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Neuroscientist Patrick House - How to Make Sense of Consciousness

How To Academy Podcast

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Nature's Innovation

The mind is often described using the most complex technology of the time, such as steam engines, electricity, quantum mechanics, or machine learning. However, every discovery in nature, like electricity or quantum mechanics, is already utilized by biology for hundreds of millions of years. Even if humans are advanced machine learning systems, it took a long time for us to reach that level of complexity.

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Speaker 1
And there's a bunch of examples in the book, but fundamentally, yeah, that's the only driving metaphor that I find. And what I find interesting about the history and the way in which people have explained the mind is that, ultimately, I mean, there's this kind of truism that ultimately, we tend to describe the mind or describe consciousness in terms of the most complicated technology of the time, right? This is like, it's a steam engine here, it's a thermodynamic thing here, it's electricity. Now it's electricity, once we have electricity, now it's a bit quantum, now that we have quantum. Now it's a bit like machine learning. Now that we have machine learning. And I actually like to flip this story on its head. Because to me, what's so remarkable about this is that every single time we seem to discover something out in nature, something beautiful that describes some phenomena like electricity, like quantum mechanics, like thermodynamics. turn inward back to biology and discover that biology is already using it and has been using it for hundreds of millions of years. We discovered it in 1890 or whatever, but it's already in us. Biology is already using it to its fullest extent and understanding it. If it is the case that, okay, we're just fancy machine learning systems, say, like the AI companies want us to believe of today, think how long it took us to get there.

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