Anna Riedl

What, if anything, differentiates us from machines? Is cognition computational? Can self-preservation be externally imposed? How do you feel in your body when you hear the word "singularity"?

Join us in a thought-provoking conversation with Anna Riedl, a distinguished cognitive scientist from Vienna, known for her work on rationality.

We dive deep into psychology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. What I find exemplary about Anna is how she plants her feet firmly in the real world while embarking deep, wide-ranging, and sometimes controversial topics in one of the fastest moving fields in science.

Anna recently co-authored an insightful paper on "Naturalizing Relevance Realization," shedding light on how our understanding of relevance in cognitive processes can be grounded in naturalistic terms. For a deeper dive into the themes of our conversation, including my summary and notes on this groundbreaking paper, visit https://balazskegl.substack.com/p/naturalizing-relevance-realization.

00:00:00 Intro.

00:05:51 Rationality and intelligence. Small and large worlds, the frame problem.

00:12:58 Non-computational (but physical!) framing, relevance realization, natural agency, cognition. Naturalistic teleology.

00:20:07 Algorithm vs organism through reinforcement learning lens.

00:33:18 Relevance realization. Bayesian rationality and the paradox of timescale. Social media AI.

00:47:40 Self-preservation: intrinsic or external goal?

00:51:23 Opponent processing.

00:57:08 Circularity argument for the non-learnability of relevance realization.

01:00:27 Ecology of agents. Where does the agential world start?

01:04:47 Singularity and self-manufacturing. Parasitic processing. Rationality. How do we construe the world? How does a topic make you feel?

01:11:16 What's next for Anna? Naturalizing decision-making.

01:14:15 Insight.

01:16:49 Prophecy, anticipation, forecasting, threshold points and agency, faith.

01:20:13 How and why Anna became a cognitive scientist? Creativity, clear thinking, psychology, cognitive science.

01:25:02 Black-box vs constructive predictive models. Implicit vs explicit.

01:29:33 Collective expertise, higher-level organisms.

01:36:52 What got me into tech? Anna's question to me.

I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/balazskegl

Artwork: DALL-E

Music: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw

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