Rachell Powell
speaker
762 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 26 Jan
Rachell Powell’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But if you think that that experience is, maybe we don't know how or why, but it just somehow falls out of
that kind of a world view, where you have this unified field that you've stitched together, where you have objects and space and time, and you learn how to navigate them, and more importantly, classify them based on their relevance to you, presumably based on fitness.
Predators, prey, objects to avoid, things to eat, so forth.
That has evolved multiple times independently in the history of life.
That, to me, is a big deal.
This is a critical thing.
We mentioned observer selection effects very early on.
Obviously, we can't just project ourselves, because it's the only way we could even be asking this question, is to come from a world where this happened, but it could never have happened again.
The big difference with convergence, which I think is beautiful about it, is that we don't have to hail from a world where consciousness, intelligence, complex problem solving, whatever you want to talk about, evolved multiple times.
That starts to really look like you're getting around observer selection effects and you're looking at a more law-like type of phenomenon.
Then the big problem comes when you get to human cultural capacities.
That takes you into a whole different realm.
So far we've been like, there's all this historical contingency embedded in the evolutionary process that gives rise to bodies, but there's quite a bit of convergence going on in the mental sphere.
which is really interesting and is suggestive of some kind of a law-like pattern, that we might actually be able to glean some contentful laws of biology that are universal to some extent, contrary to the classic view of there being no laws in biology or there being no contentful ones.
But then it sort of swings back, and I think...
when you get so like you know getting intelligent living things whether we're talking about social insects or we're talking about cetaceans you know dolphins and whales um or we're talking about cephalopod mollusks it is a very very distant place from getting a species with cumulative culture
And that is a respect in which we are unique.
But it's worse than that.
It's a lot worse than that.
So let me say why I think it's worse than that.
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