You Are A Brain

Liron

Here is a 2-hour slide 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 6 years later: I finally made a video of myself presenting this, except this time it was an adult audience. See this discussion post.

Here is a 2-hour slide presentation I made for college students and teens:

You Are A Brain

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 6 years later: I finally made a video of myself presenting this, except this time it was an adult audience. See this discussion post.

That's what I think, too.

Either way, what I'm trying to argue against is the "you are an organism" thing. Not "everything within my skin" is necessary to run the program, I mean surely not the colon or metatarsal bones? To me it makes little more sense to call the entire body "me" than my car. Either way it's a vehicle, even if at the present state of technology I'm kind of stuck with this one.

I suspect that when we, in a hurry to signal allegiance to reductionism and materialism, tell people things like "you are an organism" (or even "you are a brain", unless a proper explanation follows), many among those listeners who are actually interested in truth (rather than just in absorbing acceptable beliefs of the Tribe of Scientifically Literate) will reasonably feel there's something not quite right about this, that it dismisses something that's actually important. They might not say so, being ashamed of possibly being seen as believing in souls or some other silly nonphysicalism, but it will still not ring true to them.

So I think getting this right matters. Otherwise we're helping fuel the resistance to reductionism among the unconvinced.

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You Are A Brain

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You Are A Brain

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