Guillaume Verdon
speaker
342 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Dec 2023
Guillaume Verdon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
being under your main name, everything being attributable to you. People just are afraid to speak, explore ideas that aren't fully formed, right? And I feel like we've lost something there.
So, I hope, you know, platforms like X and others like really help support people trying to stay pseudonymous or anonymous because it's really important for people to share thoughts that aren't fully formed and converge onto maybe hidden truths that were hard to converge upon. If it was just through open conversation with real names.
I think to me, the reason I went to theoretical physics was that I had to learn the base of the stack that was going to stick around no matter how the technology changes, right? And to me, that was the foundation upon which then I later built engineering skills and other skills. And to me, the laws of physics, it may seem like the landscape right now is changing so fast, it's disorienting.
But certain things like fundamental mathematics and physics aren't going to change. And if you have that knowledge and knowledge about complex systems and adaptive systems, I think that's going to carry you very far. And so not everybody has to study mathematics, but I think it's really a huge cognitive unlock to learn math and some physics and engineering.
Get as close to the base of the stack as possible. Yeah, that's right, because the base of the stack doesn't change. Everything else, your knowledge might become not as relevant in a few years. Of course, there's a sort of transfer learning you can do, but then you have to always transfer learn constantly.
Right, right. And you'd be surprised, once you've learned concepts in many... physical scenarios, how they can carry over to understanding other systems that aren't necessarily physics. And I guess like the IAC writings, you know, the principles and tenet posts that was based on physics, that was kind of my experimentation with
applying some of the thinking from out of equilibrium thermodynamics to understanding the world around us. And it's led to, to EAC and this, this movement.
No. I think fundamentally in thermodynamic dissipative adaptation, there's the word dissipation. Dissipation is important. Death is important, right? We have a saying in physics, physics progresses one funeral at a time. Yeah. I think the same is true for capitalism, companies, empires, people, everything. Everything must die at some point.
I think that we should probably extend our lifespan because we need a longer period of training because the world is more and more complex. We have more and more data to really be able to predict and understand the world. And if we have a finite window of higher neuroplasticity, then we have sort of a hard cap in how much we can understand about our world.
So I think I am for death because, again, I think it's important if you have a king that would never die, that would be a problem, right? The system wouldn't be constantly adapting, right? You need novelty, you need youth, you need disruption to make sure the system's always adapting and malleable. Otherwise, if things...
are immortal, you know, if you have, let's say, corporations that are there forever and they have the monopoly, they get calcified, they become not as optimal, not as high fitness in a changing, time-varying landscape, right? And so, death gives space for youth and novelty to take its place, and I think it's an important part of every system in nature. So, yeah, I am for death.
But I do think that longer lifespan and longer time for neuroplasticity, bigger brains should be something we should strive for.
I think I have ideas and things I'd like to achieve in this world before I have to go, but I don't think I'm necessarily afraid of death. So you're not attached to this particular body and mind that you got? No, I think I'm sure there's going to be better versions of myself in the future. Forks. Forks, right? Genetic forks or other, right? I truly believe that.
I think there's a sort of evolutionary-like algorithm happening at every bit or nap in the world. It's sort of adapting through this... process that we described in EAC. And I think maintaining this adaptation malleability is how we have constant optimization of the whole machine. And so I don't think I'm particularly, you know, an optimum that needs to stick around forever.
I think there's going to be greater optima. What do you think is the meaning of it all?
The why? Well, the why is thermodynamics. It's why we're here. It's what has led to the formation of life and of civilization, of evolution of technologies and growth of civilization. But why do we have thermodynamics? Why do we have our particular universe? Why do we have these particular hyperparameters, the constants of nature? Well, then you get into the anthropic principle, right?
In the landscape of potential universes, right? We're in the universe that allows for life. And then why is there potentially many universes? I don't know. I don't know that part. But could we potentially engineer new universes or create pocket universes and set the hyperparameters so there is some mutual information between our existence and that universe and we'd be somewhat its parents?
I think that'd be very poetic. It's purely conjecture. But again, this is why figuring out quantum gravity would allow us to Understand if we can do that.
I think we seek, just like an LLM seeks to minimize cross-entropy between its internal model and the world, we seek to minimize the statistical divergence between our predictions in the world and the world itself, and having regimes of energy scales or physical scales in which we have no visibility, no ability to predict or perceive. that's kind of an insult to us.
And we want to be able to understand the world better in order to best steer it or steer us through it. And in general, it's a capability that has evolved because the better you can predict the world, the better you can capture utility or free energy towards your own sustenance and growth.
Showing 321–340 of 342 · page 17 of 18
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