The Royal Institution
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2017–2024
1:01:45 · 586K views · May 13, 2015
Daniel Dennett gives a Royal Institution talk toward a unified theory of information, tying together evolution, learning and engineering. He argues that design can arise bottom-up through small steps without a designer.
Recommended for its account of competence without comprehension, relevant to evolution and to debates about AI.
4 comments from Hacker News
I highly recommend this Royal Institute talk: Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design - With Daniel Dennett [0]. The presenter provides a series of small steps in the way of understanding how the combined leaps of 'dumb' evolution was able to design intelligence. He contrasts the 'bottom-up' approach to the 'top-down' design in a very intelligent manner. [0]: this video
World Science Festival has a slew of really awesome talks etc on this subject posted to youtube: [LINK] And The Neuroscience of Consciousness – with Anil Seth is really great: [LINK] Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design - With Daniel Dennett: this video
I find Daniel Dennett's framing of competency vs comprehension a good place to start. He did a nice talk at the RI on it some time ago[1]. A previous one overlaps with similar ground[2]. [1] [LINK] [2] this video
There was a question asked on Quora by a child to her mother, "Why haven't we used all the short words and gave them meaning before using all the long words?" The simple answer, apart from historical origins of words is "error correction". It is far easier to error correct words which are far apart in spelling and audio space. relevant : this video