if we actually understood that all of this that I'm seeing right now I'm making it up on the fly. This cup that I'm seeing, it only exists when I create it.

you can't actually measure the kilogramme, and you can't measure the metre because they are the platonic

Unravelling Constructed Realities

shi-ne

we impute three-dimensionality onto the world as we walk around we use things like Parallax and assumptions about what thing is bigger than what other thing and so on

bringing to light our inner diversity could be as transformational for society as recognition of our externally visible diversity has been

sense of self is a construct a psychological and social construct it's something it's not something that 00:06:42 infants are born with it's actually something that develops as we grow up our caregivers look into our eyes give us a name that we learned to identify with and also basically we learn to see 00:06:59 ourselves as they see us we inte

Horror films are always shot in the dark, in the forest, at night, in the depths of the sea, the blackness of space. And the reason is because dying was easy during evolution. If you weren't sure that was a predator, it was too late. Your brain evolved to predict. 00:02:42 And if you couldn't predict, you died. And the way your brain predicts is by encoding the bias and assumptions that were useful in the past. But those assumptions just don't stay inside your brain. You project them out into the world. There is no bird there. You're projecting the meaning onto the screen.

few grasps their imprisonment by time shifting our perceptions of the world to create ecological change is not simply about abandoning modern technology the true challenge people 00:01:13 face is breaking free of the instrumental mechanism that binds them to the modern world

From my own perspective, the conclusion is important that human structural development issubject to a categorical double bond: On the one hand, a person’s lifeworld is his or her ownsubjective construction. On the other hand, this construction is not arbitrary. In spite of allsubjectivity – because of the human’s structural coupling to its environment, this constructionis influenced and limited by the framework of this very environment (Kraus, 2013, p. 65ff.).

these four philosophers in very different ways but 00:18:14 in ways that intersect in very intriguing ways um emphasized that with knowledge sensory knowledge perceptual knowledge isn't the direct access um to sensory properties or descent or 00:18:28 objects around us but rather is always the result of a complex cognitive and perceptual process mediated by our sense organs our sense faculties and our cognitive processes 00:18:41 and just another way to put that this is a way that paul churchill puts this but also um paul fire robin also sellers is that the objects we experience the 00:18:52 world that we inhabit the world in which we find ourselves embedded is not a world that we simply find it's a world that we construct and whose constituents we construct in our central nervous 00:19:06 systems in response to sensory stimulation transduced by neural impulses that is somehow our bodies interact with other bodies in the world um our and through various kinds of 00:19:19 cognitive processes

i was particularly struck by the fact that barry didn't say the mind is this this and that okay barry said well the mind is many things 01:19:18 uh look there's this and this this and this and there's a sort of layers also in some sense in which we can talk about it or or have some understanding partial media 01:19:30 understanding about it some wisdom about it and this layering i find it it's uh absolutely brilliant from my perspective 01:19:43 uh because it it dissolves the wrong question which is what is the mind period what is the thing which is the mind here is the thing which is mine uh let's just 01:19:55 define it characterize it and understand what it is that's a wrong that's a wrong way of thinking about it it's when we say when we think about our mind of course we think something you you unite somehow 01:20:09 it's the set of processes that happen into me and it's about my thinking my emotions but it's not one thing it's a complicated layer there's many layers of discussion possible about 01:20:21 that i don't want to enter into the specific but i found this fascinating and let me go to time immediately because uh it's it's deeply related i got the book of time which is a um 01:20:34 the audio of time in which i carlo this carlo is very timely because we're also kind of running low on time absolutely absolutely 01:20:46 and and and in the book i sort of uh try to collect everything we have learned about time from science from special activity from generative statistical mechanics from other pieces and and what we 01:21:00 tentatively uh learn about time with quantum gravity which is my uh specific field once again you have to sort of uh put your hands on the notion of time and the main message of the book 01:21:12 in fact the single message of the book is that the question of what is time is a wrong question because when we think about time we think about the single thing okay we think we have a totally clear idea about time time is a single thing 01:21:25 that flows from the past to the future and the past influence the president the president of the future in the present this is how things are the reality of the present entire universe is a real state in that and we learn from science that this way 01:21:37 of viewing times is wrong it's factually wrong okay it's not true that uh we all proceed in in in together from 01:21:48 moment a to moment b and the amount lapse amount of time lapses between a and b is the same for everybody and so on and forth because we learned from from experiences especially activity generativity statistical mechanics and 01:22:01 other things so the way to think about time is that it's a very layered thing but with this thing we call time is made by layers um conceptually and when we look at larger 01:22:14 domain the one of our usual experience some layers are lost so uh some aspects some some properties of what we call time are only good 01:22:25 uh are only appropriate for describing the temporal experience we have if we don't move too fast it doesn't look too uh to to to too far away if you don't look at the atoms too in detail as a single 01:22:38 degrees of freedom and so on so forth so the notion of time opens up in a in a in a set of layers which are become increasingly 01:22:53 uh general only if you go down to the bottom level um some aspect of time like the universality of time uh uh only makes sense if if we don't go too 01:23:06 fast velocities for instance um so this is a similarity and that's why the the opening up of what the mind is into layers seems to be uh 01:23:19 the right direction to go right when if if i ask uh does a cat has a mind or does a fly has a mind it seems to me that the only answer is uh to get out of the idea that the 01:23:31 answer is either yes or no i mean i i suppose that certainly a cat has a certain you know a sleepy feeling in the morning and the moment of 01:23:43 joy when he sees his fellow cats but i suppose a cat doesn't go through a complicated intellectual game of trying to understanding what is reality and debating about that so there is some aspect in common uh either not break up 01:23:56 this this notion in in pieces once again uh i mean the the topic is what is real uh 01:24:08 if we start by saying time is real it's a beautiful chapter why you cannot say that time is an intrinsic existence uh we just get it wrong if we think well then atoms are real or the mind is real 01:24:21 all these answers we got it wrong we can say that things are real in a uh in a conventional sense within a context within a within a um 01:24:37 and and then we when we try to realize what you mean by uh something is real this is certainly real in a conventional sense but we realize that um reality the reality of this object 01:24:49 itself it gets sort of broken up into interdependence between this object and else and its different layers 01:25:02 and and that's the reality that as a scientist i can deal with not the ultimate reality the the conventional reality of course conventional reality is real as uh perry 01:25:15 was saying this is not a negation of reality uh it's a it's a it it's a freedom from the idea of the ultimate reality uh 01:25:27 the ultimate uh sort of intrinsic inherent reality being there on which in terms of which building progress

he's built a little toy he's built a treadmill for a snail isn't that wonderful he's a genuine scientist he's doing lots and lots of experiments with 00:11:27 animals they're very creative experiments in this case he's built a treadmill for a snail so the snail is held by a vice on a rotating ball and the snail is then um approached by 00:11:40 the investigator who chucks it under the chin like this and if you chuck the snail under the chin like this the snail will recoil not surprising i 00:11:52 would recall it as well but as you speed up the frequency of these chucks under the chin at about five hertz once you pass a frequency of about five chucks per second 00:12:05 the snail's behavior changes remarkably instead of being perturbed and trying to withdraw it tries to crawl onto onto something the qualitative nature of what's happening 00:12:18 to the snail has changed for the snail and its response or it's it's um sense making is altered and it's tried it perceives seems to perceive now a constant surface onto which it might 00:12:32 crawl now that might seem strange to you but i'll remind you that if we flash a light for you five times a second you'll see a light flashing and if we speed up the interval 00:12:44 then we shorten the interval between flashes to make them faster there comes a critical point at about 20 site flashes per second where you no longer perceive individual flashes but you 00:12:54 perceive a continuous light something like this underlies the magic that happens with moving pictures as well where you know that the action you see in the cinema is a bunch of projected still pictures 00:13:09 but they um have this character of continuous movement for you likewise in sound if we play that for you you hear a bunch of disconnected claps but if we shorten the 00:13:22 interval between the claps and speed it up there comes a point at which it changes into a continuous low pitch and that happens again about 20 hertz at about 20 cycles per second now for this snail 00:13:35 that border is at a different place it's at about five cycles per second what this shows is quite profound remember kant's synthetic a prioris 00:13:46 time for this snail is different than time for you the time that arises as a function of the body of the snail has this border at about five hertz where you have one at about 20 hertz 00:14:01 his basic insight is that worlds arise for snails that are not commensurable with worlds that arise for humans with which are not commensurable with worlds that arise for earthworms 00:14:15 the notion of an umvelt we get to determine a minute is used to describe this bodily specific arising of a world together with time and space 00:14:28 now i said it's rather weird to think of time being fundamentally different for an animal of a different constitution but i'll remind you that we can use our cinematic tricks to make ourselves aware of our own 00:14:41 limitations on the left there through high-speed photography we managed to make perceptible an event which we cannot otherwise see the event that you see there with the splash is 00:14:53 perfectly real but we can only make it manifest through high-speed photography similarly whoops there are processes going on around us 00:15:05 that we do not perceive and we can use time-lapse photography to make those to speed them up so that they become perceptible to us something like the blooming of a flower or the battles intricate battles fought 00:15:16 between brambles and hedges these make us aware that we perceive time as unfolding at a rate dictated by our own metabolism and bodily processes so this idea that time and space 00:15:32 are considered very different from count but very much tied now to the body this is quite radical

Humanity’s COG is assessed as its deep frames, prevalent and dominant worldviews that influence governance decisions across the public and private sectors (figure 3). Simply put, CEC presents a new type of threat—a Frankenstein-like killing and destruction phenomenon—that humanity struggles to conceive or perceive.

“We can predict if residents are happy based on their digital interactions with the service, which gives us more information about whether they will renew their leases,” says Zego CEO Adam Blake.

The socially constructed part of race is not that it is unreal, but that it is invisible in its construction, and that it is being done by people all the time, in action and in understanding. We all are pushing the levers every day.