Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…A thin client. Yeah. The brain— The brain, a brain is a thin client. Yeah. Thin client. Okay. So you’re… A brain is a thin client to this other world. Can you just lay out very clearly how radical the idea is? Because you’re kind of dancing around. I think you could also point to Donald Hoffman and who speaks of an interface to a world. So we only interact with the, quote unquote, real world through an interface. What is the connection here? Okay, a couple of things. First of all, when you said it makes sense for physics, I want to show that it’s not as simple as it sounds. Because what it means is that even in Newton’s boring, sort of classical universe, long before quantum anything, Newton’s world, physicalism was already dead in Newton’s world. I mean, think about what that means. This is, this is nuts. Because already he knew perfectly well… I mean, Pythagoras and Plato knew that even in a totally classical, deterministic world, already you have the ingression of information that determines what happens and what’s possible and what’s not possible in that world from a space that is itself not physical. In other words, it’s something like the natural logarithm E, right? Nothing in Newton’s world is set to the value of E. There is nothing you could do to set the value of E in that world. And yet, the fact that it was that and not something else governed all sorts of properties of things that happened. That classical world was already haunted by patterns from outside that world. This should be like… This is wild. This is not saying that, “Okay, everything was cool. Physicalism was great up until, you know, maybe we got quantum interfaces or we got consciousness or whatever. But originally it was fine.” No, this is saying that that worldview was already impossible really, since… So from a very long time ago, we already knew that there are non-physical properties that matter in the physical world.…

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