Lex Fridman
Уровень C1· 1339 слов
you've studied the human mind cognition language vision evolution psychology from child to adult from the level of individual to the level of our entire civilization so I feel like I can start with a simple multiple-choice question what is the meaning of life is it a to attain knowledge as Plato said B to
attain power as Nietzsche said C to escape death as Ernest Becker said d to propagate our genes as Darwin and others have said e there is no meaning as the nihilists have said F knowing the meaning of life is beyond our cognitive capabilities as Steven Pinker said based on my interpretation twenty years ago
and G none of the above I'd say aid comes closest but I would amend that to attaining not only knowledge but fulfillment more generally that is life health stimulation access to the living cultural and social world now this is our meaning of life it's not the meaning of life if you were to ask
our genes their meaning is to propagate copies of themselves but that is distinct from the meaning that the brain that they lead to sets for itself so to you knowledge is a small subset or a large subset it's a large subset but it's not the entirety of human striding because we also want to interact with
people we want to experience beauty we want to experience the the richness of the natural world but understanding the what makes the universe tick is his way up there for some of us more than others certainly for me that's that's one of the top five so is that a fundamental aspect are you just describing your own
preference or is this a fundamental aspect of human nature is to seek knowledge just in your latest book you talk about the the the power the usefulness of rationality and reason so on is that a fundamental nature human beings or is it something we should just strive for it's both it is
we're capable of striving for it because it is one of the things that make us what we are Homo sapiens wise men we are unusual among animals in the degree to which we acquire knowledge and use it to survive we we make tools we strike agreements via language we extract poisons we predict the behavior of
animals we try to get at the workings of plants and when I say we I don't just mean we in the modern West but we as a species everywhere which is how we've managed to occupy every niche on the planet and how we've managed to drive other animals to extinction and the refinement of Reason in pursuit of human
well-being of health happiness social richness cultural richness is our our main challenge in the present that is using our intellect using our knowledge to figure out how the world works how we work in order to make discoveries and strike agreements that make us all better off in the long run right and you
do that almost undeniably and in a data-driven way in a recent book but I'd like to focus on the artificial intelligence aspect of things and not just artificial intelligence but natural intelligence too so twenty years ago in the book you've written on how the mind works you conjecture again my right to
interpret things you could you can correct me if I'm wrong but you conjecture that human thought in the brain may be a result of and now we're a massive network of highly interconnected neurons so from this interconnectivity emerges thought compared to artificial neural networks we use for machine
learning today is there something fundamentally more complex mysterious even magical about the biological neural networks versus the ones we've been starting to use over the past 60 years and it becomes a success in the past 10 there is something a little bit mysterious about the human
