Tim Scarfe: evaluation

Transcript context

…Science is a humanistic endeavor. Right? The purpose of science in the universe is to make the universe intelligible to us, not to control it, not to predict it, and not to exploit it. Now, you can do all those wonderful things if you like, but in the end, as far as I'm concerned, science is no different from poetry. It's that we're trying to make sense of the world, trying to give it meaning in relation to our own existence. If you'll allow the indulgence, I want to tell a little story. It's a boxing match. In the red corner, Simplicius. He thinks science works because the universe is actually simple underneath. Find an elegant equation and you've hit the real thing. Simplicity tells you that you're on the right track. And in the blue corner, ignorantio, he thinks we simplify because we're too dumb to do otherwise. Our models work well enough for our purposes, but they're approximations, just useful fictions if you like, the map not the territory. Now, both of them agree that scientists need to simplify. But where they disagree is what that means about reality. Simplicius had history on his side or at least a certain type of history. Galileo, Newton, Einstein, they all believed pretty explicitly that nature was fundamentally orderly and that finding simple laws meant you'd found something true. Einstein famously said, God doesn't play dice. And no, he didn't actually think god had anything to do with it, but he was expressing faith that the universe is at the very bottom legible. Now, Chiromuta has gone all in on ignorantio's position. She thinks successful science tells us we've become good at building useful simplifications and that doesn't prove that nature is simple. The philosopher Nicholas of Cusa had a phrase for this attitude, doctor ignorantia. Basically, learned ignorance. You study hard, you learn a lot and what you learn includes what you don't know. Now, when we interviewed Chirimuta, she'd been following Francois Chollet's videos and for those of you who don't know Francois is a friend of the channel. He's our mascot. He's 1 of my heroes And he's got this idea called the kaleidoscope hypothesis, which is basically that the universe is made out of code and underneath all of the apparent gnarly mess that we see, there is intrinsic underlying structure. Everyone knows what the kaleidoscope is. Right? It's like this cardboard tube with a few bits of colored glass in it. This is just like few bits of original information gets mirrored and repeated and transformed and they create this tremendous richness of complex patterns. You know, it's it's beautiful. The kaleidoscope hypothesis is this idea that the world in general and any domain in particular follows the same structure that it appears on the surface to be extremely rich and complex and infinitely novel with every passing moment. But in reality, it is made from the repetition and composition of just a few atoms of meaning. A big part of intelligence is the process of mining your experience of the world to identify bits that are repeated and to extract them, extract these unique atoms of meaning. When we extract them, we call them abstractions.…

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