EP1 Simon DeDeo – The Evolution of Consciousness

Jim Rutt interviews Carnegie-Mellon Assistant professor Simon DeDeo. Simon is also affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute and the Cognitive Science program at Indiana University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds. DeDeo and his colleagues combine data from the contemporary world, archives from the deep past, statistical tools from cosmology, and models of human cognition from Bayesian reasoning and information theory to understand how cultures grow, flourish, innovate, and evolve. In this podcast, Jim Rutt and Simon DeDeo discuss the following topics: Introduction to Simon DeDeo, Noise vs. Signal: The Fermi Paradox, Social Media and Blocklists, Remembrances of Murray Gell-Mann, Cultural Evolution, Consciousness and Science Fiction.