I really think Feynman and Kauffman and generally complexity theory properly understood address the issue McGilchrist is going after… and which he can’t get to from where he starts.
First Feynmans beauty of a flower is useful. Scientific understanding properly applied is expansive - it explodes the dimensions of information - not reductive.
Second, Kauffmans World Beyond Physics is useful. As Morgan states the world is combinatorially explosive. But his and McGilchrists conclusions are wrong, or they miss what is truly amazing. As Kauffman points out, the chemical combinations needed to develop simple life happened much more quickly than one would expect from random interactions. Kauffmans conclusion is that for unknown reasons we happen to live in a universe whose structure is such that we happened naturally. This is as weird as it sounds. Kauffmans conclusion is that the universe itself is creative and we are creative beings in a creative universe.
McGilchrist is interesting - and our brains are crazy and amazing… but there is also an element that is left out around Schrodingers What is Life in that life locally violates the second law of thermodynamics by organizing and concentrating energy in space and time. You and I, each of us is roughly 10 to the fourth power (10,000) times more energy dense than the sun per unit mass (Rob Philips lecture). This is done through control and regulation and structure.
So is it surprising that our brains incorporate a domain for reinforcing and extending the sort of structure which created life by concentrating energy in space and time? We need structure.
And that our brains also see the connections, because we ourselves, each of us, are just different branches of a complex interconnected web of self-reinforcing and iteratively evolving chemical reactions which began as life on earth a few billion years ago, and which somehow the laws of the universe we live in were structured to create. The invisible hand or force isn’t reaching in. It’s always there in how physics and chemistry work.
Anyway - Morgan’s presentation is amazing. I just think McGilchrist only gets halfway to the interesting insight that we are creative beings in a creative universe.
And the real punchline is that our technologies are really just beginning to enable us to use our creativity. We are still just at the beginning.
Thanks for the feedback. I’m super interested in where I am missing something, and also mcg because his model is so robust. But I’ll be honest I’ve read this a couple of time and don’t understand the flaw in his model? I also agree on complexity theory and had the time to explore it in more detail in my longer presentation: https://whatsimportant.substack.com/p/video-the-mystery-of-curiosity
I don’t think your conclusion is “wrong” - curiosity or creativity are the right thing to land on as weird and amazing and essential and where progress comes from. But the model for getting there is “off” in subtle but important ways. For instance, evolution doesn’t make things that work feel good - it is that organisms
do things that feel good and only the organisms whose good feeling is calibrated or matches what works - well those organisms survive… the order of things is wrong… what is interesting is that the universe is structured such that curiosity and creativity offered a selective advantage. Wrangham’s Catching Fire does a good job with this sequencing as does Heinrich’s Secret of Our Success. I would argue that while psychology may describe our experiences, we need to look to physics, chemistry and anthropology and other sciences to understand the world. Psychology doesn’t offer a description of the world.
And I think Stuart Kauffman would also be useful - because one piece of complexity is that some things that people think are forces or other things are just properties of simple interacting rules or equations. Complexity is the way a set of simple things interacting can explode.
Ultimately we experience the world from
within a psychological frame - but we do not see the world from within a psychological frame. Our brains are anticipation engines which send out expectations to nerves which send back the lamba’s or unexpected. We need to escape all the shortcuts and paradoxes of the expectation engine and find ways to see and test the external
world. But I think the trick
is that you are trying to actually make emotional appeals and connect with people and using appealing ideas to build those connections. So you probably have an adaptive and effective approach using psychology - it just may not be “true” in the way you would like for it to be.
Dunning-Kruger is also useful. Dave Dunning has done some great work. Unskilled and Unaware of It, which is really about expertise and metacognition provides a very useful framework.
just realized - if you are interested in the neuroscience, have you read Robert Sapolsky’s Behave? Sapolsky is a brilliant and amazing person. He also has a new book out… but Behave is a great framing of the neuroscience as of a few years ago.
Jeff Hawkins Thousand Brains is also useful given how folks like Tom Keller at Tentorrent are deliberating mimicking the cortical column architecture of the brain in chip design.
All good stuff.
But the most “direct” criticism of Gilchrist is that he isn’t useful to Keller in designing AI chips. Keller makes the argument that we all have a reference model
of high capacity low energy compute in our skulls and that fascinates him. You might enjoy listening to Kellers lectures.
But I really think the basic problem is in the order of things. We aren’t separate from the physics of the universe - but are a natural function of the physics of the universe. There are no other strange forces. But the way the physics works is strange and curious and creative… and all you need is to build up from those laws.
If you dive into quantum mechanics and knowledge limits at that level the universe seems almost playful. It obeys defined laws but it won’t let us know enough to be able to make every calculation. This is one way to think of Heisenberg. The universe is systematically playful or as a matter of the laws of physics limits our knowledge.
So if you get this you realize poor Ray Dalio is deluded for instance since he has an elaborate theory of the economy as a machine, but it isn’t a machine -
it is alive and as Dan Nicholson points out life is different than machines (everything flows).
Anyway - you’re on the right track… just get past Gilchrist and enjoy the journey.
The profit in it is in stuff like AI chip design and Keller or the way Nicholson argues that we need an evolution in our frameworks in biology to improve the yields on our R&D becuase our cell as machine and biology as circuit diagrams models are misleading us. (see Rafael Colombo on ADC Dogmas).
As a native Kansan, I am naturally inclined to find midwesterners to be a source of wisdom. So, when I think about the competitive advantages of curiosity I can help think of this scene from Ted Lasso:
And I think we do have to think of curiosity as a social trait which is selected for or against as part of cultural evolution via group competition.
And what is interesting about our current time period is the way our global networks are enabling new ways of forming and collaborating groups - changing the dynamics of group competition and the course of cultural evolution.
But you can also just enjoy the humor and remember to be curious not judgmental. Be Ted, not Rupert.
An old business partner used to make fun of me for speaking in footnotes because my mind has always working in a “why loop” that would have made Toyoda blush…. and if your mind works that way you are aware of the social life of ideas and that the main sign you don’t understand an idea is if you think it’s your own or significantly original… there’s a logical constraint in the structure of ideas that they can only be incrementally original… but getting back to my point…
since I used the Ted Lasso quote I feel like I need to share the way it is misattributed to Whitman because this is interesting in and of itself and a useful
reminder of how social meaning is constructed and that psychology and social meaning are distinct domains from external facing modes of inquiry:
Based on the search results provided, the quote "be curious, not judgmental" does not actually originate from Walt Whitman, as is commonly believed. The evidence shows..z
From Perplexity when asked about the source of the quote “be curious,
not judgmental.”
- The quote was first seen in a 1986 advice column in The Charlotte Observer, written by Marguerite and Marshall Shearer, in response to a question about a parent finding birth control in their teenage daughter's room. The columnists advised "Try to find out her concerns. Be curious, not judgmental."[3][4]
- While the quote is frequently misattributed to Walt Whitman, professor Ed Folsom of the Walt Whitman Archive confirmed that Whitman never said or wrote those words.[3]
- The quote gained popularity after being featured in the TV show "Ted Lasso", where the main character attributes it to Whitman, but this attribution is incorrect.[3][4]
So in summary, the original source of the quote "be curious, not judgmental" appears to be the 1986 advice column in The Charlotte Observer, not the famous American poet Walt Whitman.[3][4]
There is one epic and inexcusable error throughout McGilchrists work. Human brains need basic nourishment to develop, and for most of human history it is likely most humans lacked that basic nourishment. For instance throughout documented history the majority of humans lived at subsistence levels in abject poverty and were malnourished. Their brains didn’t develop fully, and they were physically stunted. Until the early 1970s the majority of humans lived in abject poverty (less than around the equivalent of $2 a day)… and although it is painful to recognize, what this means is that the majority of humans for almost all of human history until the last 50 years - lacked the basic nourishment to be able to fully develop physically and that included their brains.
The idea that creativity ruled in eras dominated by abject poverty seems improbably, and feels like the sort of romantic anachronistic delusion we need to have the metacognitive skills to correct for to see the world accurately.
Those who live lives of privilege need to take care not to generalize their experiences. There has perhaps been an oscillation in the perceived experiences of a small elite over time - but the broad human experience just began about 50 years ago when we crossed out of the time when most humans lived in abject poverty.
The world evolves - it doesn’t oscillate like a pendulum.
I really think Feynman and Kauffman and generally complexity theory properly understood address the issue McGilchrist is going after… and which he can’t get to from where he starts.
First Feynmans beauty of a flower is useful. Scientific understanding properly applied is expansive - it explodes the dimensions of information - not reductive.
Second, Kauffmans World Beyond Physics is useful. As Morgan states the world is combinatorially explosive. But his and McGilchrists conclusions are wrong, or they miss what is truly amazing. As Kauffman points out, the chemical combinations needed to develop simple life happened much more quickly than one would expect from random interactions. Kauffmans conclusion is that for unknown reasons we happen to live in a universe whose structure is such that we happened naturally. This is as weird as it sounds. Kauffmans conclusion is that the universe itself is creative and we are creative beings in a creative universe.
McGilchrist is interesting - and our brains are crazy and amazing… but there is also an element that is left out around Schrodingers What is Life in that life locally violates the second law of thermodynamics by organizing and concentrating energy in space and time. You and I, each of us is roughly 10 to the fourth power (10,000) times more energy dense than the sun per unit mass (Rob Philips lecture). This is done through control and regulation and structure.
So is it surprising that our brains incorporate a domain for reinforcing and extending the sort of structure which created life by concentrating energy in space and time? We need structure.
And that our brains also see the connections, because we ourselves, each of us, are just different branches of a complex interconnected web of self-reinforcing and iteratively evolving chemical reactions which began as life on earth a few billion years ago, and which somehow the laws of the universe we live in were structured to create. The invisible hand or force isn’t reaching in. It’s always there in how physics and chemistry work.
Anyway - Morgan’s presentation is amazing. I just think McGilchrist only gets halfway to the interesting insight that we are creative beings in a creative universe.
And the real punchline is that our technologies are really just beginning to enable us to use our creativity. We are still just at the beginning.
Thanks for the feedback. I’m super interested in where I am missing something, and also mcg because his model is so robust. But I’ll be honest I’ve read this a couple of time and don’t understand the flaw in his model? I also agree on complexity theory and had the time to explore it in more detail in my longer presentation: https://whatsimportant.substack.com/p/video-the-mystery-of-curiosity
I don’t think your conclusion is “wrong” - curiosity or creativity are the right thing to land on as weird and amazing and essential and where progress comes from. But the model for getting there is “off” in subtle but important ways. For instance, evolution doesn’t make things that work feel good - it is that organisms
do things that feel good and only the organisms whose good feeling is calibrated or matches what works - well those organisms survive… the order of things is wrong… what is interesting is that the universe is structured such that curiosity and creativity offered a selective advantage. Wrangham’s Catching Fire does a good job with this sequencing as does Heinrich’s Secret of Our Success. I would argue that while psychology may describe our experiences, we need to look to physics, chemistry and anthropology and other sciences to understand the world. Psychology doesn’t offer a description of the world.
And I think Stuart Kauffman would also be useful - because one piece of complexity is that some things that people think are forces or other things are just properties of simple interacting rules or equations. Complexity is the way a set of simple things interacting can explode.
Ultimately we experience the world from
within a psychological frame - but we do not see the world from within a psychological frame. Our brains are anticipation engines which send out expectations to nerves which send back the lamba’s or unexpected. We need to escape all the shortcuts and paradoxes of the expectation engine and find ways to see and test the external
world. But I think the trick
is that you are trying to actually make emotional appeals and connect with people and using appealing ideas to build those connections. So you probably have an adaptive and effective approach using psychology - it just may not be “true” in the way you would like for it to be.
Dunning-Kruger is also useful. Dave Dunning has done some great work. Unskilled and Unaware of It, which is really about expertise and metacognition provides a very useful framework.
I think you’re on the right track - keep going.
just realized - if you are interested in the neuroscience, have you read Robert Sapolsky’s Behave? Sapolsky is a brilliant and amazing person. He also has a new book out… but Behave is a great framing of the neuroscience as of a few years ago.
Jeff Hawkins Thousand Brains is also useful given how folks like Tom Keller at Tentorrent are deliberating mimicking the cortical column architecture of the brain in chip design.
All good stuff.
But the most “direct” criticism of Gilchrist is that he isn’t useful to Keller in designing AI chips. Keller makes the argument that we all have a reference model
of high capacity low energy compute in our skulls and that fascinates him. You might enjoy listening to Kellers lectures.
But I really think the basic problem is in the order of things. We aren’t separate from the physics of the universe - but are a natural function of the physics of the universe. There are no other strange forces. But the way the physics works is strange and curious and creative… and all you need is to build up from those laws.
If you dive into quantum mechanics and knowledge limits at that level the universe seems almost playful. It obeys defined laws but it won’t let us know enough to be able to make every calculation. This is one way to think of Heisenberg. The universe is systematically playful or as a matter of the laws of physics limits our knowledge.
So if you get this you realize poor Ray Dalio is deluded for instance since he has an elaborate theory of the economy as a machine, but it isn’t a machine -
it is alive and as Dan Nicholson points out life is different than machines (everything flows).
Anyway - you’re on the right track… just get past Gilchrist and enjoy the journey.
The profit in it is in stuff like AI chip design and Keller or the way Nicholson argues that we need an evolution in our frameworks in biology to improve the yields on our R&D becuase our cell as machine and biology as circuit diagrams models are misleading us. (see Rafael Colombo on ADC Dogmas).
take care,
mz
As a native Kansan, I am naturally inclined to find midwesterners to be a source of wisdom. So, when I think about the competitive advantages of curiosity I can help think of this scene from Ted Lasso:
https://youtu.be/5x0PzUoJS-U?si=YjByIimhMUi5WO8D
And I think we do have to think of curiosity as a social trait which is selected for or against as part of cultural evolution via group competition.
And what is interesting about our current time period is the way our global networks are enabling new ways of forming and collaborating groups - changing the dynamics of group competition and the course of cultural evolution.
But you can also just enjoy the humor and remember to be curious not judgmental. Be Ted, not Rupert.
An old business partner used to make fun of me for speaking in footnotes because my mind has always working in a “why loop” that would have made Toyoda blush…. and if your mind works that way you are aware of the social life of ideas and that the main sign you don’t understand an idea is if you think it’s your own or significantly original… there’s a logical constraint in the structure of ideas that they can only be incrementally original… but getting back to my point…
since I used the Ted Lasso quote I feel like I need to share the way it is misattributed to Whitman because this is interesting in and of itself and a useful
reminder of how social meaning is constructed and that psychology and social meaning are distinct domains from external facing modes of inquiry:
Based on the search results provided, the quote "be curious, not judgmental" does not actually originate from Walt Whitman, as is commonly believed. The evidence shows..z
From Perplexity when asked about the source of the quote “be curious,
not judgmental.”
- The quote was first seen in a 1986 advice column in The Charlotte Observer, written by Marguerite and Marshall Shearer, in response to a question about a parent finding birth control in their teenage daughter's room. The columnists advised "Try to find out her concerns. Be curious, not judgmental."[3][4]
- While the quote is frequently misattributed to Walt Whitman, professor Ed Folsom of the Walt Whitman Archive confirmed that Whitman never said or wrote those words.[3]
- The quote gained popularity after being featured in the TV show "Ted Lasso", where the main character attributes it to Whitman, but this attribution is incorrect.[3][4]
So in summary, the original source of the quote "be curious, not judgmental" appears to be the 1986 advice column in The Charlotte Observer, not the famous American poet Walt Whitman.[3][4]
Sources
[1] 'Be curious, not judgmental." 4 ways to live more curiously in 2023 - Studio 5 https://studio5.ksl.com/be-curious-not-judgmental-live-more-curiously/
[2] Be Curious, Not Judgmental Often misattribted to Walt Whitman - Conversational Leadership https://conversational-leadership.net/quotation/be-curious-not-judgmental/
[3] Did 'Be Curious, Not Judgmental' Originate with Walt Whitman? | Snopes.com https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/be-curious-not-judgmental-walt-whitman/
[4] Is The Charlotte Observer responsible for one of Ted Lasso's most famous quotes? https://www.charlotteobserver.com/charlottefive/c5-people/article275467806.html
[5] Be Curious, Not Judgemental - Walt Whitman's Quote Explained - Steve M Nash https://www.smnash.com/be-curious-not-judgmental/
Thanks mate!
There is one epic and inexcusable error throughout McGilchrists work. Human brains need basic nourishment to develop, and for most of human history it is likely most humans lacked that basic nourishment. For instance throughout documented history the majority of humans lived at subsistence levels in abject poverty and were malnourished. Their brains didn’t develop fully, and they were physically stunted. Until the early 1970s the majority of humans lived in abject poverty (less than around the equivalent of $2 a day)… and although it is painful to recognize, what this means is that the majority of humans for almost all of human history until the last 50 years - lacked the basic nourishment to be able to fully develop physically and that included their brains.
The idea that creativity ruled in eras dominated by abject poverty seems improbably, and feels like the sort of romantic anachronistic delusion we need to have the metacognitive skills to correct for to see the world accurately.
Those who live lives of privilege need to take care not to generalize their experiences. There has perhaps been an oscillation in the perceived experiences of a small elite over time - but the broad human experience just began about 50 years ago when we crossed out of the time when most humans lived in abject poverty.
The world evolves - it doesn’t oscillate like a pendulum.