I listened to that yesterday, from the beginning, and found it fascinating, but was working on wood so no time for notes. So, I’ve listened to it again.
Incidentally, just before that I started a new audiobook, “Determined” by Robert Sapolsky, and somewhere between the two, a new appreciation has crystalized for me.
Other than certain physicist philosopher types, it’s not that I’m in competition with what Earth and biological and evolutionary scientists, or Neuroendocrinology, in the case off Sapolsky are sharing.
Besides, the new information is very much in harmony with my fundamental understanding. Possessing that internal consilience that rings of “truth” or at least Honest.
I fully appreciate I’m in no position intellectually or educationally to try and compete.
Still, I need to grapple with the fact that often this information lacks a key dimension of our evolutionary reality, something I’ve become keenly aware of.
That underly intellectual paradigm being presented can be metaphorically described as The Abrahamic Mindset. The defining character being its self-absorption intellectually and a self-serving physically nature. I don’t make a moral issue out of it, because I appreciate survival depends on a certain degree of both. So, there it is.
I really enjoyed the beginning and everything he brought to the table, excellent stuff.
Listen to 10:00 and at 14:25 gets into information transfer. 15:30 human learning, accepting tings others tell us.
But it’s like he took it to the brink then backed. The vision I got was human as lighthouse - sending out signals. What was lacking was a recognition that we are human, because we have been in constant intercourse with our environments and the other creatures that exist. Nothing like that, nope instead it was looking out from a box. We are blind to a huge dimension of this reality scientists are recording so well, but understanding not for poop.
Then Muthukrishna’s Earth analogy turned out surprisingly weak. Shocking for a person of my history.
Actually, the sense of Earth as a globe, along with the gut feeling of it floating in a void, is reinforced through all sort of experiences, from up in the mountains, on the great flat lands of Earth, near and upon water. Especially to people who live through the star lite night all their lives. All it took was a mind that was curious and the patience to observe and remember.
(14:10-15) that was disappointing for someone of my persuasion - To me it seems a product of living inside rooms for most of their lives. I live outside much of the time and home is 600sq ft of cabin, my side of the bed is about a foot from three big windows facing south, it’s not just tracing the sun from rise to set, it’s more complicated and cinematic than that - always has been for people actually living in it. I’ve spent extended periods living primitive, as in camping with it’s unique housekeeping needs and choirs, being out in it, bugs and all, water, food, wood hauling, heck poop hauling - and simply being out in the natural world going about its thing, a visit ready to head back to town and home. We are products of our environment.
Consciousness as an interaction.
At around 18:00 very interesting about chimp learning and human learning
We “ape”, better than Apes “ape”. It’s key.
Perception
{but through all of this M.M. never brings in the environment, or how it’s the interactions that form us, it remains a sterile thing of the mind.}
24:00 ability to reason
24:48 Grounded cultural reality based reasoning…”
Explaining human uniqueness
26:00 - Language as explanation for humans is wrong.
Selection
30:55 “we have a bootstrap problem
31:15 bipedalism
34:00 fire culturally transmitted (1.5 ish MYA)
47:30 Here my hero Sean, falls into trap of imagining, “once we reach some sort of equilibrium, …” (Michael points out “there are no equilibrium”)
1:02 Wealth Creation vs. Wealth Appropriation
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I liked that, Sean Carroll I can trust not to waste our time. Muthukrishna was fascinating, though his apparent belief or at least approval of galactic expansion,
… well less said the better.
Michael Muthukrishna did have some great info and good story telling.
Lausten does any of that make sense?