Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
21 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I’m not saying it’s immutable. So I think Plato may or may not have thought that these forms are eternal and unchanging.”
02 / belief
“The same way that non-physical facts of physics haunt physical objects is basically how I think different kinds of patterns that we call kinds of minds are manifesting through our… through interfaces like brains.”
03 / belief
“Sort of. I mean, Descartes got some stuff wrong, I think. But one thing that he did get right, the fact that you actually don’t know what you can poke and what you can’t poke.”
04 / belief
“I think that we have an incredible degree of mind blindness to all of the very alien kinds of minds around us, and I think that, you know, looking for aliens off the Earth is awesome and whatever.”
05 / belief
“I mean, I hate to bring up the Platonic space again, but I mean, if you talk to any creative, that’s basically what they’ll tell you, right? And certainly that’s been my experience, so I feel like it’s a collaboration.”
06 / belief
“However, we have to be humble about these things and recognize that all of those IQ metrics that we’ve come up with so far were derived from an N of one example of the evolutionary lineage here on Earth, and so we are probably missing a lot of them. So I would say we have plenty to start with.”
07 / belief
“For the interface. So if you could… So here’s my prediction for a Star Trek transporter: For whatever reason, right now, your brain and body are very attuned and attractive to a particular pattern, which is your set of psychological propensities.”
08 / belief
“I don’t think we’re looking for specific metabolic states. I think we’re looking for scales of cognitive light cone.”
09 / belief
“We make, you know, social structures, financial structures, Internet of Things robotics, AI, so we make all this stuff, and we think that the thing we make it do is the main show.”
10 / belief
“Um— You know, the second question I would ask is what’s the question I should be asking you that I probably am not smart enough to ask you? That’s the other thing I would say.”
11 / belief
“My theory for why it happens I call this age evidencing. And I think that what’s happening here, like with a lot of biology, is that cells have to update their priors based on experience.”
12 / belief
“You know, once you’ve committed to certain axioms, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that is now just what it is. And so what I’m saying is, and this is what Pythagoras was saying, I think, that there is a whole space of these kinds of truths.”
13 / belief
“You can change all the different things, you are not going to change those things. So this, I think Plato and Pythagoras understood very clearly, that there is a set of truths which impact the physical world, but they themselves are not defined by and determined by what happens in the physical world.”
14 / belief
“For the brief time that we’re here, the universe is going to grind us into dust eventually, but until then, we get to do some cool stuff that is intrinsically motivating to us, that is neither forbidden by the laws of physics nor determined by the laws of physics, but eventually, it kind of comes to an end. So I think that aspect of it, right, that there are spaces… Even in algorithms, there are spaces in which you can do other new things, not just random stuff, not just complex stuff, but things that are easily recognizable to a behavior scientist.”
15 / belief
“You already, long before you get to any of that, as Pythagoras, I think, knew, already we have the idea that this physical world is being strongly impacted by truths that do not live in the physical world.”
16 / belief
“The first thing we learned is that… Well, the first thing we learned is that distributed sorting still works.”
17 / belief
“There’s equally all kinds of other stuff which we construct, and this is just modern cognitive science that says that a lot of what we think is going on is a total fabrication constructed by us.”
18 / belief
“I wanted to first of all explore that and hopefully break the assumption that we’re good at seeing this, because I think we’re not.”
19 / belief
“We think we do because we have an N of one example on Earth and we kind of know what to expect from cells, snakes to, you know, primates, but we really don’t.”
20 / belief
“There’s a consistent feedback between the ingressions you get and the ability to have new ones, which again I think is this positive feedback cycle, where the more of these free gifts you pull down, they allow you physically to develop to ways where, “Oh, look, now we’re suitable for more and higher ones.”
21 / belief
“I suspect so, and I think so because of the way we come into being. So one of the things that I should be working on is this paper called “Booting Up the Agent,” and it talks about the very earliest steps of becoming a being in this world.”