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Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Dan Dennett, Hot and Cold

3 Quarks Daily has posted two videos by Dan Dannett on the topic of Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design. The first of them I think of as Dennett COLD. This is pretty much the same cultural evolution lecture Dennett has been giving for the last two or three years, and which I have critized in various posts. He's now got it well developed enough that he manages a graceful rather than a rushed finish. I don't know when it was delivered, but it was uploaded by The Royal Institution on May 13, 2015. Here it is:



This next video is the Q&A after the first, and is about half as long. But the content is much better. This is Dennett HOT. Once again he confesses to having gotten the wrong model of the neuron early in his career. He fields questions on
A) The Singularity (not gonna' happen, but we should be wary of ceding too much of our work to machines)
B) the prospects of AI in general (it must be more bottom up, and shear numbers of computational units is not sufficient to the problem)
 C) on human gender and race in human intelligence (we don't have any worthwhile "scales" of intelligence and who cares?), and
D) the "hard problems" of consciousness is bunk.

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