Lex Fridman Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
45 published records
01 / recommendation
“To try to make the strongest possible case for the other side and to ask yourself, “Okay, what are all the places that I am sort of glossing over because I don’t know exactly what to say?”
02 / evaluation
“He’s an amazing guy and he’s got some very interesting ideas about the intersection of cognition and evolution. But I think what you bring up is very important because there has to be a kind of impedance match between what you’re looking for and the tools that you’re using.”
03 / uncertainty
“If you go to the physics department and the biology department, those people are different in some categorical way. So somehow, I don’t know what the chicken or the egg is, but the categories… Maybe the categories create themselves because of the way we think about them and use them in language, but it does seem useful.”
04 / 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.”
05 / belief
“I mean, this speaks to embryogenesis, which I think is one of the coolest things in the universe.”
06 / belief
“I think a lot of radical thinkers think that they’re sacrificing something by learning the skill of fitting in, but I think if you want to have impact, if you want ideas to resonate and actually lead to, um … First of all, be able to build great teams- … that help bring your ideas to life.”
07 / 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.”
08 / uncertainty
“We have to do experiments. So I don’t know what the entire human society is doing, but I’ll just give you a simple example of the kinds of tools, and we’re actively trying to build tools now to enable radically different agents to communicate.”
09 / belief
“I think one useful one comes from the paper, Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere.”
10 / 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.”
11 / 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.”
12 / 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.”
13 / 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.”
14 / 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.”
15 / belief
“I don’t think we’re looking for specific metabolic states. I think we’re looking for scales of cognitive light cone.”
16 / 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.”
17 / uncertainty
“You know, take the time in all the blind alleys,” and like… That may not be optimal either, but we don’t know what the optimal is.”
18 / 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.”
19 / belief
“I think you’ve mentioned in a few places that like you wrote that the “Ingressing Minds” paper is not the weirdest thing you plan to write.”
20 / 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.”
21 / belief
“I think at the very basic level, intuitively, we think of organisms as hardware… …And software as not possibly being able to be organisms, but… …what you’re saying is that it’s all just patterns in an excitable medium, and it doesn’t really matter what the pattern is.”
22 / 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.”
23 / 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.”
24 / observation
“The point is that despite following the algorithm to do one thing, it is also at the same time doing other things that are neither prescribed nor forbidden by the algorithm.”
25 / 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.”
26 / 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.”
27 / belief
“The first thing we learned is that… Well, the first thing we learned is that distributed sorting still works.”
28 / 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.”
29 / belief
“I think from a basic caveman science perspective, the repeatable experiment… …Is the one that most of intelligence comes from here.”
30 / belief
“I think you could also point to Donald Hoffman and who speaks of an interface to a world.”
31 / 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.”
32 / belief
“I think the tension is, and absolutely, and this idea that you’re talking about, almost… I think you’ve termed it cognitive prosthetics… …Which is different ways of perceiving and interacting with the world.”
33 / 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.”
34 / 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.”
35 / 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.”
36 / commitment
“Because it’s very important to me that what we do is transition deep ideas and philosophy into actual practical applications that not only make it clear whether we’re making any progress or not, but also allow us to relieve suffering and make life better for all sentient beings, and enable us and others to reach their full potential.”
37 / preference
“This is, this is what I, what I think, and why, and, and give it space to, to sort of grow, right? And if you keep the … If you try to mush them … If you try to mush them together, I, I found that impossible because, because the practical stuff poisons the other stuff.”
38 / evaluation
“I think we as humans like to demarcate areas on that continuum and give them names because it makes life easier, and then we have a lot of battles over, you know, so-called category errors when people transgress those categories.”
39 / evaluation
“We are so parochial in what we expect to find in terms of life that we are going to be just completely missing a lot of stuff.”
40 / prediction
“It also means that you have to be generative and creative in terms of capabilities. And so for me, that means if I tell you this is what I think about cognition in cells and tissues, it means, for example, that I think we’re going to be able to take those ideas and use them to produce new regenerative medicine that actually helps people in various ways, right?”
41 / prediction
“I don’t think that there are specific, or I don’t know, but it doesn’t mean that there are going to be specific Platonic patterns for, “This is the Titanic, and this is the sister of the Titanic, and this is some other kind of boat.”
42 / preference
“0, that I’m writing at the moment, trying to formalize in a careful way all the things that we’ve been talking about here, and in particular, this notion of having to do experiments to figure out where any given system is on a continuum, and we can… let’s just start with figure two maybe for a second, and then we’ll come back to figure one. And first, just to unpack the acronym, I like the idea that it spells out TAME, because the central focus of this is interactions and how do you interact with a system to have a productive interaction with it, and the idea is that cognitive claims are really protocol claims.”
43 / evaluation
“Because if we try to define categories with the kinds of criteria that we’ve gotten used to, we are going to be very poorly set up to recognize life in novel embodiments.”
44 / evaluation
“You must be something else,” because humans, I don’t know, standard humans today, I don’t think can do that.”
45 / evaluation
“When we apply them outside the brain to other kinds of living systems, we find novel discoveries and novel capabilities, actually being able to get the material to do new things that nobody had ever found before. And precisely because I think that people didn’t look at it from those perspectives, they assumed that it was a low-level kind of thing.”