The little mermaid, romantic love, and the importance of happiness

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The little mermaid story portrays a happy ending as the Western, American way. However, the speaker's perspective, influenced by reading Oscar Wilde, focuses on the sacrifice of one's life for romantic love. Following one's heart is seen as superior to following societal and economic incentives. Suffering is attributed to caring about things that cannot be changed, and eliminating such attachments can lead to a lack of suffering and the ability to experience happiness. Happiness is compared to a cookie, initially seen as important in childhood but eventually recognized as a tool to facilitate the consumption of healthier options. Happiness is described as a state that the brain creates through its appraisal of the environment, rather than being influenced by the environment itself. The ability to change one's appraisal of the environment allows for the creation of arbitrary states of happiness. However, some individuals who focus solely on pursuing personal happiness eventually encounter a crisis of meaning and seek a more sustainable and meaningful existence.

Joscha Bach is the VP of Research at the AI Foundation, previously doing research at MIT and Harvard. Joscha work explores the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly-simulated fabric of our universe.

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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
03:14 – Reverse engineering Joscha Bach
10:38 – Nature of truth
18:47 – Original thinking
23:14 – Sentience vs intelligence
31:45 – Mind vs Reality
46:51 – Hard problem of consciousness
51:09 – Connection between the mind and the universe
56:29 – What is consciousness
1:02:32 – Language and concepts
1:09:02 – Meta-learning
1:16:35 – Spirit
1:18:10 – Our civilization may not exist for long
1:37:48 – Twitter and social media
1:44:52 – What systems of government might work well?
1:47:12 – The way out of self-destruction with AI
1:55:18 – AI simulating humans to understand its own nature
2:04:32 – Reinforcement learning
2:09:12 – Commonsense reasoning
2:15:47 – Would AGI need to have a body?
2:22:34 – Neuralink
2:27:01 – Reasoning at the scale of neurons and societies
2:37:16 – Role of emotion
2:48:03 – Happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself