Sean Carroll

Are there shortcuts?

Are there better things that we can do?

After all, the AIs also have constraints, but they're not the same constraints that human beings have.

So figuring out why cognition is the way it is and therefore how to implement it better in different kinds of systems is it's going to be a growth area in the near term.

Let's just put it that way.

So let's go.

Tom Griffiths, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

That's great to be here.

You know, I'm a physicist, and I often sort of teasingly say that physics is good for people with short attention spans, no real ability to keep a lot of complexity in their minds all at once.

And at the end of doing physics, you come up with the laws of physics.

As a cognitive scientist, as someone studying literally the most complex thing that we know about in the universe, is there any hope that

that we should even talk about something like Laws of Thought, the title of your new book?

I'm not even sure if this is a question, but it is fascinating to me if you go all the way back to Aristotle, etc.,

that Aristotle talked a lot about the world, the natural world, and the discussion of what we would call the physical world and the biological world.

There were distinctions drawn, but it was kind of a continuum, right?

Like he kind of tried to use the same concepts in both cases.

I don't know at what point that ceased to be a popular strategy.

Yeah.

Well, which brings up the question when we talk about logic, if we just use the phrase laws of thought, is this meant to refer to the normative ways that you should be thinking the right way of thinking?

Or is it just a descriptive phrase of like, this is how thinking actually gets done?