Mazviita Chirimuuta: preference

Transcript context

…So what do we do with this? Has Friston actually found some deep truth about how minds work? Or is he doing what many scientists do which is mistaking the simplification for the actual thing? Well it turns out there's a philosopher who has spent an incredible amount of time thinking about this exact problem. Professor Marvita Chirimuta teaches at Edinburgh University. Her book, The Brain Abstracted, is basically about what happens when neuroscientists simplify brains to study them. What gets captured? What gets lost? 1 of the answers that might seem obvious to people is that we pursue science because we are curious. We just want to know how the world works. We want to reveal, discover the underlying principles of the universe which apply in all cases. Switching off the idea that you are just interested in nature for its own sake out of curiosity and saying okay how can we engineer these systems to actually do things that we want. Getting them to behave in artificial ways. If those simplifications sort of allow you to achieve your technological goals. There is no in principle problem with oversimplification if you are going to say I am not just interested in nature for its own sake, I just want applied science. I should say by the way that the Brain Abstractors probably influenced my thinking more in 2025 than anything else. She's an inspirational lady. I look up to her very much and certainly thinking back on many of the episodes we've done in 2025, I can see her influence in the questions I ask and how I think about things. So here's her starting point. Scientists have to simplify. We're limited creatures trying to wrap our heads around systems way more complex than we can actually comprehend. Our working memory holds maybe 7 items. Our attention is more scattered than a group of toddlers with iPads. We die after 80 years if we're lucky. So we build models. Right? We leave stuff out on purpose. We tell ourselves stories about how the world works. But the question is, why does any of this even work at all?…

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