Max Bennett: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. Do do you take into consideration the meme sphere? So, know, we've got this kind of, we've got ideas that are quite collective as well. I thought I guess I I was gonna explore this with you later, but, maybe maybe let me frame it like this. I I have this, intuition that a lot of our intelligence is outside of the brain. So it's almost like if if I was in the wilderness and, you know, disconnected from society, I would be much, you know, a lesser human being. In a weird way, I might have more agency, but, you know, I I wouldn't have access to all of these rich cultural tools and knowledge and patterns and and so on. So it it's almost like that's where a lot of our intelligence comes from rather than and and and also meaning as well, rather than than just being able to plan in the brain and so on. And there must be some kind of interplay, so culture must shape the development of our brain and and vice versa, but culture seems to be more dynamic. But how how do you wrestle with that? Well, mean, that's undeniably true. I mean, the first example that comes to mind is just writing. I mean, what would humans be if you removed the technology of writing? I mean, we would all realize we're not that smart. I mean, writing is a technology that externalizes a feature of the brain, which is memory, which brains are not that great at. We do a good job of condensing aspects of a memory. So we for episodic like things and procedural memory, we're relatively good at. But for semantic memories, we're terrible. And so externalizing that with writing is 1 of the key technologies that enables us to be way smarter than we are in fact, because we now have this external device that enables us to store largely infinite numbers of memories and translate them across generations. So that alone I think proves your point, which is, what humans are capable of is clearly some relationship between brains and external things that can be writing tools, that can be other brains, you know, sharing ideas and getting challenged. So, yeah, you're absolutely. I agree with you. Intelligence is like the it's the dynamics, isn't it? It's it's all of the low level, you know, dynamics of things interacting with each other and we can take a snapshot of language and and we might say, well, yeah, you know, language isn't isn't the intelligence, but but language itself is a form of intelligence. So I'm not just talking about the words and language models and so on. We're talking about the actual language in in our culture. And I guess I I think of that as as almost a distinct form of intelligence.…

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