Adam Becker: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. I mean, I was inspired by James Lovelock's Gaia theory, which was, you know, kind of stimulating people to think about the Earth as a system rather than us as individuals. Yeah. There's a bit of a spectrum here. Right? Because some of them, perhaps in this case, they think that us as individual bodies, we can kind of disconnect ourselves from the system and go somewhere else. But it goes even further than that in Silicon Valley. They some of them think of us as causal patterns or as programs, memetic programs that could be uploaded to computers and and whatnot. But you you see you see the pattern though that what they're doing is is they're increasingly abstracting, us and our place in the system that that we exist in. Absolutely. Yeah. No. They don't want to be bodies. They want to be systems of pure information. And in that sense, you know, what is it? Adrian Daub, I think, said that Silicon Valley is a place that likes to pretend that it doesn't have any history. And, and I don't even think he was the 1st 1 to say that. But, you know, there's a tendency to ignore prior art in these areas and for, you know, this sort of dismissal of the body. I mean, this is an idea that goes back over February. Right? You you see shades of this in Plato and stuff like that. But, but the fact is that we are our bodies. You know, you wanna look at the best science available. We are not our We are not patterns in our brains. We are not even our brains. We are our bodies in our environment. And there is no good reason to think that you can abstract a human consciousness out of our physical selves. You know, I I almost said physical substrate. Right? But that's a word and a phrase that comes from this computational analogy for cognition and I think there's been a real kind of ignorance or amnesia or just convenient forgetting that it's an analogy. Right? Cognition is not computation. Computation has some features that are like cognition and the brain does things that look kind of computer ish under certain circumstances but neural networks on a computer are not the same as what our neurons do. Not even close. Absolutely. So we're getting into functionalism here, you know, which is this idea that essentially you can describe our our function and behavior, you know, maybe to a very high resolution in a computer program. And the important move here that they make because they're they're not saying that the metaphor is the same thing. They're saying that the the description could be alternatively physically instantiated in silicon, and that would no longer matter. Yes. That's right. And…

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