with it, but I want to come back to what the impulse was that was interesting around what is consciousness and how does it relate to us as social beings and how does it relate to the possibility of consciousness with AIs”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source