Jared Lanier & Lex Friedman

By Wayne Brown


Lex Fridman's stunning conversation with Lanier, who thinks much more deeply and widely than the average genius.

How technology, especially Social Media, changes who we are - bit by bit.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Intelligibility and he Birth of Paradigm

By Wayne Brown
" Paradigm " is a word that refers to the grand unifying ideas that underpin our understanding of a phenomenon - perhaps all phenomena. Paradigms shift slowly as the old "believers" die and a new generation is open to new ways of thinking. "Understanding" in this case is mostly about language: about how we talk to each other. If two people  subscribe to the same paradigm what they say to each other is intelligible - it "makes sense". Challenges to the paradigm always come in the form of impertinent questions. Why impertinent? Because the question comes out of left field. It makes no sense. A successful challenge to the paradigm expands and revises language itself, so that it becomes possible to speak in new ways that "make sense". In the new paradigm, the old language is no longer intelligible. For example, we don't expect to see references to " phlogiston " or the " luminous aether " in modern scientific journa...
Read more

Bitcoin

By Wayne Brown
Image
Bitcoin is not a currency. Very few people, from Nobel Prize Winning economists to the "man on the street" understand money and value. The phenomenon of cryptocurrency is a case in point. I highly recommend the little horror story of Gerald Cotton and Quadriga  as background to my comments here. Not wanting to trust their money with any "central authority", Quadriga's customers handed over their life savings to a trusted criminal and they vanished with him when he died. Marketplaces in of any scale require an underlying currency to function. At the very least, such currency must have a more or less stable value on the day the market takes place. In practice, such currencies become stable in larger territories over longer time periods, usually backed by the agreed-to value of some particular good, such as gold or silver or the promise to pay gold or silver.  Unlike in the imagination of crypto believers, the "government" is just another play...
Read more

Dennis Hoffman and The Nature of Reality

By Wayne Brown
Image
Perplexity Massive data loss.... The great math mystery "Math works so well to describe reality because math is all there is." just 32 numbers and a bit of math Lex Fridman & Dennis Hoffman The Case Against Reality (In Kindle) This may be the wrong question: Does math work so well because it's how we perceive reality or is math a fundamental property of the Universe? Missing is the idea that consciousness itself is essential and that a mathematical description of consciousness could be "fundamental" - more "fundamental" than what we think of as "reality." "The elegance of math meets the messiness of reality" - but this is a clue to how we simplify reality for efficiency. 
Read more