Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal Terrence Deacon: Origins of Life, Consciousness, Entropy, and Sentience
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Dec 22, 2022 Terrence Deacon, a neuroanthropologist from Harvard, dives into the intriguing origins of life and consciousness. He explores the paradoxes essential to life and self-destructive processes that define living systems. Deacon discusses the symbol grounding problem in AI and how communication transcends mere word patterns. He examines entropic processes, revealing how order and chaos coexist, and investigates the evolution of sentience in plants. Their adaptive behaviors raise profound questions about consciousness and the very essence of existence.
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Semiotics and Symbolic Communication
- Peirce's semiotics describes three representation types: likeness, correlation, and symbols.
- Humans uniquely use symbolic communication, distinct from iconic and indexical communication.
Language's Unique Cognitive Demands
- Human language, or symbolic communication, requires unique cognition.
- Deacon's neuroscience research explored brain structure changes enabling this.
Language's Influence on Brain Structure
- Brain size increase biases connection development, restructuring connectivity, making language possible.
- Language demands shaped the brain over time; humans adapted to a symbolic niche.