Sarah Walker
speaker
510 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Sarah Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Like there's not a universal definition of what's beautiful. It is something that is dependent on your history and how you interact with the world. And I guess what I like about beauty, like any other concept, is when you turn it on its head. So maybe the traditional conception of why women wear makeup and they dress certain ways is because they want to look beautiful and pleasing to people.
And I just like to do it because It's a confidence thing. It's about embodying the person that I want to be and about owning that person. And then the way that people interact with that person is very different than if I didn't have that, like if I wasn't using that attribute as part of, and obviously that's influenced by the society I live and like what's aesthetically pleasing things.
But it's interesting to be able to turn that around and not have it necessarily be about the aesthetics, but about the power dynamics that the aesthetics create.
Well, the point is you're saying it's an adaptive trait for like sexual selection or something. And I'm saying that the adaptation that beauty confers is far richer than that. And some of the adaptation... is about social hierarchy and social mobility and just plain social dynamics. Like, why do some people dress goth? It's because they identify with a community and a culture associated with that.
And they get, you know, and that's a beautiful aesthetic. It's a different aesthetic. Some people don't like it.
Yes, exactly. It's the same kind of- Yes, and I think too few people think about the way that they, the aesthetics they build for themselves in the morning and how they carry it in the world and the way that other people interact with that because they put clothes on and they don't think about clothes as carrying function.
I think one thing that I feel like I notice much more viscerally than I feel like I hear other people describe is that the representations in our mind and the way that we use language are not the things like... Actually, I mean, this is an important point going back to what Gertl did, but also this idea of signs and symbols and all kinds of ways of separating them. There's like the word, right?
And then there's like what the word means about the world. And we often confuse those things. And what I feel very viscerally, I almost sometimes think I have some kind of like synesthesia for language or something. And I just like don't interact with it like the way that other people do. But for me, words are objects and the objects are not the things that they describe.
They have like a different ontology to them. Like they're physical things and they carry causation and they can create meaning, but they're not. They're not what we think they are. And also like the internal representations in our mind, like the things I'm seeing about this room are probably, you know, like they're small projection of the things that are actually in this room.
And I think we have such a difficult time moving past the way that we build representations in the mind and the way that we structure our language to realize that those are approximations to what's out there and they're fluid and we can play around with them and we can see deeper structure underneath them that I think like we're missing a lot.
Yeah, for sure. I love this essay by Poincaré about like mathematical creativity, where he talks about this sort of like frothing of all these things. And then like somehow you build theorems on top of it and they become kind of concrete. But like, and I also think about this with language.
It's like, there's a lot of stuff happening in your mind, but you have to compress it in this few sets of words to try to convey it to someone. So it's, It's a compactification of the space. And it's not a very efficient one. And I think just recognizing that there's a lot that's happening behind language is really important.
I think this is one of the great things about the existential trauma of large language models, I think, is the recognition that language is not the only thing required. Like there's something underneath it. Not by everybody.
Yeah, I was just gonna say it's like a playground.
I love doing that in everything I do, but especially with language.
Exactly.
Yeah, it's literally my favorite thing to do.
Yeah. So I, you know, a lot of my sort of like what happens in my mind when I'm thinking about ideas is I've been presented with this information about how people think about things. And I try to go around to different communities and hear the ways that different, whether it's like, you know, hanging out with a bunch of artists or philosophers or scientists thinking about
things, like they all think about it different ways. And then I just try to figure out like, how do you take the structure of the way that we're talking about it and turn it slightly? So you have all the same pieces that everybody sees are there, but the description that you've come up with seems totally different.
So they can understand that there's like, they understand the pattern you're describing, but they never heard the structure underlying it described the way that you describe it.
Showing 321–340 of 510 · page 17 of 26
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