limits of knowledge

Noam Chomsky's 2011 University of Oslo lecture on Newton's contributions to the study of mind. He argues Newton abandoned mechanical explanation and lowered the bar for scientific intelligibility, with consequences for the limits of human understanding. Q&A starts at 45:33.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli gives a public lecture at the Royal Institution on how our understanding of time has changed, from Boltzmann and Einstein to quantum theory and loop quantum gravity. He blends physics, philosophy and art to argue that time is stranger than everyday intuition suggests.

Vladimir Voevodsky's IAS lecture starts from Godel's second incompleteness theorem to explore whether first-order arithmetic could be inconsistent. It motivates his vision of univalent foundations and computer-checked proofs.

A 2020 UC San Diego event with Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff presenting their Orch OR theory that consciousness arises from quantum processes in brain microtubules, followed by a conversation with Roger Bingham.

A philosophy lecture by Professor Moeller on the philosophy of identity. It builds on a discussion of Abigail Thorn's video and covers authenticity, sincerity and how online profiles reshape identity.

The first lecture of Jordan Peterson's 2017 Maps of Meaning course, setting out the Cold War context for his theory of belief and culture. He introduces the narrative structure of culture and archetypal characters for the individual, the known and the unknown.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff lectures on how political debates are framed through language and metaphors tied to values, and on the moral worldviews behind progressive and conservative politics. It was given in 2005 at UC San Diego.

An RSA Animate in which Steven Pinker explains how the mind builds infinite meanings from finite language, and why people often speak indirectly. It covers ambiguity, politeness and mutual knowledge, including the emperor's new clothes example.

Casey Muratori's first refterm lecture lays out philosophies of optimization, distinguishing optimization from non-pessimization, which means avoiding needless work. It uses his fast terminal renderer project to show how fast computers really are.

Douglas Hofstadter's Stanford Presidential Lecture argues that analogy is the core of cognition, illustrating how concepts, categorization and thought arise from analogy-making.

Jack Szostak's lecture covers how cellular life could have arisen from chemistry on the early Earth, starting from the odds of life elsewhere in the galaxy. It is part of a series on protocells and the RNA world.

Chris Granger, creator of Light Table and the Eve language, gives a Berkeley data science lecture on what computation and programming might look like in ten years. He covers the path that led to Eve and ends with demos.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth gives a Royal Institution lecture on the science of consciousness. He separates conscious level, content and self, and argues that experience arises from the brain's predictive inference.

Historian Timothy Snyder explains the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity, two ways of thinking about time that frame his books On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom.

Jordan Peterson's first lecture in his Biblical Series examines the idea of God as sovereignty and power abstracted from any individual ruler, and as the pattern inherent in human dominance hierarchies.

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

An ESOTERICA episode tracing Yahweh from a warrior-storm god near Mt Seir to the god of the Israelites in the Judean highlands. It examines how Yahwism absorbed and contended with Canaanite religion.

Geoffrey Hinton's 2025 Royal Institution Discourse on what AI has learned from biological intelligence and how it might surpass it. He explains neural networks and argues that human language use resembles what backpropagation-trained networks do.

Synthetic organic chemist James Tour gives a lecture arguing that origin-of-life research is far from explaining how life began. The talk was published by the Discovery Institute and drew sharp criticism.

Douglas Hofstadter lectures at Uppsala University on how analogy and daring thinking drove Einstein's discovery of light quanta. He argues deep insight in physics comes from imaginative leaps rather than rigid logic.

Geoffrey Hinton gives an MIT talk on what is wrong with convolutional neural networks and introduces his capsules project. The description points to the capsule network papers.

The first of Richard Feynman's 1964 Messenger Lectures at Cornell, 'The Character of Physical Law', covering the law of gravitation. Feynman traces the history from Kepler and Newton to the universality of the inverse-square law. The recording is an older one with weak audio.

A three-minute clip of Richard Feynman using the rules of chess as an analogy for how science works, discovering rules by observation and sometimes meeting surprises like castling. It touches on incremental progress versus revolutions.

Elizabeth Warren's 2007 Berkeley lecture, when she was a Harvard law professor, on why middle-class families are under growing financial strain. She draws on bankruptcy research to examine rising costs of housing, health care and education.

Professor Ruzic explains modular micro-reactors: self-contained nuclear units with passive safety whose fuel lasts about 20 years. He covers their use for process and district heat and where they can compete with diesel generation.

A lecture for high school seniors and college freshmen making the case for nuclear power and answering common objections. It is an overview of the channel's more detailed videos on each topic.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

Admiral Grace Hopper holds up a length of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond, about 11.8 inches. She explains how she made the idea concrete to people who could not picture a billionth of a second.

Sebastien Bubeck presents the Sparks of AGI paper at MIT, showing early experiments with GPT-4 across many domains and asking whether artificial intelligence has arrived. It includes the TikZ unicorn example.

Daniel Dennett's Royal Institution lecture on whether the brain is a computer and where its software comes from. He argues that minds are built by evolution and culture, with competence arising without comprehension.

A 73-minute Stanford talk by Robert Sapolsky drawn from his book Behave. It surveys the biological factors behind human behavior at its best and worst.

A Royal Institution lecture in which Nicholas Humphrey presents his theory of phenomenal consciousness and its evolution. He draws on the book Sentience and discusses evidence for animal sentience.

Sacha Arnoud, Waymo's Director of Engineering, gives a lecture in MIT's 2018 deep learning for self-driving cars course on the rise of machine learning in autonomous vehicles. It covers how Waymo uses deep learning and how it handles tricky driving situations.

Political economist Mark Blyth gives a lecture tracing two versions of capitalist 'software': the postwar Great Compression era and the neoliberal era from 1980 to 2008. He explains the bug that crashed the first and the design of the second.

Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on the biological underpinnings of religiosity, from his human behavioral biology course. It covers theories linking religion to stress, and schizotypal traits.

Associate Professor Simon Michaux presents estimates of the metals needed to build one generation of renewable technology to replace fossil fuels. He argues current production and reserves fall far short, with copper a key shortfall.

Neil Postman's 1997 lecture at College of DuPage, based on his book, argues that Americans treat technology as a national religion and depend on it to solve larger human problems. It includes audience questions.

A professor from Illinois compares the cost of building, fueling and operating a nuclear plant against a natural gas plant, using visual charts. It shows how construction time and interest rates dominate, when the investment pays off and when costs cross over.

Mark Blyth's 2016 Brown University lecture on global Trumpism, explaining the rise of populism through economics, the decline of Western middle classes and revolt against technocracy.

Mathematician Colin Wright demonstrates juggling and explains the mathematics of juggling patterns, including notation that led to new throwing patterns. It is a public presentation at the Museum of Mathematics aimed at a general audience.