David Eagleman
speaker
1,631 appearances
7 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 20 Mar
David Eagleman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
This is just part of the passage into maturity, right? We realize that it's a long game. And so we get to know that, you know, as kids, we eat the cake every time. Maybe we get sick from it. And what we realize is that the things that we want for our lives are a different category of things. And so these are part of the networks that are right.
I totally agree. And by the way, you introduced this idea of thinking about the future and thinking about community, but I think we'd agree those are not orthogonal actions. Not at all. Exactly. They point in the same direction or similar directions.
You know, I think they're very similar. Yeah, okay. Thinking about a stranger and thinking about yourself. For some reason, we have this special attachment to our future selves. So we do things like put money into an IRA. We do all kinds of things that we're doing for our future self. So our future self will be, you know, happy, we imagine, even though our future self will be unrecognizable to us.
You don't know who that future person is, and you're making all kinds of decisions in deference to them.
Oh, that's interesting.
I'm not sure I would think you would need that piece. Well, that's the question. I'll think about that further. But here's what I would say. It's the experience of time that children have that allow them to think about time. In other words... In other words, if you and I talk about ancient Rome, we're at an age where we can kind of think about 2,000 years and think about what that means.
An eighth grader learning about that in school really can't imagine 2,000 years. No. Much less imagine 50 years, what that time scale. Or even next week. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. But as you mature in the world, you're able to think about timescales that you simply weren't able to before.
Agreed, agreed. Okay, great. So where we get then is maturation leads to an ability to think long-term. It's this capacity to think about who do I want to be is something that requires experience and some amount of wisdom. And this is... I know that we share an interest in stories and how this can set... This can help us set an idea in our heads for, hey, that's... That's who I want to be.
I hadn't thought about this because my short-term networks have been having fun and I've been in elementary school and middle school and so on. But now I'm really starting to think about this and what impact I want to make in the world. Anyway.
When you have that idea in mind, even let's say, let's imagine a person is religious and really has established, hey, I want to be like this deity or this role model of any sort. There's always conflict though, right? Because then you've got temptations in front of you, all around you. And so there's always this rivalry.
I only mentioned this going back 10 minutes because the issue of, do these systems work out some sort of nice gameplay? Sort of, but there's also the fact that they're always in conflict. You're just always dealing with this, even when you have... Well, that's also... Well, maybe I would say...
That's right. Right. And this allows us to go back and tie two pieces together, which is that You know, the brain's job is really to burn things into the unconscious when it says, oh, I've got this, I've got that. This is a routine I've seen before, right? But the reason we're always conscious, the reason the brain's always burning a lot of energy is because the world throws lots of novelty at us.
And so despite all our best efforts, every day is full of the unexpected. And therefore, we're always in these novel conflicts, right?
That's right. Although I suspect that a lot of our future simulation is unconscious because some amount of our future sim is, you know, is something that we've... Right, it's using the machine. It's using the machine, exactly. Yeah, yeah, definitely.
And so we certainly can pull things up into consciousness and think, okay, I really want to understand what it would be like if I did this and if I moved to this other city and got this other job. But much of the time, we're just slamming things forward.
Let me make sure I can unpack that. It's that if you're looking at a high entropy state where there's lots of possibilities, then you have higher anxiety. Anxiety actually indexes that.
That's almost by definition. And by the way, this goes back to what we were saying also about, you know, for example, the Tetris players, or let's just say, I don't know, let's say when you, did you play soccer as a kid? Okay, so when you first were learning how to play soccer, again, your brain, if we could have measured it while you were running around on the field, it's on fire because you're,
You're trying to figure out, wait, where's the ball? Where's everyone else? You know, it's all knees and elbows and you don't know what's going on. Okay. A professional soccer player is a hundred times better than you, but his brain isn't burning nearly as much energy as the child trying to figure this out. That's right. He's in a much lower entropy state. Exactly. He's in a lower entropy state.
That's because his movements are more efficient. Right. But the reason is because the child is trying to simulate all the possibilities. The professional has sort of seen everything play out before. That's the key. He's got the patterns. But the child has the high entropy state because, you know, what if I try this? What if I try that? Yeah. And so on.
And what he famously said is, I'm not thinking about where the puck is, I'm thinking about where the puck is going to be. Right, right, right.
Showing 1461–1480 of 1,631 · page 74 of 82
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