Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Right? But you see, it’s not clear at all that the physical poking is your primary reality. That’s not clear to me at all. I don’t know. That’s an obvious thing that a lot of people can show… is true to take a step to the Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” That’s the only thing you know for sure, and everything else could be an illusion or a dream. That’s already a leap. I think from a basic caveman science perspective, the repeatable experiment… …Is the one that most of intelligence comes from here. The reality is exactly as it is. To take a step towards the Donald Hoffman worldview takes a lot of guts and imagination, and stripping away of the ego and all these kinds of processes. I think you can get there more easily by synthetic bioengineering in the following sense. Do you feel a lack of X-ray perception? Do you feel blind in the X-ray spectrum or in the ultraviolet? I mean, you don’t. You have absolutely no clue that stuff is there, and all of your reality as you see it is shaped by your evolutionary history. It’s shaped by the cognitive structure that you have, right? There are tons of stuff going on around us right now that we are completely oblivious. There’s equally all kinds of other stuff which we construct, and this is just modern cognitive science that says that a lot of what we think is going on is a total fabrication constructed by us. So I think this is not a… I don’t think this is a philos-… I mean, Descartes got there from a philosophical point. That’s not what I’m, that’s not the leap I’m asking us to make. I’m saying that depending on your embodiment, depending on your interface, and this is increasingly going to be more relevant as we make first augmented humans that have sensory substitution. You’re going to be walking around. Your friend’s going to be like, “Oh, man. I have this primary perception of the solar weather and the stock market because I got those implants.” “And what do you see?” “Well, I see the, you know, the traffic or the internet through the Trans-Pacific Channel.” We’re all going to be living in somewhat different worlds. That’s the first thing. The second thing is we’re going to become better attuned to other beings, whether they be cells, tissues. You know, what’s it like to be a cell living in a 20,000-dimensional transcriptional space? To novel beings that have never been here before, that have all kinds of crazy spaces that they live in, and that might be AIs, it might be cyborgs, it might be hybrids, it might be all sorts of things. So this idea that we have a consensus reality here that’s independent of some very specifically chosen aspects of our brain and our interaction, we’re going to have to give that up no matter what to relate to these other beings.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.