TEDxWumaStreet 2018 talks and videos

2018-11-03 Wenzhou TEDxWumaStreet speech title: Copernicus in the inner world

Lecture video https://www.google.com/search?q=TEDxWumaStreet+Li Xiaoxu&source=lnms&tbm=vid

Technology is changing the face of our lives. In 2015, three years ago, the chief scientist of Facebook's virtual reality team made such a magic trick in his speech:

Have you ever come across that these two colors are the same? Please raise your hand when you see that these two pills are the same color, there should be, but very few. Our chief scientist then slowly erased its background. When the background was erased, the audience would find that the pixels and pigments of the two pills are really the same in physics, and they are all gray. If we bring the background back, you should see blue and red again.

This scene comes from the famous "The Matrix". If the protagonist chooses the blue pill, he will enter the virtual world into the dream of the matrix, and if he chooses the red pill, he will return to real life. Our chief scientist used such a "snippet" to express that virtual reality is the same as real life. But the proposition he wants to say is not a joke. When virtual reality and real life enter the brain neural network and become your brain neural network signal, they are really the same.

I'll address three propositions with this one topic, and finally I'd like to make a little critique of virtual reality.

Ⅰ Time and space window expansion - melody theme change

The first proposition: as the time-space window expands, the melodic themes we see will change. This seems to be a very bland proposition. For the pill we just saw, we did not see the pixels inside the pill, but we saw the pixels of the pill and the pixels next to the pill at the same time. Our neural network does the automatic processing and calculations, leading us to see melodic contrasts.

What are you seeing now? If I magnify the pixels of the pills enough times to cover the entire field of view, this is what you see.

We interpret it as a day of peace that seems to be a dull, undisturbed day, and if we put it back in the context of a turbulent era, it seems to have color.

So I want to say that the connotation of our happiness is different on different time scales. On the time scale of seconds, we experience positive emotions. If you're in a very anxious, tense state, it's a negative emotion. We make this time scale a little bigger: for example, when we watch a particularly wonderful movie, it is best to be in suspense most of the time. So we are on a relatively long and malleable time scale, and the connotation of our happiness is focus, commitment, and not distraction.

So what can help you not get distracted?

I am a statistics teacher. I often encourage my students to take a piece of paper and write in class. I was writing when the other two speakers were speaking. I'm not trying to remember, I'm writing this action so I don't get distracted and can grab clues.

If we look at our life from the perspective of the universe, will the value collapse? Because the galaxy will be destroyed, and human beings will be destroyed in a long enough time. In this context, are you afraid that the meaning and value of human beings will disappear?

This is the Milky Way, and it's made into a crystal. If it's a galaxy on the plane and we make it a crystal on a time scale, what does that represent? Like a piece of music, our whole life is a melody. What you feel is not the pixel (of the pill), but the melody of contrast. After the melody is played by you, it will end. When the song ends, does it disappear forever? Or is it forever? This is a difference in concept.

" Vast "

In this science fiction, the entire galaxy is an atom, and in the larger universe, this atom exists for a very short time. An unstable atom will decay very quickly, and the moment before decay is equivalent to billions of years in our current galaxy. Will their world have their intelligent creatures, will they have their first-person perspective and first-person experience? Will there be any meaning to them? Are their meanings the same music as ours? Is it the same relationship and structure? Is it strictly equivalent in the mathematical world, something that will never be destroyed?

This is Copernicus, and many of his friends may not have accurately understood his views. His point is not to express that the earth revolves around the sun, he is talking about this [speaker rotates once].

Now all the audience circled around me, Copernicus said is such a feeling. If you look at it from a third-person perspective, you can see a particularly strong contrast with the first-person perspective. In our day and age, it seems not too difficult to advocate heliocentrism. But it's actually quite difficult. If I didn't make this circle, most viewers would think that the heliocentric was talking about the earth revolving around the sun, no, in fact it focused on the rotation of the earth.

In our time, our Copernicus is the philosopher of the mind, Daniel Dennett. I talk about his heliocentric theory. We're back to this example again. Of course, the red and blue pills are all gray pixels. On everyone's retina, do you see the gray pill or the head down. This matter is famous in the history of thought, and it is said that Leonardo da Vinci first wrote it down. How do we know that what we see is an inverted image on the retina? Actually, what we see is not an image on the retina, but electromagnetic waves on the retina. The network gives it the computations that become the neural signals that characterize these colors. As the neural network goes in layer by layer, where does our conscious self see these, receive these signals and content? Before Dennett, almost all psychologists doubted our conscious self, buried deep in a more internal location in the brain. But this is wrong.

Let's look at this example again. Now you should all see the white triangle with the arc edge blocking the foreground. If you don't see it, I have only seen individual cases of damage to the brain area and there are reports that you cannot see it. This is not quite the same as the two red and blue pills that some friends can't see. In fact, you can reflect on what you see are some parts of it, some subtle features at the junction of the three corners and the other six lines . Therefore, this arc-edge triangle is that your neural network has walked several layers in the retina, and one of the layers suddenly calculated and read it for it. This thing is completely automated. So you don't need to use your brain, you don't realize it at all, you see it. In addition to this arc-edge triangle, you also see this cover, this is a book, you also see me telling you about it here, you also see the whole world around you, the whole environment, you Seeing parts of your own body, have you seen your eyes, you don't even know that you have a retina receiving an inverted image, and you don't even know your conscious self-wrong, just "can't see" , not to say "I don't know", but you know, why do you know, it is because the neural network calculates further down, at a certain layer, it is exactly the same as this arc-edge triangle, and suddenly it is calculated, okay, you are now With a conscious self.

This is Dennett's heliocentric theory. Our conscious self emerges from our conscious content. The geocentric theory means that we have a conscious self hiding deep in the layers of neural networks, secretly looking out. These two things are completely different. If you use the movie player to understand: my brain neural network is like a movie player, and I am the first-person character in the movie, which is played. I gave it a more common name, called Brain Tonic.

In the book, which is translated as "The Mind of Me," Dennett wrote a short science fiction story. In science fiction, he wrote himself as the protagonist. His brain was carefully dug out and kept in a laboratory glass jar. Through WIFI and the receiver in the empty skull, the nerve signals are closely connected and connected smoothly. Under such a scene, where would he feel his conscious self was? Will his conscious self be in the glass jar? No, it was felt in his visual content, and the content felt by his body was reversed to the first-person position. In most cases, it should be behind his eyes.

Search keywords at station B: rubber hand + experiment

Have you seen this video? Double Eleven is coming soon, you can take a look at this and get your hands on it. This is a particularly classic study published in "Nature" in 1998, and it was reproduced in the documentary courseware. Now I ask you a question, if the knife is pierced in the direction of his real hand, this is a paper screen, if a knife is pierced into the position of his real hand, is he not afraid? He thought he had escaped doom. If a hammer hits Dennett's head, he'll be scared, and if a hammer hits Dennett's brain in a lab jar, he feels like it's none of my business. This is Dennett's doctrine.

My main work is to rewrite the psychology of happiness using Dennett's model. We can see something like this, which seems to be common sense, but it is an insight that is particularly unexpected in common sense. Why all languages say our mind is here (heart) and not here (brain). Have you ever found a language where English, French, German, Chinese do not speak the heart when speaking of the heart. Why?

In our daily life, vision occupies the vast majority of the experience content. When we feel emotion, happiness, and sense of meaning, at such a special point in time, our visual content does not change much, and without change, there is no melody. Where was our melody at that time? In our heartbeat, in our breath. So when we say that we are moved, it is really my heart. That thing happened when your heart hit, you know what it was, so where are you? In the position of the heart, in the position of the chest. So our subject is called psychology, not brain science. This is unscientific, but there is a very deep philosophical reason behind it.

Another technology-related one: Do you feel stupid when you wake up from a dream? It is especially obvious that you have a very poor memory. After just 10 seconds, most of the things in your dream have been forgotten. You can try a psychological experiment like this, and remember every time you wake up from a dream, you will find that the dream is actually very rich. As long as you start to memorize it at the time, you will be able to unfold the very interesting plot of the dream at once. But you forget all about it after 10 seconds. The reason is very simple, because when we just wake up, many brain areas in our brain have not woken up. In particular, to consolidate our short-term memory into long-term memory, this part of the brain is still sleeping.

In my statistics class, I can't remember almost all the interesting examples, but I remember how to find it and demonstrate it. Search for keywords, right! As long as a person is used to using Google and search engines, the function of his memory has been changed and shaped. He will remember how to find it, and he will remember the key words, but he will never spend his resources to remember the last pointed content. So, we found that this generation of students, if compared to the students of ten years earlier, they are far worse off in closed book exams. Because they are used to memorizing how to look up things, it is no longer easy to remember what the thing to look up is.

If I was in the closed-book exam session myself, I would have performed extremely poorly, not like a statistics teacher at all. Because my brain and Google's server are working together as a movie player, the scene played is the scene when I was a high-level statistics teacher. If I cut it off, I'm in a particularly crappy statistics teacher scene. So, the brain is not me, the brain is my player.

Ⅱ Expansion of the theme of the melody - the change of personality position

We just mentioned that when the window of time and space changes, the theme of the melody will change. If we open this window to the whole life time window, then the melody theme also changes. Why am I coming back to this proposition? Because of different conscious contents and different melodic themes, different selfs will be made up in the brain. When the time window opens, people quietly change from a psychological person to a sociological person, or a philosophical person.

When we return to the topic of meaning, Frankl can be thought of in our doctrine of meaning. Frankel said: We are going to pursue the meaning of life, but we are doing self-transcendence. We do not have our own life goals first, and then complete them after the meaning of life is clear. It was only after the tortuous process of finding the meaning of life was completed that it suddenly emerged: it turns out that there is such a layer of meaning and such a layer of mission in my life. A person who has touched his life's mission is not afraid of fate; while a person who has not touched his life's mission wants to choose freely. When we are not afraid of our destiny is when we identify with our mission.

In order to express the proposition that "freedom is responsibility - the free choice of the whole life is the responsibility to realize the choice of life". He proposed to build a statue similar to the Statue of Liberty on the West Coast of the United States, called the Statue of Duty. The shape of this statue of responsibility has been completed, and now it is in the process of site selection. The final situation should be like this, you can climb to the viewing platform on the top.

http://responsibilityfoundation.org/

Freedom is responsibility, what does that mean? The freedom of the self emerges from the entire time scale of life. He wants to achieve freedom. On each short psychological scale of life and consciousness, you must be able to practice and practice this freedom. This means that you have to limit your own freedom, psychological freedom, not freedom. So freedom is responsibility.

I look at this proposition from another angle. For a long time, the sociological and philosophical self derived from the melody of the whole life, and the self derived from psychology are two different people: different melody, different derived self. The free choice of these two men happens to be in conflict. It will be interesting to see what role technology plays in that. Who is your phone helping you? If you are holding a pen and paper, you are helping your whole life self and realizing its freedom; if you are holding a mobile phone and it is on Double Eleven, you will not listen to our lecture, and you will be distracted in the middle of the lecture. buy order.

At what point does the melody of the entire life time scale become activated? It seems that it is difficult to be activated in most of the daily life, when is it particularly easy to be activated? Facing life or death, or facing a special experience, like climbing Kilimanjaro.

TED

This example is particularly interesting. This neurophysiologist developed a tumor in the brain area of her own language and logic, and suddenly burst open, causing a cerebral hemorrhage in that brain area, and she entered a state of near death. This kind of near death What are the characteristics of the state? Her other brain areas are alive, and she enters a state of dream state that we just said. In fact, when the vast majority of people finally die, the brain regions do not die at the same time, but rather first and then later. Therefore, the vast majority of people end their life in a dream way that integrates real life scenes. If you've ever had a near-death experience, you've gained a deeper understanding of the melody of your entire life.

There should not be many listeners here who have had this experience, but you can try to do hospice care, which is a very serious matter, or more positive, there should be quite a lot of listeners who have experience in giving birth, right? Some of the men here may have had experience with childbirth like me. There is no way for these experiences to tell you what you would experience at that time in an oral expression.

Here's what Hume said, "If you tell me about someone who is addicted to a relationship, it's easy for me to understand what you mean and form a correct view of the person's situation. But we must never associate this Concepts are equated with the person's infatuation in love." Teacher Anti just mentioned the difference between facts and opinions, and finishing the description of the factual level of an experience is completely different from the experience you actually experienced. Therefore, I hope that the friends present will have the opportunity to accompany the delivery, go to hospice care, and go to Kilimanjaro.

This theme of ours speaks of melodic themes, the change in your personality stance as you expand from everyday life to the time scale of your entire life. Once we have the proposition of these two steps, it is easy to understand why I criticize the technology of virtual reality. Because virtual games should not have too long a time line, our current technology can't do it, let a person immerse in a game from life to death, and when we evaluate the meaning and value of the whole life, our characteristics Yes, if you have two stories, it's not an additive relationship, it's a max relationship. Therefore, when we turn our life into a virtual game of many segments, our life loses the real, inner thread, and our melody is destroyed.

Our conclusion is that the virtual itself does not lose to reality, but it loses to reality on the scale of time windows. Therefore, I am not very optimistic about the virtual reality industry ("Three Lives fortunately" wrote: the virtual reality industry will lose to the augmented reality industry).

Ⅲ Copernicus of Time Philosophy

Finally, we introduce a particularly brain-burning philosophical proposition. Let's go back to Copernicus, what did Copernicus do? [Speaker spins a circle] What is McTaggart doing? [Speaker walks straight to the right] We usually say that we are on the river of time. McTaggart says no, we are in the glacier of time. Our first person is above the timeline (forward), and the timeline itself does not move. This and heliocentrism are very delicate time and space propositions on the symmetry.

Under such a view, you suddenly realize what death means. Death is the end, not the disappearance in our original meaning. The melody that you have played throughout your life, the big movement around the age of 80, when it is played by you, it will fall asleep in the glacier of time, it will end, and it will not disappear. If you are under such a viewpoint, the fear now is not death itself, but the fear of not finding and fulfilling the mission before death.

The whole proposition of our talk is called: "The time window of virtual games closes too quickly, but we have a time window of an idea world that is always open and can transcend death."

This is the theme of the three steps we are talking about today. After the time window expands, the melody theme changes; when the melody theme expands, the personality position changes; and the virtual loses to reality, but don’t be afraid, our philosophy The world is beyond reality and will never be destroyed.

Three Copernican Thought Heroes

My book pays homage to three Copernicus, and we compare their doctrines. Dennett said: The content of consciousness emerges from the conscious self through neural network processing in the first-person perspective. Frankel said: The whole journey of our life in pursuit of meaning defines the meaning of our life. It’s not the other way around, we have the meaning of life to realize this meaning, no, we are looking for meaning that we don’t know what it is, and the results of each person’s pursuit are different, and the results of each person’s pursuit are different from his own original expected value judgment. , and constantly revise their values. McTaggart told us: There is a world of ideas, we are not in the river of time, we are in the glacier of time, we are playing a melody movement, it will end, when it is played well, it will be be there forever.

thank you all!

TEDxWumaStreet public account

"Three Lives fortunately" homepage provides an online tour of the literature

• Facebook F8 Annual Conference Speech and Experimental Prototype of Red and Blue Pills: Abrash, M. (2015). Facebook's Vision and the Future of Virtual Reality [ Tencent Video ]; Adelson, EH (2000). Lightness Perception and Lightness Illusions. In M. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The New Cognitive Neurosciences (2nd ed. pp. 339-351). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [ pdf ]
• Science fiction of the Milky Way mentioned in the speech: Liu Jian. (1989). Huohan , Juvenile Science , 1989-02, 9-18. [ Douban ]
• An experimental prototype for the cover of D. Marr's Vision Neurology masterpiece: Kanizsa, G. (1976). Subjective contours. Scientific American , 234 (4), 48-52. [ APA ]
• Science fiction pseudo-documentary starring Dennett himself: Hoenderdos, P. (1988). Victim of the Brain . [ imdb ]
• The prototype of the chop hand experiment: Botvinick, M., & Cohen, J. (1998). Rubber hands “feel” touch that eyes see. Nature , 391 (6669), 756. [ pdf ]
• The Google effect experiment on memory: Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, DM (2011). Google effects on memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science , 333 (6043), 776-778. [ pdf ]
• Statue of Responsibility project homepage: responsibilityfoundation.org
• Near-death experiences shared by neurophysiologists: Taylor, JB (2008). My stroke of insight, [ TED ].
• McTaggart's Philosophical Literature of Time: McTaggart, JE (1908). The unreality of time. Mind , 17 (68), 457-474. [ pdf ]