EP 08 - System 2, Superman, & Simulacra: Jeff's Amateur Philosophy

Visit our website BeautifulIllusions.org for a complete set of show notes and links to almost everything discussed in this episode

Selected References:

2:03 - Existentialism entry from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) and Existentialism: Crash Course Philosophy #16 (YouTube video)2:20 - Atheism (IEP)6:07 - The Quran, The Book of Mormon, The Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism, Daoism10:41 - The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow14:46 - Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow 15:13 - See “Why People Choose Coke Over Pepsi” and “How the Brain Reveals Why We Buy” 15:45 - Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman15:54 - Douglas Vigliotti17:40 - Keith Stanovich and Richard West coined the terms System 1 and System 2 in their work on dual process theory, as noted by Kahneman in the first chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow entitled “The Characters of the Story”  - Psychologists have been intensely interested for several decades in the two modes of thinking evoked by the picture of the angry woman and by the multiplication problem, and have offered many labels for them. I adopt terms originally proposed by the psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West, and will refer to two systems in the mind, System 1 and System 2.18:16 - Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman18:34 - Thus Spake Zarathrustra by Friedrich Nietzsche19:10 - The Overman 20:18 - See “Tool-Making Crows Are Even Smarter Than We Thought” video from National Geographic regarding the New Caledonian Crow20:22 - See images of bowerbird nests and  “What Makes Bowerbirds Such Good Artists” (Scientific American, 2015) “Bowerbirds, Art, and Aesthetics” (Communicative & Integrative Biology Journal, 2012)21:05 -  See “You Don’t Have a Lizard Brain” and “It’s Time To Correct Neuroscience Myths” and “A Theory Abandoned But Still Compelling”24:23 - Self-Consciousness gives us an ability to reflect on our experience and project into the future and recognize that we exist26:50 - Simulacrum and Simulation by Jean Beaudrillard27:13 - Hyperreality27:17 - The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon27:20 - Postmodernism30:04 - BeautifulIllusions.org - “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” -Jean Beaudrillard30:08 - Read “On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges31:32 - See “Baudrillard’s Thoughts on Media” (Philosophical Society.com)33:10 - See “Modern human brain organization emerged only recently” (Science Daily, 2018) - “The Homo sapiens fossils were found to have increasingly more modern endocranial shapes in accordance with their geological age. Only fossils younger than 35,000 years show the same globular shape as present-day humans, suggesting that modern brain organization evolved some time between 100,000 and 35,000 years ago.”33:13 - See “The (Violent) Origin of Sports” (Psychology Today, 2008) and the Wikipedia entry on the history of sport - “It is likely that after the switch from hunter-gathering to farming becoming the primary means of providing food became dominant, those individuals who had previously been assigned to the Hunter role- and were likely naturally more physically built for the purpose- had little way to utilize their skill sets in a practical setting anymore, so instead entered a form of perpetual preparation for hunting and practicing the skills required, which then let to competitive bouts intended to indicate whomever was the most "prepared" for the different elements of the hunt- for example the speed to chase down, strength to wrestle down or accuracy to rapidly dispatch the prey and associated wagering on the outcomes of contests, which them evolved gradually into what we would recognize as sports as we would know them today.”33:35 - See “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant” by David Graeber (STRIKE! Magazine, 2013), and this 2018 Vox interview with Graeber about his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory34:07 - George Carlin on “natural” (YouTube video, definitely NSFW)38:35 - Can we overcome our cognitive biases? See “Your Lying Mind: The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain” (The Atlantic, 2018) and this 2015 interview with Daniel Kahneman (The Guardian)44:01 - Freaks and Geeks (TV Show)

This episode was recorded in November 2020

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti