Paul Conti

Where I think it was Hegel, right?

Who realized, hey, when you have like thing A and thing B and they're complicated and they come together, you know, you don't get a hybrid of A and B, right?

You know, you end up getting something that's new, that's novel.

And I think that...

describes to some degree what emergence is, except there's a whole new universe of novelty that comes at each layer of emergence that allows infinite possibilities that weren't possible before.

And I think that's why we're so complicated, that our functional neuroscience, which I think is psychology, our ability to think about ourselves, about others, to be reflective, is sitting on top of

so many layers of emergence, like the idea of standing on the shoulders of giants, that we're, you know, each of us, our consciousness is standing on the shoulder of a giant of many, many, many levels of emergence, of novelty, so many of which we don't understand.

I mean, about subatomic particles, everything that quantum physics means, you know, when does time become important?

As opposed to things happening outside of time and outside of space.

When do we slot into one temporal perspective and then the complexity just, I think, grows and grows and grows.

I think that's entirely possible.

I mean, I think the only emergent thing, so to speak, that we build is culture, right?

The aggregation of us.

So you have individual human minds, which are entirely unique.

I mean, even the fact that time is different for you and me, right?

It may be by picoseconds, right?

But we...

can engage because our perceptions of time are parallel enough, they're close enough, right?

That we can share a reality, right?

But we're all living in a different dimension of time, right?