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How ludicrous it is that this video only has 1,600 views. I remember watching this when it came out several months ago, I would have expected 20,000+ views by now. What legend, and what a privilege to be aware of this rare conversation.

@jccusell

2 жыл бұрын

Most people don't even know who he is. Under 40s just label him an old, has-been, climate change denier and move on.

Thank you very much, Mr Dyson. R.I.P

Life’s little connections are what makes living worth while. About six months ago, I read The Starship and the Canoe -my first ever exposure of Mr. Dyson. This conversation adds a whole new dimension. Thank you Mr. Blackwood for making this possible.

Another brilliant interview and commentary, Stephen. What an honor that you were able to share personal time with this phenomenal man before his passing.

Thank you, Mr. Blackwood. Enjoying your "conversations" in Trier, Germany

Adding book titles mentioned during the program would be helpful (within the show notes)

Imagine being the rolemodel of this man being the same age. Feynman was a giant

Thanks for this, Stephen.

What an amazing introduction

@stephenjblackwood

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you.

"A recipe for cooking a soup without knowing what you are putting in it!" Hilaire. Fermi was brutal in his constructive criticism!

"The world doesn't need passionate leaders, only docile consumers." Ghost in The Shell: Individual Eleven kind of puts into perspective why our education system is the way it is.

Absolutely beautiful

Where heresy is sanctioned everyone is a budding heretic, and consequently no one is. A place so free would surely be a most soul crushing prison.

Looks like John Oliver in the thumbnail.

I guess you meant Gödel, not Girdle?

@ericadler9680

3 жыл бұрын

@@1262ak Grow up child, you're embarrassing yourself.

Stephen asks a lot of questions where he basically says the answer he wants to get...

46:10 climate panic attack.

1:18:00 Freeman Dyson is one of my personal heroes, but I need to make a sharp objection to how this discussion of biological materialism is being framed here. It turns out that quite a lot of what we used to think of as our uniquely human cognitive apparatus is readily approximated by material methods. Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have given us a system which learns _ab initio_ (starting with nothing but the rules governing legal moves, termination of play, and adjudication of outcome) to perform at Go or chess on a level no human-as presently constituted with 23 chromosomes-will ever achieve. If for deep philosophical reasons, one wishes to argue on behalf of some voodoo in the bottle, that's one thing. We should remain humble about the possibility that there's a non-materialistic realm to someday explore. But here's the problem. Most people, having decided to put one drop of voodoo into the bottle, immediately decide that the voodoo permeates everything, everywhere and always. (A presumption and presupposition of theism, as one prominent form of voodoo.) That's a totally different thing. On current evidence, however, it seems that we don't actually _need_ to haul the voodoo down the from the top shelf to explain every species-laudatory aspect of human cognition. The realm of classical, materialistic cognition might actually explain a heck of a lot about what goes on upstairs in the human brain. Oh, but this neglects some "essence" of what it means to be human, transforming any initiative to accurately map the boundary between what classical materialism adequately explains on its own into a mission fatally misguided and dangerous. First, I don't have much time for that remark. We have historically managed to convince ourselves that this special essence-never to be neglected for a cutthroat cultural heartbeat-was cognate with skin colour or the shape of your nose. One of the tasks the human mind seems to be rather terrible at performing is identifying where this essence properly resides in the cognitive firmament. Many of our instinctive proposals have been worse than phrenology. Why such a rush to stampede the fire exit of cognitive materialism-a stance that has lately managed to model quite a lot of our uniquely human cognitive capacity-for the phrenological realm of _Where's Waldo?_ essentialism? Oh, but Go and chess barely scratch the surface. I wouldn't be so quick myself to conclude that. We have barely scratched the surface so far on this new superpower to actually scratch the surface. Second, this voodoo, such as we grasp it at all, reliably explains nothing, for any practical value of "explains". It's a nice little tow truck if your metaphysical philosophy skids into a muddy ditch. (If that strikes you as "practical" then we hold entirely different definitions of practical, now and forever.) On the other hand, it does make for an excellent hitching post to tether our humble pie. Physicists at least admit they don't yet have a consistent and coherent theory of everything (ToE). Not all computer scientists are so inclined. Many of us wonder if perhaps Turing hasn't already nailed a computational ToE to the wall. I'm pretty sure this partially explains the rift between Dyson and Stephen Wolfram, who otherwise had many tastes in common. The normal way we locate the nexus of our essence as soulful humans is to appeal to our presupposed non-material cognition. It takes one to know one. We don't know much about essentialism, but we do for certain know that our "essence" can identify our essence with far less than a map and two hands (two hopelessly materialistic tools that essence would never stoop to employ). Clearly, an essence which doesn't take the existence of essence as axiomatic is not worth having in the first place. The axioms of essence are, of course, a wild, wonderful and exotic beast as compared to the boring axioms of formal reasoning. And this is _entirely_ practical, because, oh, look at all those people who _have_ a soul but wander through life as if they haven't. Clearly _those_ people have some form of damaged / insufficient essentialist self-appreciation. Perhaps we should send some missionaries their way to help "civilize" them in adherence and subservience to the higher social glue, as our own non-negotiable cultural fable prefers to construe this. Bottom line, Dyson is slyly claiming that electrons are essentialist for quantum reasons, therefore humanity is essentialist. It would be hard for that chain of reasoning to be incorrect, because you'd have to posit something weird and sophisticated to scrub the essence out of the electron as they mass together into the human mass. Okay, so let's play that out. Our electrons have an essence of nondeterminism, which pervades the material universe. We are made of electrons. Now what? (Insert theism here.) And yet many people sit there being all smug about how computers now playing Go to a standard far above human performance has barely scratched the surface of anything worth having. What, precisely, have _you_ scratched with how your essentialist electron maps to human scale that's even so slight at this recent human accomplishment in the field of applied AI? Nothing I would yet count as worthy of a pencil mark on the map. But do keep barking up this cosmic tree. Perhaps after some millennial winter of a thousand years, essentialism will emerge from the wilderness-like applied AI has only recently managed to do after a seemingly endless vista of its own glacial decades-as a soulful pursuit that has at least scratched _some_ practical surface after all. What it has today instead: insert theism here. Sorry, but I'm not awarding that so much as pencil mark on any map worth having of daily human affairs. It does, however, remain a useful thumbtack to puncture versions of materialism that are quite too confident concerning their ultimate sufficiency. The direct route to separate the baby from the bath water is to find the baby. No progress yet. (Hey, let's ask the electrons!) The indirect route is to pare away the bath water, as slowly and as carefully as possible. Here we have actual progress, however slender this reed remains. Edit: Add missing "of" and missing "there".

@saintlybeginnings

Жыл бұрын

Not sure what your argument is. But ‘essence’ wasn’t what had nose widths measured nor skin color ‘ranked’, that would be Darwinian evolution/ ‘enlightenment’ & modernity materialistic based errors.