Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. I think too few people think about the aesthetics they build for themselves in the morning and how they carry it in the world and the way that other people interact with that because they put clothes on and they don’t think about clothes as carrying function. Let’s jump from beauty to language. There’s so many ways to explore the topic of language. You called it, you said that language, parts of language or language in itself or the mechanism of language is a kind of living life form. You’ve tweeted a lot about this in all kinds of poetic ways. Let’s talk about the computation aspect of it. You tweeted, ” The world is not a computation, but computation is our best current language for understanding the world. It is important we recognize this so we can start to see the structure of our future languages that will allow us to see deeper than the computation allows us. ” What’s the use of language in helping us understand and make sense of the world? I think one thing that I feel like I notice much more viscerally than I feel like I hear other people describe is that the representations in our mind and the way that we use language are not the things… Actually, this is an important point going back to what Godel did, but also this idea of signs and symbols and all kinds of ways of separating them. There’s the word and then there’s what the word means about the world. We often confuse those things. What I feel very viscerally, I almost sometimes think I have some synesthesia for language or something, and I just don’t interact with it the way that other people do. But for me, words are objects and the objects are not the things that they describe. They have a different ontology to them. They’re physical things and they carry causation and they can create meaning, but they’re not what we think they are. Also, the internal representations in our mind, the things I’m seeing about this room are probably… They’re small projection of the things that are actually in this room. I think we have such a difficult time moving past the way that we build representations in the mind and the way that we structure our language to realize that those are approximations to what’s out there and they’re fluid, and we can play around with them and we can see deeper structure underneath them that I think we’re missing a lot.…

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