Tim Scarfe: evaluation

Transcript context

…n left, no traffic lights. If your question is like same function, I say, no, it's a completely different building. It was a school, now it's a hospital. Next question. So is it or is it not the same? That, that question is the mistake. An absolute question that provides no interface or computer scientists call level abstraction chosen for 1 particular purpose so that I can compare whether an answer is better than another. Let me crack a joke for the philosophers who might be listening to this. Tazeel Shep. Is it the same or it's not the same? Who is asking? Why? Because if it is the tax man, the tax man, you're doomed man. I mean, there is no way you can play any, oh, I change every plank that you're gonna pay their tax. It's the same ship. I don't care. But if it is a collector, that ship is worth 0. You change all the planks? You must be joking. Is worthless. So is it or is it not the same? Depends on why you're asking that particular question. Tell me why and I can give you the answer. Now why, in other words, no frame within which we have chosen the interface that provides the model of the system, no potential answer. So the question is like, is the universe a computational gigantic, yes or no, meaningless? Is it worth modeling the universe as a gigantium for the purpose of making sense of our digital life? Oh, yes. Definitely. Because we are informational organisms. So metaphysics. No. I meant in the 20 first century the best way of understanding human beings today is as informational organisms. Last century we thought that biologically not made much more sense. A lot of water and sprinkle a little bit of extra and so on. Mechanism, big car time, etcetera. Not absolute answers, not relativistic answers, but relational answers. The relation between the question, the purpose and the actual answer. But it takes 3, not 2. So the computational model isn't literally true, but it's useful. The mistake is forgetting that it's a model. So the early cybernetics guys, so Weiner and McCulloch and Pitts, they knew that they were working with analogies. McCulloch and Pitts wrote their famous paper showing that neurons could theoretically work like logic gates. Now, weren't claiming neurons actually were logic gates, but they were using it as a kind of functional description. But somewhere along the way, the metaphor hardened. A lot of neuroscientists today don't say that the brain is like a computer, they say it is 1 and the metaphor became the thing itself. Now Chiromuta, borrowing from Whitehead by the way, she said that this is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is another 1 of those leaky abstractions I was talking about. By the way, there's a great book called The Brain Abstracted by Marvita Chirimuta. I interviewed her recently. And she said that 1 of the most pervasive myths in neuroscience is that we use these leaky abstractions and idealizations to talk about cognition. And usually, it's using the most recent technology at the time. So, you know, a few hundred years ago, we were describing the brain in terms of pulleys and Pulleys and levers, yes.…

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