There's an idea repeated through the lecture that I find very interesting:
> "A deeper realization came further on: there might be limitations in language itself and
our ability to represent ideas and think about them that could preclude us from actually
understanding the foundations of our situation.
> Living organisms are shaped by evolution to survive, not necessarily to get a clear
picture of the universe.
> There’s a
nice saying from the Talmud: We see things not as they are, but as we are. That is,
whenever we’re looking out into the world, we’re always seeing ourselves, we’re not
really seeing what’s out there.
For most of my life I'd assumed that human concepts were this limitless sort of thing capable of making fundamental connections to what's going on in the universe at some deep level. In more recent years I've come to consider them as almost like another sense: they are symbolic patterns consistently formed when we are exposed to certain stimuli (like our experience of smells consistently reappearing when exposed to similar molecules). Our conceptual faculty augments the pure pattern-correspondence of our more primitive senses in that the patterns can be associated with other internal patterns, and in that we can generate new patterns purely from existing patterns (using logical and analogical processes), which at some future time may be usefully associated with some never-encountered external stimulus. This is of course extremely useful—but we really must be falling into what should be an obvious trap of anthropocentrism in ascribing to them much more than that.
As an example of where we're likely tripping up by considering concepts to be somehow transcendent: there's a common unjustified stance that mathematics is not only capable of describing the universe, but that it's somehow behind its operation. Even further than that, I often run into smart people with the view that reality is somehow made of mathematics. I wonder if that's what Kay's getting at with this:
> Art is “all the stuff that people make”, and this includes our beliefs (which we like
to call “reality”).
Almost in a similar manner to the way one might fail to recognize the absurdity of a misplaced pink elephant in a dream, we seem structured to unknowingly substitute our mental reference systems with the things they refer to.
So, assuming we're screwed, where's the best place to move preemptively? I know Boston isn't that place.
- I assume the coasts are a nonstarter.
- Moving inland could be nice, but the ground would need to be pretty arable to restart civilization there. I'm guessing somewhere in Africa is a safe bet, given the lack of resource exploitation there, but then again, there's not much infrastructure at the moment.
> "A deeper realization came further on: there might be limitations in language itself and our ability to represent ideas and think about them that could preclude us from actually understanding the foundations of our situation.
> Living organisms are shaped by evolution to survive, not necessarily to get a clear picture of the universe.
> There’s a nice saying from the Talmud: We see things not as they are, but as we are. That is, whenever we’re looking out into the world, we’re always seeing ourselves, we’re not really seeing what’s out there.
For most of my life I'd assumed that human concepts were this limitless sort of thing capable of making fundamental connections to what's going on in the universe at some deep level. In more recent years I've come to consider them as almost like another sense: they are symbolic patterns consistently formed when we are exposed to certain stimuli (like our experience of smells consistently reappearing when exposed to similar molecules). Our conceptual faculty augments the pure pattern-correspondence of our more primitive senses in that the patterns can be associated with other internal patterns, and in that we can generate new patterns purely from existing patterns (using logical and analogical processes), which at some future time may be usefully associated with some never-encountered external stimulus. This is of course extremely useful—but we really must be falling into what should be an obvious trap of anthropocentrism in ascribing to them much more than that.
As an example of where we're likely tripping up by considering concepts to be somehow transcendent: there's a common unjustified stance that mathematics is not only capable of describing the universe, but that it's somehow behind its operation. Even further than that, I often run into smart people with the view that reality is somehow made of mathematics. I wonder if that's what Kay's getting at with this:
> Art is “all the stuff that people make”, and this includes our beliefs (which we like to call “reality”).
Almost in a similar manner to the way one might fail to recognize the absurdity of a misplaced pink elephant in a dream, we seem structured to unknowingly substitute our mental reference systems with the things they refer to.