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

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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")