YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Lane

lines on the record: 247
first: 2022-09-07
most recent: 2022-09-07
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'm sure it will. The interesting thing to me about protein folding is that for a long time, my understanding, this is not what I work on, so I may have got this wrong, but my understanding is that you take the sequence of a protein and you try to fold it. And there are multiple ways in which it can fold and to come up with the correct confirmation is not a very easy thing because you're doing it from first principles from a string of letters which specify the string of amino acids. But what actually happens When a protein is coming out of a ribosome, it's coming out of a charged tunnel and it's in a very specific environment, which is going to force this to go there now and then this one to go there and this one to come. And so you're forcing a specific.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've never done anything like that. I don't know much about it. The people who I've talked to who do work on it say amazing things can happen and a bit of a brain drone in a dish is capable of experiencing some kind of feelings or even memories of its former brain. Again, I have a feeling that until we understand how to control the electrical fields that control development, we're not going to understand how to turn an organoid into a real functional system.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not taken into consideration. You look at the structure of the mitochondrial membranes in the brains of simple things like Drosophila, the fruit fly, and they have amazing structures. You can see lots of little rectangular things all lined up in amazing patterns. What are they doing? Why are they like that? We haven't the first clue.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we already know the EEG and so on is telling us a lot about brain function, but we don't know which cells, which parts of a neural network is giving rise to the EEG. We don't know the basics. The assumption is, I mean, we know it's neural networks. We know it's multiple cells, hundreds or thousands of cells involved in it, and we assume that it's to do with depolarization during action potentials and so on. But the mitochondria which are in there have much more membranes than the plasma membrane of the neuron, and it's a much greater membrane potential. And it's formed in parallel, very often parallel Christie, which are capable of reinforcing a field and generating fields over longer distances. And nobody knows if that plays a role in consciousness or”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get themselves tangled up in questions like electrical fields influencing development. It seems like Mumbo Jumbo to a lot of biologists and it should not be because this is the 21st century biology. This is where it's going. But we're not going to reverse engineer a human being or the mind or any of these subsystems until we understand how this developmental processes work, how electricity and biology really works. And if it is linked with feelings and with consciousness and so on, that's the I mean in the meantime we have to try but I think that's where the answer lies.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So little is known about, you talk about reverse engineering, so little is known about the developmental pathways that go from a genome to going to a fully wired organism. And a lot of it seems to depend on the same electrical interactions that I was talking about happening at the level of single cells and its interaction with the environment. There's a whole electrical field side to biology that is not yet written into any of the textbooks, which is about how does an embryo develop into or a single cell develop into these complex systems, what defines the head, what defines the immune system, what defines the brain, and so on. That really is written in a language that we're only just beginning to understand and frankly biologists, most biologists are still very reluctant to even”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure if we are capable of reverse engineering the whole thing. If the human mind is capable of doing that, I mean, I wouldn't be a biologist if I wasn't trying But I know I can't understand the whole problem. I'm just trying to understand the rudimentary outlines of the problem. Another aspect though you're talking about developing from a single cell to the human mind and all the subsystems that are part of the immune system and so on This is something that you'll talk about, I imagine, with Michael Levin.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would see that as a higher level of organization of neural networks. They're all using the same biochemical wiring within themselves.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moving moments in the movies from when I was a boy was the unplugging of Hal in 2001. That was the death of a sentient being, and Hal knew it. So I think we. We all kind of know that That's a sufficiently intelligent being is going to have some form of consciousness, but whether it would be like biological consciousness, I just don't know. And if you're thinking about how do we bring together, I mean, obviously we're going to interact more closely with AI. But are we really, is a dog really like a toaster? Or is there really some kind of difference there? You were talking about biochemistry is algorithmic, but it's not a single algorithm and it's very complex. Of course it is. So it may be that there are again conflicts in the circuits of biochemistry. But I have a feeling that the level of complexity of the total biochemical system at the level of a single cell is less complex than the level of neural networking in the human brain or in an AI.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Based on an emotion, we can just think, I don't care, I can't resolve this complex situation. I'm going to do that. And that can be based on, in effect, a different currency, which is the currency of feelings and something where we don't have very much personal control over. And then it comes back around to you. And what are you trying to get at with AI? Do we need to have some system which is capable of overriding a rational decision which cannot be made because there's too much conflicting information by effectively an emotional judgmental decision that just says do this and see what happens. That's what consciousness is really doing, in my view.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he wrote in very different terms about it, as if somehow it's a way out of the algorithm. Now, it seems to me that consciousness in that sense is capable of scuppering the algorithm. I think in terms of the biochemical feedback loops and so on, it is undoubtedly algorithmic. But in terms of what we decide to do, It can be much more”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Close to irrefutable and not very enjoyable. I don't like the sound of it. That's just my reaction as a human being. You might like the sound of it because that says that AI is capable of the same kind of emotional feelings about the world as we are because the whole thing is an algorithm and you can program an algorithm and there you are. He then has a peculiar final chapter where he talks about consciousness in rather separate terms, and he's talking about meditating and so on and getting in touch with his inner conscious. I don't meditate, I don't know anything about that.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd like to throw something else at you which troubles me on reading it Noah Harare's book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and he's written about this kind of thing on various occasions. And he sees biochemistry as an algorithm. And then AI will necessarily be able to hack that algorithm and do it better than humans. So there will be AI better at writing music that we appreciate the Mozart ever cord or writing better than Shakespeare ever did and so on because biochemistry is algorithmic and all you need to do is figure out which bits of the algorithm to play to make us feel good or bad or appreciate things. And it's a, as a biochemist, I find that argument.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, in some sense, what you're saying is AI cannot become meaningfully Emotional, let's say, until it experiences some kind of internal conflict that is unable to reconcile these various aspects of reality or its reality with a decision to make. And then it feels sad necessarily because it doesn't know what to do. And I certainly can't dispute that. That may very well be. It works. I think the only way to find out is to do it.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are. Now, I don't imagine that a dog is remotely as close to being intelligent as an AI intelligence. But it's certainly capable of communicating emotionally with us.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. But you can look into the dog's eyes and you can see that it's sad that it's delighted to see you again. I don't have a dog, by the way. It's not that I'm a dog.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, most people would dispute whether we can say a dog. I would say a dog is undoubtedly conscious, but some people would say it doesn't”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the philosophers for a long time have talked about Possibility that you can have a zombie intelligence and that there are no feelings there, but everything else is the same. I have to throw this back to you, really. How do you deal with the zombie intelligence?”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which can be selected over generations that if you get this wrong, it's linked with this set of circumstances that I've just, as an individual, I have a moment of blind panic and run as a bacterium or something. You have some electrical discharge that says blind panic and it runs, whatever it may be. And you associate over generations, multiple generations, that this electrical phase that I'm in now is associated with a response like that. And it's easy to see how feelings come in through the back door almost with that kind of... Giving real time feedback on your position in the world in relation to how am I doing? And then you complexify the system. And yes, I have no problem with phase transition. Can all of this be done Purely by The language by the issues with how the system understands itself. Maybe it can, I honestly don't know.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Effect know it exists as a unit, as an entity. I mean, no, in inverted commas, obviously, it doesn't know anything, but it acts as a unit and it acts with astonishing precision as a unit. And I had suggested that that's linked to the electrical fields on the membranes themselves and that they give some indication of how am I doing in relation to my environment as a kind of real-time feedback on the world. This is something physical.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose the complexity of the environment and your position of an organism in that environment in the full richness of that environment over its entire life, over multiple generations, with changes in gene sequence over those generations, so slight changes in the makeup of those individuals over generations. But if you take it back to the level of single cells, which I do in the book and ask how does a single cell”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, to my mind, it comes back round to the problem we were talking about before about simulations and sensory input and learning what all of this stuff means. Life and death That biology, unlike society, has a death penalty over everything. And natural selection works on that death penalty. If you make this decision wrongly, you die. And the next generation is represented by beings that made a slightly different decision on balance. And that is something that's intrinsically Difficult to simulate in all its richness, I would say. So what is...”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think if we want to understand consciousness, that's the only question to answer because certainly AI is capable of outthinking and it's only a matter of time. Maybe it's already happened. In terms of just information processing and computational skill, I don't think we have any problem in designing a mind which is at least the equal of the human mind. But in terms of what we value the most as humans, which is to say our feelings, our emotions, our sense of what the world is in a very personal way, that I think means as much or more to people than their information processing. And that's where I don't think that AI necessarily will become conscious because I think it's the property of life.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a biochemist, the question for me then was okay, it's a concoction of a central nervous system, a depolarizing neuron gives rise to a feeling, to a feeling of pain, or to a feeling of love or anger, whatever it may be. So what is then a feeling in biophysical terms in the central nervous system? Which bit of the wiring gives rise to? And I've never seen anyone answer that question in a way that makes sense to me.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or a rock is conscious, it's just a matter of how much. And I find that very unpersuasive. I can't say that it's wrong. It's just that I think we somehow can tell the difference between something that's living and something that's not. And then the other end's an emergent property of a very complex central nervous system. And I never quite understand what people mean by words like emergence. I mean, there are genuine examples, which I think we very often tend to. Use it to plaster over ignorance.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wrote about it in the epilogue to my last book because 10 years ago in a book called Life Ascending about consciousness. And the subtitle of Life Ascending was the Ten Great Inventions of Evolution. And I couldn't possibly write a book with a subtitle like that that did not include consciousness. And specifically consciousness as one of the great inventions. And it was in part because I was just curious to know more and I read more for that chapter. I never worked on it. But I've always, how can anyone not be interested in the question? And I was left with the feeling that, A, nobody knows. And B, there are two main schools of thought out there with a big kind of skew in distribution. One of them says, oh, it's a property of matter. It's an unknown law of physics. Panpsychism, everything is conscious. The sun is conscious. It's just a matter of.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, I agree with you, but. We come really with this to Consciousness And is there a distinction there? Because what you're saying, the natural endpoint says we are indistinguishable, that if you are capable of building an AI which is sufficiently close and similar that we merge with it, then to all intents and purposes, that AI is conscious as we know it. And I don't have a strong view, but I have a view.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it would be very difficult, but I don't see why in principle it wouldn't be possible. And I agree with you that we try to understand the world, we try to integrate the sensory inputs that we have, and we try to come up with a hypothesis that explains what's going on. I think, though, that we have huge input from the social context that we're in. We don't do it by ourselves. We don't kind of blunder around in a universe by ourselves and understand the whole thing. We're told by the people around us what things are and what they do. And language is coming in here and so on. Have to be an extremely impressive simulation to simulate all of that.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't. I mean, this is not what I work on, so I don't know how close to it we are. The gain one works. But I agree with you that, yeah, I'm not sure that it's a morally justifiable thing to do, but is it possible in principle?”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How good does a simulation need to be to be able to do that? Well, it needs to convince you that all your sensory input is correct and accurate and joins up and makes sense. Now, that sensory input is not something that we're born with. We're born with a sense of touch. We're born with eyes and so on, but we don't know how to use them. We don't know what to make of them. We go around, we bump into trees. We cry a lot. We're in pain a lot. We're basically booting up the system so that it can make head or tail of the sensory input that it's getting. And that sensory import is not just a one-way flux of things. It's also you have to walk into things. You have to hear things. You have to put it together. Now, if you've got just babies in the matrix who are slotted into this, I don't think they have that kind of sensory input. I don't think they would have any way to make sense of New York as a world that they're part of. The brain is...”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I suppose the issue with the matrix, I imagine that it's possible to To delude the mind sufficiently that you genuinely in that way do think that you are interacting with the real world when in fact the whole thing's a simulation.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some kind of, let's say, computer construction of reality, I'm not in my ground here, but if you construct the laws that this is what reality is inside this, then you play by those laws.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would hesitate to say it's not real because it's precisely how we do understand the world. We have eyes, but if you keep someone in apparently this kind of thing happens, someone kept in a dark room for five years or something like that, they never see properly again because neural wiring that underpins how we interpret vision never developed. You need when you watch a child develop, it walks into a table, it bangs its head on the table and it hurts. And now you've got two inputs. You've got one pain from this sharp edge and number two, you probably touched it and realized it's there. It's a sharp edge and you've got the visual input and you put the three things together and think, I don't want to walk into a table again. So you're learning and it's a limited reality, but it's a true reality. And if you don't learn that properly, then you will get eaten, you will get hit by a bus, you will not survive. And same if you're, if...”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in either environment, I wouldn't deny that you could have exactly the world that you talk about. And it would be very difficult to, you know, the idea in matrix movies and so on that the whole world is completely... Construction and we're fundamentally deluded. It's difficult to say that's impossible or couldn't happen and certainly we construct in our minds what the outside world is. But we do it on input and that input”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not sure it's an illusion so much as a bubble. I mean, we have a sensory input, which is a fraction of what we could have a sensory input on. And we interpret it in terms of what's useful for us to know to stay alive. So, yes, it's an illusion in that sense. The tree is physically there. And if you walk into that tree,”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Organisms that have got a lens and a retina and a cornea and so on. Basically, they've got a camera type eye in a single cell. They don't have a brain. What they understand about their world is impossible to say, but they're capable of coming up with the same structures to do so. So I suppose then is that once you've got things like eyes, then you have a big driving pressure on the central nervous system to figure out what it all means. And we come around to your other point about manipulation, sensory input, and so on. Now you have a huge requirement to understand what your environment is and what it means and how it reacts and how you should run away and where you should stay put.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to evolve an eye. But once you have one, then there's nowhere to hide. And again, we're back to predator-prey relationships. We're back to all the benefits that being able to see brings you. And if you think, you know, philosophically what bats are doing with eco-location and so on, I have no idea, but I suspect that they form an image of the world in pretty much the same way that we do. It's just a matter of mental reconstruction. So I suppose the other thing about sight, there are single-celled”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Movement. I mean, again, extremely important going back to the origin of animals, the Cambrian explosion, where suddenly you're seeing eyes in the fossil record. It's not necessarily, again, lots of people historically have said what use is half an eye. And you can go in a series of steps from a light sensitive spot on a flat piece of tissue to an eyeball with a lens and so on if you assume no more than I don't remember this. This was a specific model that I have in mind, but it was a 1% change or half a percent change for each generation. How long would it take to evolve an eye as we know it? And the answer is half a million years. It doesn't have to take long. That's not how evolution works. That's not an answer to the question. It just shows you can reconstruct the steps and you can work out roughly how it can work. So it's not that big a deal.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why did the Yanothils disappear? I don't know. I mean, I suspect that they suspect they were probably less violent, less clever, less populous, less willing to fight. I don't know. I mean, I think it drove them to extinction at the margins of Europe.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they're much easier to sequence. You've got many more copies of these things, and you can sequence them very quickly. But the problem is because they go down only the maternal line from mother to daughter, your mitochondrial DNA and mine is going nowhere. It doesn't matter any kids we have. They get their mother's mitochondrial DNA, except in very, very rare and strange circumstances. And so it tells a different story, and it's not a story which is easy to reconcile always. And what it seems to suggest to my mind at least is that there was one way traffic of genes, probably going from humans into Neanderthals rather than the other way around.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's got genes that were considered to be effectively trivial because they did a very narrowly defined job, but they're not trivial in the sense that that narrowly defined job is about everything that is being alive.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've talked before about the mitochondria, which are the power packs in cells. These are the pared down control units is their DNA. So it's passed on by the mother only. And in the egg cell, we might have half a million copies of mitochondrial DNA. There's only 37 genes left, and they do basically the control unit of energy production. That's what it's doing.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the first full genomes were sequenced maybe 10 years after that, and they showed plenty of signs of mating between. So the mitochondrial DNA effectively says no mating. And the nuclear genes say, yeah, lots of mating. But we don't know.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, pretty much. There's some interesting. The first sequences that came along were in mitochondrial DNA. And that was back to about 2002 or thereabouts. What was found was that Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA was very different to human mitochondrial DNA. That's so interesting. You can do a clock on it and it said the divergent state was about 600,000 years ago or something like that. So not so long ago.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look outside humans and you look at chimps and bonabos and so on, and they're very, very different structures to society. Chimps tend to have an aggressive alpha male type structure and bonabos. It's basically a female society where the males are predominantly excluded and only brought in at the behest of the We have a lot in common with both Both of those groups.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have both, and we have a constant kind of vying between the two sides. We really do care about other people, beyond our families, beyond our immediate people. We care about society and society that we live in. And you could say that's a drawing towards socialism or communism. On the other side, we really do care about ourselves. We really do care about our families, about working for something that we gain from. And that's the capitalist side of it. They're both really deeply ingrained in human nature. In terms of violence, and interactions between groups, yes, all this dynamic of if you're interacting between groups, you can be certain that they're going to be burning. each other and all kinds of physical violent interactions as well, which will drive the kind of cleverness of how do you resist this, let's build a tower. What are we going to do to prevent being overrun by those marauding gangs from over there?”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think one of the most wonderful things about humans is where all of those things. I mean, we are deeply social as a species. And we're also deeply selfish. And it seems to me the conflict between capitalism and communism is really just two aspects of human nature, both of which are both.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often productive really matters. But in human terms I don't know what the actual factors were that were driving a large brain, but you can talk about fire, you can talk about... Tool use, you can talk about language, and none of them seem to correlate especially well with the actual known trajectory of human evolution in terms of cave art and these kind of things. That seems to work much better just with population density in number of interactions between different groups, all of which is really about... Human interaction, human interactions, and the complexity of those.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. The interactions really. And there's some guy at UCL called Mark Thomas, who's done a lot of really beautiful work, I think, on this kind of question. So I talked to him every now and then. So my views are influenced by him. But a lot seems to depend on population density, that the more interactions you have going on between different groups, the more transfer of information, if you like, between groups, people moving from one group to another group, almost like lateral gene transfer in bacteria, the more expertise you're able to develop and maintain, the more culturally complex your society can become. And groups that have become detached, like on Easter Island, for example, very often degenerate in terms of the complexity of their civilization.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A distance is all about the brain, and where's the brain and morality coming from? It seems to me to be all about groups, human groups and interactions between groups”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source