Terrence Deacon

You know? Uh, how, how did, how did the sorts of meaning that we experience come to be? And so the goal then is to try to break that down into seeing how that is itself evolved.

Um, and here the work of folks like Terrence Deacon is really valuable, um, and, and many others who have been trying to sort of understand, uh, how you can progressively decompose the very complex forms of meaning making that we do, uh, as humans and then see how this has emerged over the course of, of, uh, an evolutionary time span.

Now, why complexification is important is because that evolutionary story is a complexification story.

Um, you know, uh, we-

What do our labels mean? But it's critical to all that follows.

And when Deacon was writing in 1997, he said it was a central problem of language origins and what was thought to separate human and non-human communication systems.

Now, we know now that this is not completely correct, but it was the basis on which we were able to start doing the studies.

Because unless you have a hypothesis, you can't prove whether it is wrong or right.

lot.

I mean, Terence Deacon, who is one of my favorite writers about consciousness, says that, like, so much of consciousness studies is description dressed up as analysis, right? No, no, description dressed up as explanation.

It's no explanation.

He always says, if you look inside these theories, there's a homunculus within the homunculus operating the brain.

lot.

I mean, Terrence Deacon, who is one of my favorite writers about consciousness, says that, like, so much of consciousness studies is description dressed up as analysis, right?

No,

no, description dressed up as explanation.

The beginning is extremely mysterious.

So interviewing a guy named Jack Solzak recently, I'm probably mispronouncing his name, Nobel laureate on this area.

Some, if people are bio nerds, they'll know like Dennis Noble and Michael Levin and these other, I talked to like the people asking these questions, like super non-amateurs, like mega non-amateurs.

And abiogenesis, what you talked about, the start of life, ridiculously mysterious.

The guy that's blown my mind the most, a guy named Eric Smith, who's also going to be on the trajectory very soon, he's from Santa Fe Institute, they study complexity.

His suspicion is that as the geosphere started to form, there were kind of chemical gradients in some part of the formation of the geosphere that created what is called auto-catalyzing sets of reactions, where this chemical just so happens to react with this one in a way that creates something that helps to catalyze one of the earlier ones.

And sometimes there's like six or eight or 12 or 14 connections to these things.

Before AI loses control, like we can't control it, I think we have to understand the living process much better than we do now.

oh yeah so but i mean basso is still worth reading in knowledge management he's still the seminal text knowledge assets is still whatever and that gave rise to kenevy right okay and max was brilliant when he and his later stuff with cern is probably a better starting point because it's two-dimensional or three Alicia Gerardo on constraints is brilliant.

Terence Deacon in symbolic species is brilliant.

But his other books, he stole other people's ideas.

But symbolic species is the one which finally killed off Chomsky's language.