Here is a 2-hour slide show I made for college students and teens:
You Are A Brain
It's an introduction to realist thinking, a tour of all the good stuff people don't realize until they include a node for their brain's map in their brain's map. All the concepts come from Eliezer Yudkowsky's posts on Overcoming Bias.
I presented this to my old youth group while staffing one of their events. In addition to the slide show, I had a browser with various optical illusions open in tabs, and I brought in a bunch of lemons and miracle fruit tablets. They had a good time and stayed engaged.
I hope the slides will be of use to others trying to promote the public understanding of rationality.
Note: When you view the presentation in Google Docs, make sure you can see the speaker notes. They capture the gist of what I was saying while I was showing each slide.
3 comments:
Hi Liron. I just had a peek at LessWrong.com and ran across your PowerPoint. I cannot resist trying to poke a hole in what I expect will be an area of complacency in your thought. In certain respects, self-identified rationalists of the OB/LW school are likely to be quite cautious in their judgements, but in other respects they are going to be as obliviously dogmatic as any fundamentalist. I think I see a few such dogmas in the part of the local belief system on how to be rational (e.g. "be Bayesian" - I don't recall ever seeing much discussion on whether this is in fact correct advice, or advice that can be followed by a human being, or even about where the prior comes from and what justifies it). But I want to go even further, to show up some of the assumptions which are taken as premises by anyone from that crowd, and which will not be touched by any attempt to "be rational".
Just to let you know in advance, this is going to be one of those tiring harangues about "qualia". On slide 47 you say consciousness is "still mysterious", but in your notes you say we find the still-mysterious things to be so "just because we haven’t entirely succeeded to open them up and understand their moving parts". That is the part which is an ideological statement, and which shows that, although you don't feel like you understand consciousness now, you don't expect that understanding it will require any fundamental change in worldview.
Now the qualia challenge is, very simply: How do you get color - subjective color, the color we actually experience - out of a universe of colorless fundamental objects? I submit that you can't. No amount of stacking up colorless particles, fields, geometries, etc, is going to give you a shade of red or a shade of blue. And yet we know the latter to exist somewhere in reality, because they are right there in front of us every day. If we are to go with your headline claim ("you are a brain") and say that that which is directly experienced is in some way "in the brain", that doesn't make the problem any easier, though perhaps it takes us a little closer to understanding: the brain according to current physics is still made of nothing but colorless fundamental entities. Where do the colors come from?
thanks for this post but i couldn't see the presentation!
Thanks learningenglishway. The hosting site I used stopped serving the file. I fixed the link to point to a Google Docs version.
Post a Comment