The Royal Institution
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2024
49:35 · 333K views · Sep 21, 2023
A Royal Institution lecture in which Nicholas Humphrey presents his theory of phenomenal consciousness and its evolution. He draws on the book Sentience and discusses evidence for animal sentience.
Recommended as a good high-level view of Humphrey's book and his argument on how consciousness evolved.
3 comments from Hacker News
If you want fun narration and loosely tech based story, I'd recommend the Magic 2.0 series. Scott Myers created a fun world in that series. I'm really hoping book 7 comes out at some point. The narration is so damn funny. Luke Daniels is a master of making all the characters come alive. The Expanse series is also good if you want more of an epic. Jefferson Mays also does a great job of making the characters feel real. Even if he changes how gimbal is pronounced between certain books. There's also loads of great non fiction stuff out there. One of my personal favorites from this past year was Sentience by Nicholas Humphrey. His recent RI lecture was great and a good high level view of the book. this video
A thing that always comes to mind with these kind of news is the claim that octopi have comparable effects from MDMA as humans. For anyone that have an overview of evolutionary history that should be interesting to say the least. [LINK] Another interesting source I have found lately is this talk by Nicholas Humphrey (How did consciousness evolve?). If I'm interpreting him right, being a crab is nothing. The experience of "something" evolved a couple of hundred million years ago at the earliest, in our lineage. Assuming he is right. this video
Thank you. I keep bringing it up here and you are the first one who has perceived my point. For more on 'blue' and 'chocolatey', check out this video... How did consciousness evolve - with Nicholas Humphrey this video