Skip to content
Rounds
0:00 / 0:00

21. Chaos and Reductionism

Stanford

2.2M subscribers • 7 videos on Rounds

YouTube
  • Recommended by 2 people, in Hacker News and Psychology & Neuroscience Stack Exchange, across 2 different months.
  • Presented by Robert Sapolsky, Professor at Stanford University, as the video describes them

Assumes interest and some biology. Education, not medical advice.

1.8M views15 years ago2 recommendations

Brain and nervesEvidence and public healthNeuroscienceReading studies

Robert Sapolsky explains the limitations of reductionist science and how chaos theory applies to understanding complex biological systems and human behavior.

(May 19, 2010) Professor Robert Sapolsky gives what he calls "one of the most difficult lectures of the course" about chaos and reductionism. He references a book that he assigned to his students. This lecture focuses on reduction science and breaking things down to their component parts in order to understand them best. Stanford University: stanford.edu/ Stanford Department of Biology: biology.stanford.edu/ Stanford University Channel on YouTube: youtube.com/stanford

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an excellent lecture on chaos theory, the limitations of reductionism, and how they apply to neuroscience and human behavior.

Keith Knauberin Psychology & Neuroscience Stack Exchange • Recommends

On “Emotional Calculator; How can I mathematically show a decrease in anxiety using an emotional equation?”

Attempting to reduce emotional responses to mathematics is likely in the realm of chaos theory. Here is a great Robert Sapolsky Stanford lecture on Chaos versus Reductionism. link to this video
3View on Stack Exchange

animal_spiritsin Hacker News • Recommends

On “Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest”

I think its a good start to learn about chaotic systems instead. For most systems, minute parameter changes can have dramatic effects on the predictability of the system link to this video
View on Hacker News

lr4444lrin Hacker News • Mentions

On “It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do”

Maybe, but assuming Shermer has correctly conveyed the contents of this part of the book, Sapolsky's got a lot of nerve asserting so confidently in this book that there is such a definitively deterministic core to humans behavior at the macro level while acknowledging irreducible complexity irrespective of scale as he did so clearly in one of his Stanford lectures: link to this video . I really like the guy as an educator, and I'm sure he's earned his scientific chops, but that doesn't qualify him to be even an amateur ethicist.
View on Hacker News

IIAOPSWin Hacker News • Mentions

On “MIT scientists discover neurons that light up whenever we see images of food”

…dmas face. There's just too many possible states of grandmas. There has been some evidence (like this study) that maybe sometimes there are "sparsely coding neurons" (Eg, some monkeys apparently have a brain cell that reliably responds to seeing Jenifer Aniston and nothing else). But such sparse coding (if it exists) is the exception not the rule. link to this video…
View on Hacker News

IIAOPSWin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Evidence of a predictive coding hierarchy in the human brain listening to speech”

…e neurons that have rote memorized every orientation of your grandmothers face (and everyone else's face), you would need to have far more neurons than can possibly fit in any animals head, let alone yours. This concept is literally known as a "grandmother neuron", and its widely considered to be debunked. I refer you to this neuroscience lecture. link to this video Beyond the simplest, most common tasks where it pays to have a rote lookup table, you truly do need an algorithm.…
View on Hacker News

nyrikkiin Hacker News • Mentions

On “Critique of Freakonomics interview with psychologist Ellen Langer”

Nit: It goes a bit deeper than that. Note this talk by another Pop Sci personality Robert Sapolsky, where he talks about the limitations of western reductionism. link to this video Yet his latest book on free will exclusively depended on an reductionist viewpoint. While I don't know his motivations for those changes, the fact that the paper he mentioned was so extremely unpopular that I was only one of a handful that read it surely provided some incentive: > "REDUCTIONISM AND VARIABILITY IN DATA: A META-ANALYSIS ROBERT SAPOLSKY and STEVEN BALT" Or you can go back to math and look at the Brouwer–Hilbert controversy, which was purely about if we should, universally, accept PEM a priori, which Church, Pos…
View on Hacker News