You Are A Brain
Here is a 2-hour PowerPoint presentation I made for college students and teens:
It's an introduction to realist thinking, a tour of all the good stuff people don't realize until they include a node for their brain's map in their brain's map. All the concepts come from Eliezer's posts on Overcoming Bias.
I presented this to my old youth group while staffing one of their events. In addition to the slide show, I had a browser with various optical illusions open in tabs, and I brought in a bunch of lemons and miracle fruit tablets. They had a good time and stayed engaged.
I hope the slides will be of use to others trying to promote the public understanding of rationality.
Note: When you view the presentation, make sure you can see the speaker notes. They capture the gist of what I was saying while I was showing each slide.
Added: I don't have a good file hosting solution for the original PowerPoint file, so I changed the link to point to Google Docs.
Comments (57)
i have not viewed it yet (though i'm greatly looking forward to it) but my first reaction was: you got teenagers to sit still for 2 hours to listen to a talk on rationality. my mind is blown.
In the second half hour, when I was talking about the electromagnetic spectrum, I was a little nervous/excited and adopted a really college-lecture-level style and vocabulary and a lot of the audience (high school age) was obviously starting to tune out.
After I did the optical illusions and miracle fruit demo, which brought me about 2/3 into the presentation time-wise, I had a 5-minute intermission for people to just chat with each other, then continued. Their attention then seemed pretty steady for the last third.
I guess there are enough neat mind-pwns sprinkled throughout the presentation to keep people entertained, even the ones who self-reported that it went way over their heads.
I like this.
It's a nice high-level overview that I can point friends to.
To further that goal, I published this to Google Docs so you can just view it on the web.
Good presentation: just out of curiosity do people here consider the question of whether we are brains settled? Obviously no one here is going to hold that we're immaterial souls and I think the claim that we are brains is less wrong than the claim that we're souls. But I'm also pretty confident that persons aren't brains and I imagine the people who expect future persons to upload themselves to computers will agree with me. To give the usual computer analogy I think saying you are a brain is like saying an operating system is a couple computer chips- you've named the substrate but not the thing itself.
But I'm just curious since Liron said this came of Eliezer and I haven't read everything on OB... is this the popular opinion here that we are brains?
"You Are A Brain" is not strictly accurate, to my mind, but it's catchy and sufficiently less wrong to be useful as a hook for the concepts.
My preferred clarification is "I'm not my brain, I'm something my brain is doing."
No, "you are an organism".
You are a mammal, and all that is within your skin is you. This includes the unconscious bits, as well as the conscious running dialogue in your head. This includes all your other organs, whose functioning affects the functioning of your brain.
The statement "You are a brain" means that your brain is the part of you that is essential to your identity. This is not entirely accurate, and other threads in this discussion address some clarifications. But essentially, it makes the point that an injury that destroys part of your brain would cause you to be a different person in a way that the loss of a limb would not.
That's right. The more accurate, less catchy title would be "You Are Implemented On A Homo Sapien Brain".
Depending on what it meant by the question, either "I'm a pattern of information encoded in my brain" or "I'm a side-effect of processing that my brain does for it's own reasons" are the one-sentence descriptions I'd use.
I identify with the meat that currently contains/creates/executes me, but not perfectly - I don't expect that replacing the meat with a sufficiently-similar replacement would alter the experience of being me.
Identity, of course is a continuum, not a binary measure. A different brain with the same patterns and inputs would be so much like me that I'd call them the same. But really it might be no more similar than future me and past me in the "same" body.
Nice!
How did your audience react to your presentation?
Talking to people afterwards, I could tell they thought it was a really fun program and a good addition to their event. They seemed to feel that the content was deep.
Unfortunately, many of them seemed to not grasp the central principles. When I asked them what they thought the main idea was, they said something like: "Your experience is what you make of it, like how you feel in social situations is under your control" -- apparently rounding to the nearest cached wisdom (although not a bad one).
I consider that a failure on my part to make the concepts clear and accessible enough. It was unreasonable to think that people would remember the definition of "heuristic", for example, the way I presented it in passing during the original presentation.
After I did the presentation, I spent a couple more hours tweaking and reorganizing the slides before posting to LW. Now that I've improved the slides, and now that I've had practice with presenting the material, I'm optimistic about being able to achieve more comprehension the next time I find an audience for this.
And even when the ideas are over some people's heads, I think that as long as they're entertained, it's good to expose them to an impressive display of realist philosophy at an early age.
Would you consider making a video of yourself giving the presentation (on youtube, f.ex.) and posting it to LW?
Note to self: Start asking audience members what they thought was the main idea of my talk.
Anything that says "come back later, there is wisdom here" is good. Star Trek got me started being interested in physics. Every bit helps.
Loved the gut example.
Thanks. I got the idea from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. I think Hawking was saying that anthropic reasoning makes it unsurprising that we would observe three spatial dimensions. If there were only two spatial dimensions, complex organisms couldn't evolve, because e.g. two-ended digested tracks don't work. And if there were four or more spatial dimensions, the force of gravity would weaken too much with distance to hold stars together, or something like that.
I liked it.
It might be even more amusing to use a cartoon character instead of a photograph of Jessica Alba - it has even less connection to reality than a photograph.
I've had a crush on Kimiko Ross for some time now, if that helps.
She's really hot.
Jessica Rabbit?
Jessica Rabbit is more of a caricature of a sexy woman than actually sexy... her upper chest is too wide when compared to the rest of her body.
I was thinking of a character drawn in an anime style... something more like this:
http://api.ning.com/files/2hal38Sr*lP-QBmNhQjjB01Wxjm2oiWUjCeXs8i*7C8_/morrigan.jpg
(That's Morrigan from Darkstalkers.)
Just to clarify, does this mean you're releasing the slides in the public domain?
Yeah.
Re slide twenty-seven:
In future presentations, please don't use the grammatical second person.
Alright. I wasn't concerned with that kind of thing because the writing is intended to be used as speaker notes, not read off directly. And the youth group I presented to was all male (with one openly gay member in the audience).
Why? What would be the better way?
The current wording implicitly suggests that the normative human is sexually attracted to women, whereas in fact this is only true of approximately half the population. I understand that this interpretation is not what was explicitly intended, but clear language is important, especially if one is going to hold forth on "unconscious map computation".
It seems that this can all be dodged by simply showing Jessica alongside, I don't know, Brad Pitt or someone. Should take care of most viewers.
The wording "you might feel aroused anyway" suggests no such thing. "Might" carries no implication that P>0.5, merely that P>0.
The next sentence "So your feeling of horniness is not connected to what’s in reality", however does tend to imply the default is sexual attraction to women. It's also untrue: the pixels on the screen are real, they just happen not to be a different reality (Jessica Alba being in the room).
I noticed this too, but in context I don't think it's the most natural reading. It seems as if the audience is assumed by default to be composed of heterosexual males, with the word might acknowledging that they might or might not be aroused by this particular picture at this particular time. See notes to slide twenty-nine: "You stealth-compute 'sexiness' as a property of Jessica alba by unconsciously evaluating signs of her health and fertility in her appearance."
Here I'm inclined to defend the original phrasing. Criticism in the service of inclusiveness and clear language is one thing; literalist nitpicking is another. When we say "The picture isn't real," I think it's rather clear from context that we mean "the picture is not a veridical rendering of reality," not "the picture does not exist."
On the other hand---it is worth pointing out that men viewing pornography should not be said to be making a mistake (as is suggested by speaking of a "feeling of horniness {being} not connected to what’s in reality"). The men know perfectly well that it's only a photograph, they just don't care. Why would they or should they? Humans are adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers.
All this mess could be sidestepped entirely by using "sunset/beautiful" or "chocolate/tasty" rather than "Jessica Alba/sexy," although I imagine some would argue that this would damage the presentation by making it less entertaining.
I also note that using a photoshopped image (or playing the Dove natural beauty youtube thingy) would convey the point even more strongly.
Nicely done! Thanks for sharing.
+1 Awesome
I stole some of your slides for my own presentation to high schoolers.
(Will upload a copy in case I ever get the time to translate it from Finnish.)
Could you put this up on youtube at some point?
I didn't make a recording of the presentation I did. Next time I have an occasion to do it I will look into getting it taped.
Is anyone else having trouble downloading this? I get .1MB, and then the download seems to stall.
Mirror, if it helps.
Slide 24: "your the map" is probably a typo.
The presentation is very good. Well done!
It doesn't show correctly in either Google Docs or Open Office. Sadly, vote down.