RE:THINKINGHOSTED BYZACK BAKER
Re:thinking is an interdisciplinary podcast exploring ideas at the intersection of philosophy and technology.
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Peppers and so on. And I point out that if you get a croissonia plant, it's simply ongoing value, increasing exponentially and ever more value. And that's the fundamentally good thing we know about. So we want more cruconia plants, we wanna take advantage of compounding returns. Right. That makes sense. And I saw, actually, there was recently a conference in Brussels called post growth 2018. And there's some non negligible amount of academics who seem to think that growth is maybe this either inherently bad thing or at least a thing we don't actually want to be optimizing for as society, are you familiar with that group of and what they're working on and and what are they so concerned about that you think they're getting wrong when it comes to economic growth? I think I I am familiar with those groups. There's a natural human tendency to be pessimistic and to be nostalgic about the past. John Rawls also was very suspicious about economic growth. He thought the 1st generation that did the savings to sustain growth would be worse off, and that would not satisfy his maximum principle. But without growth, we can't pay the bills. We run out of money. The things we rely on government to do, it cannot do, especially a low savings, high debt society, like the United States, we need growth just to stay afloat. So the idea that you can settle into some peace peaceful stationary state where everyone's a low to cedar or, you know, in Homer's Odyssey, you know, so you're saying the swine, that's not possible for real human beings. It's either grow or probably your society will flowed or at least become quite barbaric. Right. And I think when people hear about economic growth, they maybe get a little bit nervous and they think that this could be, you know, incredibly damaging to the environment you know, like marginalized certain groups of people as we sort of focus on growth above all else, but you have some intuitions in the book and some terms about, like, wealth plus and sustainable growth. Could you talk a little bit about how your vision of growth and wealth differs a little bit for maybe what people think that, you know, economics normally think about? Sure. You know, I think
Re:thinking
Ep 4 - Don Hoffman on the Nature of Consciousness
Tue Sep 25 2018
Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 4 of the Rethinking podcast. On this episode, I'm joined by professor Dawn Hoffman of UC Irvine, where he's a professor in the department of cognitive science. Professor Hoffman studies consciousness, visual perception, and evolutionary psychology to help answer fundamental questions about the nature of mind. He's the author of multiple technical and popular books, and has a 2015 TED talk with over 2 and a half 1000000 views. On today's episode, we're diving deep into his philosophy on conscious realism, the mind body problem, philosophy of science, and more. I hope you enjoy the show. Professor Hoffman, thank you so much for coming on the show. My pleasure, Zach. Thanks for having me. So I'd like to start with a little bit of background. Why are you studying consciousness and the nature of the mind, and when did you first get interested in these sort of fundamental questions? I've I've been interested in the philosophy of mind since I was a teenager, actually. I was very interested in questions about, artificial intelligence and are we just machines and if we're not just machines, you know, what are we? And so I've I've been interested in these questions for quite a while, and I decided to pursue them. I I you know, you can't just jump into the big questions very easily. You need to warm up with some tractable questions, and so I did a lot of study of of human vision and and doing models of visual perception. And I studied that, at MIT. I studied under David Marr at MIT in the artificial intelligence lab, so that I could actually do something specific and and make progress on a specific problem. But I think I was always interested in the bigger questions complex interactions of matter or or not? And, so, I I figured I
Of, overhead for your sort of penetrating the inside world and getting them to listen to you at all. So, if you try to tell them things that are small amounts of information, quite likely, it won't get through at all. Basically, they'll go, why should we listen to you at all? And, you know, and then they'd hear something, they say fine, but that's what I already thought. And they think why you know, it was just wasn't worth listening to you. And so if you're trying to more on the outside get people to listen, you you kind of need a bigger piece of news. So outsiders are held to a higher standard. So as for a Harvard graduate, you can just tell people what they kind of expected and everybody thinks you're great and wonderful because you did it in a very sophisticated way. But if you're somebody else, it just doesn't count. You you don't exist. It wasn't anything they thought was worth noticing. So for both of those reasons, it's worth, you know, doing. And I also think, you know, academia just, doesn't pay very much attention how important things are in deciding what to credit. It mostly looks more of a binary thing. Is it at all interesting? And then they look at other considerations. And something that's 10 times more interesting, a 100 times more interesting or important, they don't actually give it a 100 times more effort or attention. Yeah. And when you say, like, a 100 times or 10 times more interesting, what do you mean by interesting? Just the the new the newness of it, the relevance? Or Well, you know, ultimately, we we learn new things because we could use them. So there's a sense in which, you know, information is valuable because it can affect decisions. So in standard decision theory, value of information calculation says, well, what decisions might this information update change? Mhmm. And information is valuable to the extent there are decisions you might make that you'd make differently if you had that information. And so, it matters. You know, for example, a lot of the things we might learn about cosmology, there's really not much we're gonna do with it. There's not really decisions we might make that would depend on that. So we we might find it interesting and, enjoy it. But from a disvalued information point of view, there's very little point in learning cosmology any