The Royal Institution
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2018–2024
1:16:22 · 873K views · Apr 6, 2017
Daniel Dennett's Royal Institution lecture on whether the brain is a computer and where its software comes from. He argues that minds are built by evolution and culture, with competence arising without comprehension.
Cited as an excellent entry point to Dennett's thinking on minds, memes and competence without comprehension.
6 comments from Hacker News
I discovered him with the excellent Royal Institution talk "If Brains are Computers, Who Designs the Software?" [0]. And the quote which marked my mind is "How could a slow, mindless process build a thing that could build a thing that a slow mindless process couldn't build on it's own ?". [0] : this video
I'd recommend Daniel Dennett's talk If Brains are Computers, Who Designs the Software? as a counterpoint to this article [1]. Dennett's talk is a bit long but I mostly enjoyed it, especially when he points out the computerphobia of many of his colleagues. Of course, it's easier for me to agree with Dennett than for many other people, because I'm a computationalist in the philosophy of mind and suspect that consciousness is an emergent property of certain computations. It might in theory even be possible to realize that by analytical insight - though probably not in practice. I'm generally not a fan of the philosophy of mind, though, because it mostly consists of speculation and intuition pumping. [1] this video
Thanks for the link, I didn't know about that. It's kind of in the autocatalysis way, but more about "memes" in the sense of the book which introduced the term "The selfish gene" by Richard Dawkins. He says it 2 times, it's what drives his speech : At the beginning : this video And at the end : this video That's a very nice and profound speech asking good questions.
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] this video [2] [LINK]
tl;dr - ants can be compared to neurons (they even use similar mechanisms) and ant colonies can be compared to consciousness (although they lack human-recognizable self-awareness). I think it's not useful to compare humans with ants and human culture with ant colonies (it's on another scale, although there are some similarities, too). - - - This type of memory can be compared to the building blocks of our memory when we look into our brains. Each neuron is basically an agent that acts on its own (comparable to an ant) - if you look into neuron behaviour, there are some pretty interesting things (e.g. they try to get to the locations where most of the activity is happening to get more energy and weaken connections based on activity - synaptic plasticity). The algorithms both employ are comparable - I see similarities between ant colonies and human brains. The human consciousness emerges from this phenomenon - the biggest difference is that all our neurons work together to create a consciousness that is self-aware (actually, it's only a small part of the brain that creates "me"). Understanding ant colonies can be beneficial for understanding human consciousness. this video (I don't care about the computer analogies, but the concept of individual agents acting together in the brain gets across)