EP1 Simon DeDeo – The Evolution of Consciousness

Simon DeDeo is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also affiliated with the Cognitive Science program at Indiana University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds. For three years, from 2010 to 2013, he was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He and his collaborators study how people use words and signals, and the ideas they represent, to create a world. They have studied a diverse set of systems that includes the French Revolution, the courtrooms of Victorian London, the research strategies of Charles Darwin, the insurgency of modern-day Afghanistan, the emergent bureaucracy of Wikipedia, the creation of power hierarchies among the social animals, and the collusions and conspiracies of petrol stations in the American Midwest. They combine data from the contemporary world, archives from the deep past, statistical tools from cosmology, and models of human cognition from Bayesian reasoning and information theory to understand how cultures grow, flourish, innovate, and evolve. Index to The Jim Rutt Show featuring Simon DeDeo Introduction to Simon DeDeo (00:00:00 to 00:11:00) = 11 minutes Noise vs. Signal: The Fermi Paradox (00:11:00 to 00:23:00) = 12 minutes Social Media and Blocklists (00:23:00 to 00:48:00) = 25 minutes Remembrances of Murray Gell-Mann (00:48:00 to 00:56:00) = 18 minutes Cultural Evolution (00:56:00 to 01:13:00) = 17 minutes Consciousness (01:13:00 to 01:30:00) = 17 minutes Science Fiction (01:30:00 to 01:38:00) = 8 minutes Transcript of The Jim Rutt Show featuring Simon DeDeoJim Rutt interviews Carnegie-Mellon Assistant professor Simon DeDeo. Simon is also affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute and the Cognitive Science program at Indiana University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds. DeDeo and his colleagues combine data from the contemporary world, archives from the deep past, statistical tools from cosmology, and models of human cognition from Bayesian reasoning and information theory to understand how cultures grow, flourish, innovate, and evolve. In this podcast, Jim Rutt and Simon DeDeo discuss the following topics: Introduction to Simon DeDeo, Noise vs. Signal: The Fermi Paradox, Social Media and Blocklists, Remembrances of Murray Gell-Mann, Cultural Evolution, Consciousness and Science Fiction.