Terrence Deacon: Origins of Life, Consciousness, Entropy, and Sentience

YouTube Link: https://youtu.be/PqZp7MlRC5g Sponsors: - Brilliant: https://brilliant.org/TOE for 20% off - Rocket Money: https://rocketmoney.com/everything - Masterworks: https://masterworks.com promo code TOE - Uncommon Goods: https://uncommongoods.com/everything *New* TOE Website (early access to episodes): https://theoriesofeverything.org/ Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverything LINKS MENTIONED: TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:50 Overview of insights and autobiography 00:07:28 How are mental representations achieved? 00:16:37 Living in a world of symbols 00:23:11 Indexical Relationships 00:26:49 The language problem 00:29:47 Molecular binding and Covariant Relationships 00:39:45 Structural Information and Recursion 00:44:26 1,2,3, Repeat, Chomsky and Universal Grammar 00:51:19 Chomsky's Universals and Turing Machines 01:02:15 Gödel and minimizing ambiguity 01:10:13 Establishing reference and meaning 01:14:59 Noise and signals 01:20:08 The Symbol Grounding Problem ("The Hard Problem of Meaning") 01:30:06 Where does value come from? 01:37:28 Life is a process far from equilibrium 02:14:46 Homeodynamics and Teleodynamics 02:17:02 Sentience vs. Consciousness 02:39:55 Epistemology is tied to Ontology 02:45:31 Universal Grammar (with a capital "U") goes all the way down to chemistry 02:51:48 Absence and "Nothingness" (our existence is based in "absence")