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Speaker 1: I look forward to to a class in school where

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the young kids learn about us the way that we

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learn about cavemen when we read that, Oh my god,

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you know you used to step on the sharp stick

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and get septis and die and that was the end

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of that.

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Speaker 2: And and they would.

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Speaker 1: Learn about us, and they would say, wait a minute,

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you're telling me. These people they would have to live

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their whole life in whatever body they randomly got at birth.

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So they just got you know, some some random cosmic

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rate would hit their would hit their embryonic cells, and

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they would be crippled or they would have you know,

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whatever their limitations of IQ or whatever. They would just

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have to stay in that body. And and and there

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was nothing they could do about it. And they would,

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you know, they would have to kill other things to

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eat just to survive. Like these are all crazy. These

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are a mature species. Shouldn't be shouldn't be doing any

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of this. And and I feel like, if you know,

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in the future, when they look back, this is going

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to seem ridiculous.

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Speaker 2: It's going to seem crazy that that that that.

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Speaker 1: Our lives and the and the meaning and the and

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the achievements of our lives would be limited to things

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that we had absolutely no control because we didn't know

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what to do.

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Speaker 2: We didn't you know, the.

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Speaker 1: Cells seemed to poop out after after eighty or ninety years.

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We don't know what to do, and and and that's

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and that's it. That's just that's just how that's how

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we were born, and that's how we stayed. I I

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you know, to to me, this is gonna this is

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gonna seem the kids aren't even gonna.

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Speaker 2: Believe that this is how we lived our lives.

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Speaker 3: This is Jonathan Peche Welcome to the Symbolic World.

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Speaker 4: So hello everyone. I am here with John Ervaki that

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all of you know very well. But I'm also here

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with Michael Levin. It is the first time that I

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meet him. For years now, people have been telling me,

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you have to talk to Michael, you have to talk

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to him, you have to talk to him. And so finally,

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with John's help, we were able to connect and hopefully

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we can have a productive discussion. Michael runs a research

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lab at Toughs University. He's doing some really amazing things

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that we're going to talk about obviously in the podcast,

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and that connect to, obviously to the things that John

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and I care about.

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Speaker 3: So, Michael, thank you for accepting this.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you. It's very nice to meet you.

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Speaker 1: And yeah, John and I have had many conversations and

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he said I should come on, So yeah, let's do it.

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Speaker 4: Yes, all right, So I mean I think we could

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maybe start and maybe you can explain briefly what it

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is that you do and especially in some ways, you know,

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what are the things that you're bringing to the table

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that are that have been surprising in terms of the

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system that you're discovering and that you're implementing on the

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biological world.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, well, there's kind of many ways to describe it.

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I think I think i'll try this one for today.

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If you look from the outside at what it is

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that my group does, and I run the Allen Discovery

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Center at Toughs University, and we have applications that range

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across birth defects, reach out of medicine, meaning trying to

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repair really drastic injuries and aging and things like that.

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We'd we have applications in cancer and bioengineering, and so

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so one way to look at this as really pretty

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pretty normal science. You know, we publish in all the

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normal scientific journals. All all that is is that aspect

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of it is conventional. But one of the interesting things

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that I think is an unspoken assumption in that work

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in general, in the in the community.

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Speaker 2: Is that.

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Speaker 1: There's a certain set of formal models. And these formal

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models come from chemistry, they come from some some math,

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and some physics. And there's this notion that those formal models,

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specifically formal models that people associate with mechanisms or machine

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like processes, right, and so we'll have to define that word,

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but fundamentally it's defined by a set of structures like

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you know, things around touring, you know, touring machines and

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these these tools of computation. The idea is that those

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kinds of things are going to be sufficient for the

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life sciences. So this idea that those formal models, they've

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done great for us in physics, they've done great for

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us in engineering and all of that. And then if

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we just keep using those those kinds of models, we

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are going to get what we're looking for in life sciences,

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which is to understand where we come from and why.

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And then, more importantly than just explaining the stuff that's

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already happened, is facilitating the research going forward and really

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gaining control of our embodiment and repairing all these horrible

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afflictions that plague living systems. And so one of the

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things that I'm fundamentally interested in, and this has been

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kind of the central point of my career, is understanding

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embodied minds. So for me, I want to very much

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help patients, that's for sure. But also the way we

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use things like regenerative medicine and bioengineering and so on

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is as model systems for testing our approach to various

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very ancient filosophical questions. So there are some really deep

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questions about what it means to be a mind in

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the physical universe, how minds can be composed of parts,

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so collective intelligence, that kind of stuf so so, so

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my claim is that you can't just decide that chemistry

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and those kinds of formal models are the right way

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to go. You have to do experiments, and you have

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to infact consider what you might be missing with those

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models and try other tools that we have in our

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toolbox to see if they might actually be more appropriate.

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Some of those tools come from behavioral science, right, and

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so then what we do is apply some of these

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things that are typically used with brainy animals or you know,

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the subjects of behavioral science, and we find and we

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find that day wait a minute, actually those tools give

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you some really good advantages in dealing with molecules, with cells,

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with molecular networks, and even with some really weird things

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that we can talk about that aren't even stranger than that.

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And so that starts to open up some really fundamental

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questions about how we've been thinking about cognitive intelligence and

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how far to you know, how far in terms of

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diversity of embodied minds can we go. So that's what

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that's what my group does, is it teaks to understand

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different ways to address our mind blindness and what I

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think of as our very limited ability to see other

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beings that are not like ours, that are not like this.

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Speaker 4: So maybe you can tell people just a little bit

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about the results that you've been having, you know, some

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of the experiments you've been that you've been running, and

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that you've been I mean, giving measurable results that are

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at least to me when I first started seeing them,

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just completely astonish me. I couldn't believe some of the

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things I was thinking. He gives some examples of how

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that that lands in practice and that'll help people understand

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why why this is so important.

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Speaker 1: Sure, Sure, I'll mention a few things. One important thing

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to put this all this in context is that there's

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a there's a there's a certain game that that tends

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to get played, which is that we will we we

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have discovered something and I describe it, and then people

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will say, well, that's consistent and with chemistry and physics.

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That doesn't prove anything. And so let me be very

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clear about my claim. My claim is not that we've

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discovered some sort of magic underneath that is inconsistent with physics.

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That is not what I'm saying in the slightest. What

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I'm saying is the reason that you're that people are

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saying this now after we've discovered the thing that wasn't

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discovered before, is that it's not just. The task here

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is not to just find consistency when somebody does something new.

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The thing is to find new frameworks that help you

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find the new thing. It's not enough to look backwards

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and say, well, I suppose I could tell a biochemical

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story about this.

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Speaker 2: Of course you can. It's not going to be fairies underneath.

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Speaker 1: It's always good if you want to look underneath and

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tell a biochemical story. You always can, But the question

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is why didn't that biochemical story get you to this discovery?

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And what other stories are needed to add to our toolbox. So, okay,

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so some simple things that that we found. One of

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the big things that we've been studying is how memories

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exist in all kinds of living material that is not brain.

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And so what we've discovered, for example, is that the

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standard picture of morphogenesis or embryonic development or regeneration, so

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basically cells getting together to build complex structures, is that

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the standard version of Okay, the cells follow simple rules,

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and we all know there's systems where if you follow

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a bunch of simple rules, something very complex will happen.

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That's kind of people call this emergence, this feed forward process.

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You sort of turn the crank in something it emerges. Well,

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we found out that sometimes that's what's happening in biology,

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but other times there's a very specific goal directed process.

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When I say goal, I don't mean human level purpose

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as in I know what my goal is.

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Speaker 2: I don't mean that.

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Speaker 1: I mean goal in the sense in which your thermostat

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has goals, or your self driving car has goals, or

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a guided missile has goals. In other words, there's an

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error minimization loop where the system represents some kind of

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a state and it has different degrees of ingenuity to

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get to that state even if things go wrong or

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something get things change or whatever. Found that biology actually

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stores set points or or morphological goals, and we can

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rewrite those goals, and that cells are basically a collective intelligence,

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not just your neural cells. We all know that's a

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collective intelligence that helps make you, but all cells can

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make a collective intelligence that can reach certain kinds of goals,

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and you can rewrite those goals, which is amazing because

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what we found is that those goals are encoded bioelectrically.

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Looking backward, it's not such a shock because you know

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this is how brains work. Turns out that's a much

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more ancient system, so we can do things like you

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take a flatworm and if and the flatworm is regenerative,

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so you cut it into pieces and every piece makes

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one head, one tail very reliably, and you get your

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you get your worm back.

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Speaker 2: So it turns out.

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Speaker 1: That if you look, there's a there's a bioelectrical memory

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in the tissues that tell you how many heads a

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worm is supposed to have, and we can rewrite that

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memory without touching the DNA. This is not about the hardware.

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This is not about the genetic hardware. This is about

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the memories that guide the problem solving intelligence of the cells.

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And you say to those cells with a interface that

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we worked out, no, actually a good worm should have

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two heads, and then guess what they build? They build

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two heads and now it's super cool. You can cut

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it into pieces and those pieces will forever, as far

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as we can tell, it's been what twenty years that

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we've been doing this, those pieces will continue to make

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two headed worms.

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Speaker 4: So if you have a two headed worm and you

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cut that one into two, then the part will continue

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to make two headed worms.

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Speaker 2: Correct that lineage.

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Speaker 1: You have now made a lineage of two headed worms

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that will forever be two headed worm. And by the way,

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if you sequence it genetically sequence it, you will be

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none the wiser about it. Because we haven't touched the genome.

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The genome is completely normal, right, so it's invisible to

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the standard methods of moleculogenetics. So we can do that.

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We can alter these kinds of things in software as

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it were. We've shown that certain kinds of birth defects.

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And this is in animal models. This is not in

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humans yet, but we're going hopefully to the clinic at

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some point repair certain really nasty kinds of birth defects

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by reminding the cells again through this bioelectric interface, reminding

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the cells what is the pattern that they're supposed to

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be building, So we can override certain kinds of birth defects.

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We can create new organs where they don't belong. So

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that we've made tadpoles with eyes in their guts and

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things like this, what you can say to the cells,

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build an eye.

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Speaker 2: And this is.

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Speaker 1: Important when we do this. We don't micromanage this genes.

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We don't micromanage the cells. We figured out a message

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that says build and eye here. And the reason that

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works is because we're dealing with an agential material. Whether

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it's a material that I don't have to be as

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an engineer, I don't have to be in charge of everything.

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It has competencies. All I'm doing is plugging into those competencies.

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And if I can speak the language that it understands,

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and if I'm convincing, because that's a key part of this,

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you have to convince the material this is not there's

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ways that it will ignore you. If you do it wrong,

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it'll ignore you. So you have to be convincing. And

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then you say, build an eye here, that's what it'll do.

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It'll build an eye. We've done we've done normalization of cancer.

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So injecting nasty human onca genes into the frog model,

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normally they make tumors, basically a dissociated identity disorder of

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this collective intelligence.

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Speaker 2: We could talk about what I mean by.

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Speaker 1: That, but you can reverse that by artificially forcing the

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cells into a particular bi electrical state, and then you've

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normalized the tumor. The cells will go on to do

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normal build the healthy organs, and do normal things even

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though the the oncoprotein is blazingly strongly expressed. And I

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guess the final thing I'll mention you know, we've done

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induction of regeneration, so allow animals that don't regenerate to

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grow their legs back. And we've made some synthetic life

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forms that are made of living cells, but in a

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form and function that has never existed.

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Speaker 2: On Earth before. These are some of the things that

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we work on.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, and so I mean this is demean it's amazing.

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I mean it's amazing in the sense that this this

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idea that because we we have to get to the

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right terminology. And so you use the word memory, okay,

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and when you mean what you mean by memory, and

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you relate the notion of memory to purpose, right, Like

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there's a goal and then there's a that goal produces

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a memory. Because we always think of memory as something

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in the past. But I keep telling people that actually

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a goal is a type of memory because you're always

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aligning yourself towards that goal. You have to remember what

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you're doing, you know, as you're moving towards towards the goal.

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Is that what you mean when you use the word memory, Well, I.

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Speaker 1: Agree with everything you just said. A goal, I do think,

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is a kind of memory that looks into the future.

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But there are there are other kinds of memory. There

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are many different kinds of memory, and there are other

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kinds of memory that don't involve goals, right, So there's

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a habituation, sensitization. They're very simple kinds of memories that

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are not forward looking like that. But but but memory

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is a requirement I think for for significant goal directedness,

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you have to remember what your goal is. Otherwise otherwise

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it's not going to happen.

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Speaker 4: And so when you say that you give the day,

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you give a you give certain being. You reprogram their memory.

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Like what type of memory are you talking about here?

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Speaker 1: So there's two okay in the in the experiment you're

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talking about, So there's a one headed worm. And we've

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created a technology that is kind of similar to what

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the neuroscience is to when they try to scan your

293
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brain and guess what you're thinking of. You have this

294
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neural decoding kind of thing. So we have a technology

295
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whereby we can look at the at the cells of

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the plenarium and we can see the visually and we've

297
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made videos movie like anybody can see these pictures and videos. Now,

298
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the bioelectric pattern that encodes for the collective intelligence the

299
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answer to the question how many heads should I be building?

300
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Because all of this stuff, you know, when you're injured,

301
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you have decisions to make. What are we going to build?

302
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Are we going to build anything? Should we grow in

303
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what direction? There are many decisions to make, and there's

304
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a particular pattern that says how many heads we are

305
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going to build? And what's important is that it's a

306
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it's a homeostatic process because until that goal is satisfied,

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the cells.

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Speaker 2: Are going to work really hard.

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Speaker 1: They're going to keep working like your thermostatic, it's going

310
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to keep working until the error is within acceptable you know, bounds.

311
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So we see that pattern that says one head, one tail,

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and we figured out a way to rewrite it, and

313
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so we go in and we rewrite it and we

314
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say two hits. And my ultimate goal, the ultimate goal

315
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of the regenerative medicine side of the lab is to

316
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be able to write any pattern you want, so complete

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freedom of embodiment. So so first to rewrite all the

318
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normal human patterns. So you've lost a finger, or you've

319
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lost an eye, or you need a new liver or

320
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whatever it is, here is the pattern that will make

321
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the cells grow that for you from scratch every time.

322
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That's that's the goal. And then ultimately to be able

323
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to say new patterns. You know, five fingers is good

324
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and all that, but what if I wanted something else?

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Speaker 2: Right, So ultimately you could have whatever. But that's that's

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the idea.

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Speaker 1: To be able to communicate your goals to the collective

328
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intelligence of the cells in a way that they will

329
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then build whatever you want them to build.

330
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Speaker 4: And so in this in this vision, the genetics they

331
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become a kind of of like bound potential that the

332
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the these patterns are tapping into.

333
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Speaker 3: Because I imagine there's a limit, right.

334
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Speaker 4: You can't you can't How can I say this, like

335
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you can't make uh or you know, row wings.

336
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Speaker 3: Let's say, like you can't make a flat work or

337
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maybe I don't know, I don't know how far it goes.

338
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Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, that's a that's.

339
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Speaker 1: A good question. So that's a good quation. So you're

340
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asking if the morphogenetic machinery is universal, and uh, I

341
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will I will I? We don't know yet the real

342
00:16:30,799 --> 00:16:32,440
answers We don't know. But but but I'll tell you

343
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what I think there There is a fundamental problem with

344
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which is that the hardware does constrain some things you

345
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can do. So for example, in the if in the

346
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plenarian genome there is no genes, there are no genes

347
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that will make hard materials. Right, so there's there's no

348
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there's nothing to make bone rapp But you know any

349
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of that stuff, you are no amount of bi electrics

350
00:16:51,600 --> 00:16:53,559
is gonna is gonna make that thing grow up? You know,

351
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something that it doesn't chemically is not able to do. However,

352
00:16:57,279 --> 00:16:59,399
maybe that's that we don't We're not sure, but I

353
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suspect that's reasonable limit. However, other than that, my strong

354
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suspicion is that it's universal. So if you wanted to

355
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have wings, and you had the hardware, you were capable

356
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of making the molecules needed to for whatever your wings

357
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are supposed to have. I bet, I bet you could

358
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have wings and a propeller and a you know, whatever

359
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whatever you.

360
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Speaker 2: Want, as long as as the hardware is important.

361
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Speaker 1: But boy, I I I don't think it is as

362
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limiting as people think it is.

363
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Speaker 3: Hmmm.

364
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Speaker 4: So yeah, this is very it's this is very scary.

365
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I mean it's it's exciting and it's scary, you know.

366
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Speaker 5: Uh.

367
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Speaker 4: The so the I mean, the thing that I'm interested in,

368
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obviously is talking about patterns.

369
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Speaker 3: So have you this type of idea.

370
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Speaker 4: It does seem like it's something like a new like

371
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it's kind of platonic. It's it's kind of Aristotelian platonic.

372
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Speaker 2: Uh.

373
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Speaker 4: You know, there's this you have a set of bound

374
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potential that's quite malleable, you know, and then you have form,

375
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you have information that is that is in some ways

376
00:18:04,119 --> 00:18:08,279
calling it or helping it know where to direct its

377
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energy towards in what direction? Uh, And then that's creating

378
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this union between the pattern and the embodiment. Like if

379
00:18:16,119 --> 00:18:19,680
you if you tried to put in a pattern that

380
00:18:19,799 --> 00:18:22,720
didn't that couldn't be realized. It's if you tried to

381
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force a good example, again, like you said you have,

382
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if the genetic structure can't produce hard material and you

383
00:18:29,519 --> 00:18:32,039
tried to use some pattern or try to force the

384
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pattern on it, then it would just ignore it, or

385
00:18:34,480 --> 00:18:36,680
it would it would just not work, Like what would happen?

386
00:18:37,559 --> 00:18:40,079
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, let's let's take a step back into the

387
00:18:40,200 --> 00:18:43,240
because because you you've you've opened a very big kind

388
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of issue here with these platonic patterns. So look, uh,

389
00:18:46,400 --> 00:18:48,039
you know, if we had done this a year and

390
00:18:48,079 --> 00:18:50,480
a half ago, I would not have been talking about

391
00:18:50,480 --> 00:18:52,160
this at all. You know, I've been thinking about this

392
00:18:52,160 --> 00:18:55,559
stuff for decades and I had not broached the topic

393
00:18:55,599 --> 00:18:58,880
of platonic patterns until the until this year. And that's

394
00:18:58,920 --> 00:19:02,480
because I think it is now actionable. In other words,

395
00:19:02,720 --> 00:19:04,960
we're now to the point where we can actually make

396
00:19:05,079 --> 00:19:07,960
useful progress and it's time to test out some of

397
00:19:08,000 --> 00:19:12,640
those those ideas, and and the reason is, among other things,

398
00:19:12,799 --> 00:19:16,279
is that when you let's let's just let's just ask

399
00:19:16,319 --> 00:19:18,720
the question of where do these patterns come from? So

400
00:19:18,720 --> 00:19:20,440
so we look at an early you know, like like,

401
00:19:20,480 --> 00:19:23,559
for example, one thing that was discovered in my lab

402
00:19:23,799 --> 00:19:26,200
by Danny Adams years ago. It was this thing we

403
00:19:26,240 --> 00:19:28,599
call the electric face. And it's literally the fact that

404
00:19:28,640 --> 00:19:30,839
when you look when you do the electrical profiling of

405
00:19:30,839 --> 00:19:32,359
an early embryo, long before.

406
00:19:32,160 --> 00:19:32,799
Speaker 2: It has a face.

407
00:19:33,000 --> 00:19:36,079
Speaker 1: Okay, what you can see in the electrical pattern is

408
00:19:36,079 --> 00:19:37,680
something that looks like a little face. It's like a

409
00:19:37,680 --> 00:19:40,000
little pre pattern, a scaffold. Here's where the eyes are

410
00:19:40,000 --> 00:19:41,480
going to go. Here's where the mouth is going to go.

411
00:19:41,559 --> 00:19:43,680
Here like, it's all it's all there, right, So same

412
00:19:43,720 --> 00:19:46,279
thing in the flatworm and and so on. So one

413
00:19:46,279 --> 00:19:47,880
thing you might ask is, okay, but where did these

414
00:19:47,880 --> 00:19:51,599
patterns come from? And so the standard answer is, well,

415
00:19:51,640 --> 00:19:54,759
they come from selection. In other words, for eons, all

416
00:19:54,799 --> 00:19:56,319
the other there were all kinds of patterns. All the

417
00:19:56,359 --> 00:19:58,200
other ones died out, they were they weren't as good.

418
00:19:58,279 --> 00:20:00,480
So now now you get this. That's the that's the

419
00:20:00,519 --> 00:20:04,279
standard answer. So in the last few years, what we've

420
00:20:04,319 --> 00:20:06,880
done in our lab, and other people have done relevant

421
00:20:06,880 --> 00:20:09,400
things too, but they just don't they don't sort of

422
00:20:09,400 --> 00:20:13,519
put it this way. We've made things like xenobots and anthrobots.

423
00:20:13,640 --> 00:20:17,720
These are living constructs that are made from standard cells.

424
00:20:17,759 --> 00:20:19,480
We do not touch the DNA, we don't put any

425
00:20:19,480 --> 00:20:23,079
synthetic biology. There's no scaffolds, the three D printed anything.

426
00:20:23,240 --> 00:20:23,599
Speaker 2: These are.

427
00:20:23,640 --> 00:20:26,920
Speaker 1: These are stock stock hardware or standard cells. And what

428
00:20:27,000 --> 00:20:29,039
we found is that if you give them a chance

429
00:20:29,160 --> 00:20:33,640
to kind of reboot their embodiment, they make novel creatures

430
00:20:33,640 --> 00:20:37,680
that have new behaviors, new patterns of gene expression, new

431
00:20:38,039 --> 00:20:42,480
uh uh form, and new physiology and new capabilities that

432
00:20:42,920 --> 00:20:46,000
don't look like anything that they've that we've had in

433
00:20:46,000 --> 00:20:48,880
our in our evolutionary history. And they do this immediately

434
00:20:48,960 --> 00:20:50,599
out of the box. You don't need to train them

435
00:20:50,640 --> 00:20:52,720
to it. You don't need to force it. You know,

436
00:20:52,720 --> 00:20:54,680
people say, how did you make them? I say, well,

437
00:20:54,680 --> 00:20:57,440
all due respect to the hard working scientists in our lab,

438
00:20:57,519 --> 00:21:01,559
we barely made them. They sort of make themselves. What

439
00:21:01,599 --> 00:21:03,799
we did is we facilitated some of these things to

440
00:21:03,839 --> 00:21:08,039
come forward, and now I think we have to Now

441
00:21:08,240 --> 00:21:13,519
there's an important question, which is information costs energy to compute.

442
00:21:13,599 --> 00:21:16,559
And if you ask when did we compute human form

443
00:21:16,640 --> 00:21:18,400
and when did we compute the frog form?

444
00:21:18,640 --> 00:21:19,880
Speaker 2: We know the answer, Well.

445
00:21:19,880 --> 00:21:23,079
Speaker 1: For millions of years of the genome bashing against the

446
00:21:23,160 --> 00:21:26,079
environment and sort of though, that's when the computations were done.

447
00:21:26,440 --> 00:21:29,559
When were the computations done to make zenobots and anthwrobots.

448
00:21:29,559 --> 00:21:31,559
There's never been any selection pressure to be a good

449
00:21:31,559 --> 00:21:35,200
anthrobot or a good zenobot, right, And if you say that, well,

450
00:21:35,240 --> 00:21:37,000
they sort of the genome sort of learned it at

451
00:21:37,000 --> 00:21:38,480
the same time as it learned to be a frog

452
00:21:38,559 --> 00:21:41,200
or a human. Well, that undercuts the whole point of

453
00:21:41,279 --> 00:21:44,240
the specificity of the theory evolution is you're supposed to

454
00:21:44,279 --> 00:21:46,160
be able to explain the things you see here by

455
00:21:46,240 --> 00:21:48,000
a specific history of how you got here.

456
00:21:48,119 --> 00:21:50,920
Speaker 2: If that history is not a good clue, then you

457
00:21:50,960 --> 00:21:52,640
know what are we doing here?

458
00:21:52,960 --> 00:21:56,720
Speaker 1: So so now it becomes time to ask a very

459
00:21:56,759 --> 00:22:00,519
simple question, do you want to be pessimistic? Which I

460
00:22:00,599 --> 00:22:03,160
think this view is, which is the standard view. It's

461
00:22:03,160 --> 00:22:06,079
a very pessimistic view, which says, these are emergent phenomena.

462
00:22:06,160 --> 00:22:09,400
There's surprises that we didn't see coming. They come for

463
00:22:09,519 --> 00:22:11,960
they're just a random grab bag of facts that seem

464
00:22:12,000 --> 00:22:14,680
to hold in our universe, and when we come across them,

465
00:22:14,680 --> 00:22:16,599
we will write them down in our big book of

466
00:22:16,680 --> 00:22:19,559
cool emergent surprises and that'll sort of be that, and

467
00:22:19,599 --> 00:22:22,079
then we have to and then well, you know, at

468
00:22:22,079 --> 00:22:24,440
some point we'll find some new ones and that'll be great.

469
00:22:24,880 --> 00:22:28,319
Or I think the more optimistic and I can't you know,

470
00:22:28,359 --> 00:22:29,680
I can't prove that this is correct.

471
00:22:29,720 --> 00:22:31,000
Speaker 2: This is the metaphysics.

472
00:22:31,000 --> 00:22:33,599
Speaker 1: I prefer the more optimistic view is what the Platonists

473
00:22:33,599 --> 00:22:36,319
mathematicians do, which is they say, right, there are tons

474
00:22:36,359 --> 00:22:39,319
of these weird facts about numbers and shapes and so on.

475
00:22:40,559 --> 00:22:43,440
But they're not a random grab bag of surprises. They

476
00:22:43,680 --> 00:22:46,200
are made by an ordered structure. They exist within an

477
00:22:46,279 --> 00:22:49,039
ordered structured space. We know that space is not the

478
00:22:49,039 --> 00:22:51,240
physical space because there's nothing you can do in the

479
00:22:51,240 --> 00:22:54,720
physical world to change Figenbaumb's constant and you know the

480
00:22:54,799 --> 00:22:57,079
value of E and all this stuff. You can't change

481
00:22:57,119 --> 00:22:59,519
that from the physical world. It's a separate space of

482
00:22:59,559 --> 00:23:02,720
all these roots and we can have And the reason

483
00:23:02,720 --> 00:23:05,440
I say it's optimistic is because once you posit that

484
00:23:05,480 --> 00:23:08,480
it's a structured space, you can have a research program

485
00:23:08,519 --> 00:23:11,960
to explore the space as the mathematicians do. You can,

486
00:23:12,240 --> 00:23:14,400
you know, you can systematically go from one to the

487
00:23:14,400 --> 00:23:17,640
other and find out find new ones. And so the

488
00:23:17,680 --> 00:23:19,640
model I'm proposing, and I'll send you guys, if I

489
00:23:19,640 --> 00:23:21,440
haven't already, I'll send you a link to this where

490
00:23:21,559 --> 00:23:26,039
I'm organizing an asynchronous symposium on the platonic space. We

491
00:23:26,079 --> 00:23:29,359
have a bunch of computer scientists and mathematicians, and I

492
00:23:29,400 --> 00:23:33,079
did the first talk on biology and so on, where

493
00:23:33,119 --> 00:23:36,279
we'll be talking about this this idea that there is

494
00:23:36,319 --> 00:23:39,319
this structured space of patterns. Some of these patterns are

495
00:23:39,359 --> 00:23:42,720
the low agency things that mathematicians study. So you might

496
00:23:42,759 --> 00:23:45,279
say that mathematics is like the behavioral science of kind

497
00:23:45,319 --> 00:23:48,680
of simple inhabitants of that space. But some of those

498
00:23:48,720 --> 00:23:51,119
patterns I think, and this is kind of like a crazy,

499
00:23:51,279 --> 00:23:53,240
you know, sort of controversial claim that I wouldn't have made,

500
00:23:53,400 --> 00:23:56,839
you know, until recently, I think that some of the

501
00:23:57,079 --> 00:24:01,839
more complex high agency patterns from this space are behavioral propensities,

502
00:24:01,920 --> 00:24:04,839
aka kinds of minds. I think that's what minds actually are,

503
00:24:04,920 --> 00:24:07,759
is that they're they're actually the inhabitants of that of

504
00:24:07,799 --> 00:24:10,799
that space. And so you get forms of forms that

505
00:24:11,039 --> 00:24:13,640
ingress into the physical world. Some of these are shapes

506
00:24:13,759 --> 00:24:16,400
of morphogenesis, some of these are behaviors. Some of these

507
00:24:16,440 --> 00:24:21,359
are gene expression profiles or physiological circuits. But I am

508
00:24:21,400 --> 00:24:23,440
with you in the sense that I think very quickly,

509
00:24:23,480 --> 00:24:26,640
once you see what modern life sciences are doing, you

510
00:24:26,680 --> 00:24:28,960
get into this idea that yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna,

511
00:24:29,200 --> 00:24:31,759
we're gonna have to understand this. This not just the math,

512
00:24:31,960 --> 00:24:35,119
but you know, the deeper contents of that space.

513
00:24:37,119 --> 00:24:41,160
Speaker 6: Can I say something something, Yeah, yeah, I would. I

514
00:24:41,480 --> 00:24:44,160
think I agree, of course, with what Mike's saying. Mike

515
00:24:44,240 --> 00:24:46,640
and I talked about this. I think there's a further argument.

516
00:24:46,640 --> 00:24:48,759
Mike isn't building this argument, but I'm building this argument.

517
00:24:48,799 --> 00:24:52,079
I think when he moved uh that biology into a

518
00:24:52,119 --> 00:24:57,119
platonic space or neoplatonic space, the already existing convergences between

519
00:24:57,119 --> 00:24:59,519
his work and a lot of the work that's going

520
00:24:59,519 --> 00:25:02,200
on in four ECOGSI, and Mike is talking about kinds

521
00:25:02,200 --> 00:25:04,839
of minds now, so it's not inappropriate for me to

522
00:25:04,839 --> 00:25:08,000
do this. I think when you move into that neoplatonic space,

523
00:25:08,440 --> 00:25:11,240
you get a shared ontology that can bind that biology

524
00:25:11,279 --> 00:25:15,279
and that cognitive science together even more tightly in a

525
00:25:15,400 --> 00:25:18,920
mutually informative and mutually beneficial fashion. So some of the

526
00:25:18,960 --> 00:25:21,680
action on the ground isn't just going to show up biologically.

527
00:25:21,880 --> 00:25:23,880
It shows up in new ways and new things we

528
00:25:23,920 --> 00:25:26,680
can do when we're trying to understand the nature of cognition.

529
00:25:27,039 --> 00:25:29,240
And for me, that's a very exciting thing and one

530
00:25:29,279 --> 00:25:33,000
of the things that shows you, like, you know, Mike

531
00:25:33,079 --> 00:25:35,240
is talking about anomalies are building up and we'll just

532
00:25:35,279 --> 00:25:38,000
note these in our notebook. Well, Thomas Kuon says, eventually

533
00:25:38,000 --> 00:25:41,559
the anomalies become systematic, and then you make a paradigm shift,

534
00:25:41,559 --> 00:25:44,359
and if the paradigm shift is fruitful, then it lives.

535
00:25:44,680 --> 00:25:46,839
And I think that's what we're on the cusp of

536
00:25:46,960 --> 00:25:49,920
right now. I think the anomalies have piled up too high.

537
00:25:50,279 --> 00:25:52,720
We're looking for a kind of systematicity, and I think

538
00:25:52,880 --> 00:25:55,240
Mike is pointing towards that. And I think a lot

539
00:25:55,279 --> 00:25:59,000
of my work, you know, coming out of four ECOGSCI

540
00:25:59,119 --> 00:26:03,440
and embodiment, you know, it converges in some very very

541
00:26:03,480 --> 00:26:07,240
powerful ways. And I don't think I'm forcing anything on Michael.

542
00:26:07,279 --> 00:26:10,599
You know, he's talking about collective intelligence. He's talking about levels.

543
00:26:10,960 --> 00:26:13,000
He like, you know, he makes use of Eric Hole's

544
00:26:13,039 --> 00:26:17,400
work as I do. That's that vertical dimension. Horizontally. He

545
00:26:17,440 --> 00:26:21,039
talks about the cognitive light cone, which is very overlapped,

546
00:26:21,079 --> 00:26:22,720
and he talks about it in terms of care, which

547
00:26:22,759 --> 00:26:25,359
overlaps a lot with the work I do on predictive

548
00:26:25,359 --> 00:26:28,880
processing and relevance realization. He talks about memory in terms

549
00:26:28,920 --> 00:26:32,079
of agency, where agency is expressed in terms of ingenuity,

550
00:26:32,119 --> 00:26:34,799
which is are there multiple pathways from the initial state

551
00:26:34,839 --> 00:26:38,160
to the goal state? And can the system access multiple pathways?

552
00:26:38,559 --> 00:26:42,039
Like all of this just goes like this, and for me,

553
00:26:42,880 --> 00:26:46,400
that is a powerful reason. I think it's I think

554
00:26:46,640 --> 00:26:50,880
it is a good epistemological reason to pursue, you know

555
00:26:50,920 --> 00:26:54,920
what Mike is calling the optimistic frame, because it's potential

556
00:26:55,039 --> 00:27:00,319
to massively like imagine if we really really wed, which

557
00:27:00,359 --> 00:27:01,839
I'm trying to do, and I think Mike is trying

558
00:27:01,839 --> 00:27:05,559
to do biology and cognition together in this way. I mean,

559
00:27:05,920 --> 00:27:08,599
then embodiment, Look look at the tunes that are becoming

560
00:27:08,640 --> 00:27:11,799
out here really powerfully. Embodiment becomes not just a phrase.

561
00:27:11,839 --> 00:27:16,559
It becomes a deep ontological principle that explains so much.

562
00:27:17,119 --> 00:27:21,799
Or Jonathan something like logos. Mike is talking about information patterns,

563
00:27:21,839 --> 00:27:25,519
and you have to persuade and that makes things actualized

564
00:27:25,559 --> 00:27:29,759
in different ways. And so Mike, if you want to

565
00:27:29,759 --> 00:27:32,559
object anything I'm saying, please feel free. But I think

566
00:27:32,799 --> 00:27:36,119
another argument, an argument I make by making use of

567
00:27:36,160 --> 00:27:39,240
Mike's work is, Look, this has the potential we have

568
00:27:39,279 --> 00:27:43,680
a convergence from for ECOGSCI and Mike's take on biology,

569
00:27:44,039 --> 00:27:49,640
and they really overlap and reinforce them mutually, mutually afford insight.

570
00:27:50,200 --> 00:27:54,200
I think this is a powerful justification for pursuing this program,

571
00:27:55,240 --> 00:27:57,839
for taking it as something plausible, something that should be

572
00:27:57,880 --> 00:28:02,960
taken seriously within scientific and philosophical UH domains. So I

573
00:28:03,039 --> 00:28:06,000
just wanted to add that as an additional argument, and

574
00:28:06,079 --> 00:28:08,200
that's why I am so excited about Mike's work.

575
00:28:09,079 --> 00:28:11,359
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's great. I nothing for me to complain

576
00:28:11,400 --> 00:28:13,599
about there. The only the only thing I would I

577
00:28:13,599 --> 00:28:16,799
would add is is just that at the at the

578
00:28:16,920 --> 00:28:22,240
end of the right before that, Jonathan was asking about, uh,

579
00:28:22,279 --> 00:28:24,440
you know what happens if you try to force the

580
00:28:24,480 --> 00:28:26,920
wrong pattern into the wrong embodiment, and I, you know,

581
00:28:26,960 --> 00:28:30,519
I I view everything we do in the physical world

582
00:28:30,559 --> 00:28:36,000
when we make the robots cells embryos, biobots, camera like,

583
00:28:36,039 --> 00:28:38,519
whatever we make. I think these are interfaces what we're

584
00:28:38,559 --> 00:28:41,279
making are they are the interfaces for these patterns. I

585
00:28:41,319 --> 00:28:43,279
don't think it's a matter of trying to cram the

586
00:28:43,319 --> 00:28:47,359
wrong pattern into the interface. I think they're in the way.

587
00:28:47,359 --> 00:28:48,799
It's a weird way of putting it, and I don't

588
00:28:48,839 --> 00:28:51,920
exactly know what it means, but I my strong suspicion

589
00:28:51,960 --> 00:28:54,200
is that these patterns are kind of under positive pressure

590
00:28:54,519 --> 00:28:56,599
in the sense that you don't need to do much

591
00:28:56,680 --> 00:28:58,559
to get them to come through. You make an interface.

592
00:28:58,599 --> 00:29:01,759
There they are, and and in fact, the key for

593
00:29:01,880 --> 00:29:05,119
us I think going forward, as if we're going to

594
00:29:05,160 --> 00:29:07,799
survive as a as a species, is to get much

595
00:29:07,839 --> 00:29:10,519
better than we are now. About what patterns do you

596
00:29:10,559 --> 00:29:13,640
get when you make specific kinds of interfaces. We make

597
00:29:14,039 --> 00:29:17,839
Internet of things, swarm robotics, we make social and financial structures.

598
00:29:17,880 --> 00:29:20,400
We never mind all the cyborgs and everything else. We

599
00:29:20,480 --> 00:29:22,799
make all these things. We have no clue what patterns

600
00:29:22,839 --> 00:29:25,279
we're picking up, and we may be picking up patterns

601
00:29:25,279 --> 00:29:27,759
that have never had embodiments. And I have a feeling

602
00:29:27,759 --> 00:29:30,119
that a lot of when we talk about AI and

603
00:29:30,160 --> 00:29:33,839
things like that, we're fishing in a pool that maybe

604
00:29:33,880 --> 00:29:37,200
has never been embodied on this planet maybe though I

605
00:29:37,240 --> 00:29:38,240
doubt it, but maybe.

606
00:29:37,960 --> 00:29:41,920
Speaker 2: Nowhere in the universe. You don't force these things in.

607
00:29:42,000 --> 00:29:44,359
Speaker 1: You make an interface, and then you better have some

608
00:29:44,480 --> 00:29:46,039
idea of what's going to show up.

609
00:29:47,079 --> 00:29:49,759
Speaker 4: How I see it, because one of the things I mean,

610
00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:53,319
as I'm listening to you speak, because we're if we're

611
00:29:53,319 --> 00:29:55,559
bringing up these types of languages, and I like how

612
00:29:55,640 --> 00:29:59,000
John mentioned the word logos. You know, at least in

613
00:29:59,079 --> 00:30:01,400
some Christian metay physics, the ones that I care about

614
00:30:01,519 --> 00:30:06,240
Sat Maximoths the Confessor, especially, the notion of form gets

615
00:30:06,319 --> 00:30:08,440
fused with the idea of logos and logos in the

616
00:30:08,480 --> 00:30:10,640
sense of reason, in the sense of purpose, right, and

617
00:30:10,680 --> 00:30:13,799
so the form is actually purpose driven. It's not just

618
00:30:13,920 --> 00:30:17,359
like a shape that doesn't have any it. It actually

619
00:30:17,559 --> 00:30:20,200
is actually something that leads you towards purpose, which is

620
00:30:20,200 --> 00:30:21,200
why we talked about.

621
00:30:21,039 --> 00:30:22,960
Speaker 3: The idea of memory and of purpose.

622
00:30:23,200 --> 00:30:26,559
Speaker 4: It really kind of lit me up that these patterns there,

623
00:30:26,680 --> 00:30:32,920
they're active, right, They actively constrain reality towards the purpose

624
00:30:33,039 --> 00:30:35,599
that they that they pattern, you know, And so to me,

625
00:30:35,799 --> 00:30:37,160
all of that makes sense.

626
00:30:38,720 --> 00:30:42,599
Speaker 1: It's important, right, because that's a very important point and

627
00:30:42,839 --> 00:30:45,480
in the talk, So in that symposium I put up

628
00:30:45,519 --> 00:30:47,200
last night, I put up an hour and a half

629
00:30:47,440 --> 00:30:50,480
talk about this, this is the platonic space in biology,

630
00:30:50,559 --> 00:30:53,559
and I spent I spend twenty minutes of that specifically

631
00:30:53,599 --> 00:30:57,720
talking about these patterns being gold states and not just

632
00:30:58,119 --> 00:31:00,000
you know, here are the patterns that happened to show up.

633
00:31:00,359 --> 00:31:03,160
This is this is an actual goal state that a system,

634
00:31:03,160 --> 00:31:05,920
that an intelligent system is pursuing. I think that's that's

635
00:31:05,920 --> 00:31:07,599
actually a very important feature.

636
00:31:07,319 --> 00:31:07,640
Speaker 5: Of all this.

637
00:31:07,920 --> 00:31:11,880
Speaker 6: Yeah, Kevin Corrigan has made quite a significant argument about

638
00:31:11,920 --> 00:31:15,279
the ancient Greek notion of logos being understood much more

639
00:31:15,359 --> 00:31:17,720
like the way we talk about, you know, the system

640
00:31:17,759 --> 00:31:21,720
of constraints on feedback cycles within a dynamical system, rather

641
00:31:21,799 --> 00:31:22,640
than just like.

642
00:31:22,720 --> 00:31:25,079
Speaker 5: Connecting dots on a PC of paper.

643
00:31:25,400 --> 00:31:27,599
Speaker 6: Right now, I want to, I want I want to,

644
00:31:28,079 --> 00:31:30,279
I want to throw one potential fly in the ointment

645
00:31:30,599 --> 00:31:34,920
if I can, uh, just just just just because I

646
00:31:34,960 --> 00:31:37,880
want to see what both of you say about this. Uh,

647
00:31:37,920 --> 00:31:39,799
and I you know, and I've been talking about this.

648
00:31:39,839 --> 00:31:42,880
I've been talking. I was talking about this, uh to

649
00:31:43,240 --> 00:31:47,240
Zevy Slavin about the work of Jewish neoplatonist called even

650
00:31:47,880 --> 00:31:51,920
Gabbarol and other people and Whitehead too. Is this and Mike,

651
00:31:51,920 --> 00:31:53,599
you used a white heady in terms, so it's not

652
00:31:54,119 --> 00:31:55,920
you talked about aggression, right.

653
00:31:56,039 --> 00:31:56,440
Speaker 2: Uh.

654
00:31:56,519 --> 00:31:59,440
Speaker 6: Now, the thing, the thing that people often don't notice,

655
00:32:00,039 --> 00:32:02,240
you know, Whitehead said he's a platonist, and he is,

656
00:32:02,839 --> 00:32:05,920
but there's an inversion that's going on and in terms

657
00:32:05,920 --> 00:32:09,400
of what classical platonism looks like because at the top

658
00:32:09,720 --> 00:32:13,240
is form, and form is pure actuality, and at the

659
00:32:13,279 --> 00:32:17,440
bottom is hule, it's pure potentiality. But when Whitehead talks

660
00:32:17,440 --> 00:32:21,160
about up here, he's talking about he's talking about possibility,

661
00:32:21,240 --> 00:32:26,720
space and potentiality. Right that that gets loaded or ingress

662
00:32:26,799 --> 00:32:30,359
down to use the term you used, and it calls

663
00:32:30,480 --> 00:32:35,599
out from call sort of causation up from the hule

664
00:32:35,599 --> 00:32:37,519
at the bottom, the matter at the bottom.

665
00:32:37,680 --> 00:32:38,079
Speaker 5: And that's it.

666
00:32:38,200 --> 00:32:42,960
Speaker 6: That's that's an inversion of the classical platonic model. And

667
00:32:43,039 --> 00:32:48,359
why that's important, I think paradigmatically, is because when we

668
00:32:48,519 --> 00:32:52,160
had the older model where it's actuality at the top,

669
00:32:52,640 --> 00:32:57,640
and we tended to set we tended to equate actuality

670
00:32:57,720 --> 00:33:01,799
with reality. In fact, we use the terms synonymously in

671
00:33:01,880 --> 00:33:05,319
our language, will say when we will say I actually

672
00:33:05,640 --> 00:33:08,640
love her or I act and we use it synonymously.

673
00:33:08,640 --> 00:33:12,079
But if you accept the inversion, then of course now

674
00:33:12,119 --> 00:33:18,000
you've got possibility, real possibility being constitutive of reality in

675
00:33:18,039 --> 00:33:21,319
a fundamental way. And I just want to note that

676
00:33:21,400 --> 00:33:23,680
although we're talking and we're using a lot of the

677
00:33:23,680 --> 00:33:28,000
platonic language, and I'm very happy to be there, as

678
00:33:28,079 --> 00:33:30,680
you know, there's also an inversion that has occurred to

679
00:33:30,839 --> 00:33:34,640
my mind, and I wanted to know what either one

680
00:33:34,680 --> 00:33:36,759
of you or both of you thought of that is

681
00:33:36,799 --> 00:33:41,759
that matter? Does it matter very much to either one

682
00:33:41,799 --> 00:33:45,480
of you? And and and what is the relate how

683
00:33:45,519 --> 00:33:51,000
do we I'm very much for reading these old authors.

684
00:33:51,000 --> 00:33:53,960
You know that, Jonathan Man, But you know, there's there's

685
00:33:54,000 --> 00:33:57,640
a promeneutic thing here. There's a lot of similarities, but

686
00:33:57,680 --> 00:34:00,000
there's also this fundamental inversion.

687
00:34:00,119 --> 00:34:03,200
Speaker 5: And so what we do there? And so who wants

688
00:34:03,200 --> 00:34:04,960
to sorry for pregure?

689
00:34:05,000 --> 00:34:07,680
Speaker 4: I mean, I can start in the sense that I

690
00:34:07,680 --> 00:34:11,719
I tend to think incarnationally. That's that's the that's my

691
00:34:11,840 --> 00:34:16,400
Christianity speaking, or my Christian metaphysics is that I and

692
00:34:16,400 --> 00:34:19,519
and I'm maybe closer closer to Aristotle in that sense,

693
00:34:19,559 --> 00:34:24,519
which is that the to me the the reality is

694
00:34:24,559 --> 00:34:28,280
the embodiment. That's the reality. That's where reality happens. That

695
00:34:28,320 --> 00:34:32,960
you have patterns and you have the potentiality into which

696
00:34:32,960 --> 00:34:36,880
these patterns can get embodied. But for something to be real,

697
00:34:36,960 --> 00:34:40,480
it has to be embodied, because the is. But I

698
00:34:40,559 --> 00:34:45,000
have a problem with pattern doesn't exist without without its instantiation.

699
00:34:45,360 --> 00:34:48,360
Speaker 6: But but how can you talk about what what Mike

700
00:34:48,480 --> 00:34:51,239
is saying? The patterns have to be ordered, and you know,

701
00:34:52,199 --> 00:34:54,559
and the old way of ordering them was there was

702
00:34:54,599 --> 00:34:57,000
an actuality the mind of God, and that's how you

703
00:34:57,039 --> 00:34:58,239
got around I.

704
00:34:58,719 --> 00:35:03,519
Speaker 4: Like actual but pure actuality is not is not being

705
00:35:03,599 --> 00:35:06,000
like it's not it's it's how can I say this?

706
00:35:06,159 --> 00:35:08,400
Speaker 3: It's like, uh, in order.

707
00:35:08,519 --> 00:35:10,960
Speaker 4: I think that the realist thing is that is the

708
00:35:11,039 --> 00:35:12,280
relationship between the two.

709
00:35:12,360 --> 00:35:13,320
Speaker 3: Like the realist thing is.

710
00:35:13,280 --> 00:35:18,960
Speaker 4: When these forms they they they they embody themselves. That's

711
00:35:19,000 --> 00:35:21,039
the thing that that at least that I care about

712
00:35:21,039 --> 00:35:21,480
the most.

713
00:35:21,880 --> 00:35:23,920
Speaker 5: Okay, well, I want to hear what Mike has to say.

714
00:35:24,719 --> 00:35:27,320
Speaker 6: I mean because the model is very much like to

715
00:35:27,360 --> 00:35:29,119
my mind, at least here your arrows where you have

716
00:35:29,159 --> 00:35:32,400
top down constraints and you have bottom up causation in

717
00:35:32,440 --> 00:35:36,280
a way where constraints are What patterns do is shape

718
00:35:36,280 --> 00:35:40,599
what is possible. They're shapings of possibility. That's how most

719
00:35:40,679 --> 00:35:47,239
mathematicians talk about mathematical formula or scientific laws. If you're

720
00:35:47,239 --> 00:35:49,960
a realist about their law, about those laws. They're not events,

721
00:35:50,199 --> 00:35:54,400
they're not actualities. They're constraints on what is possible for us.

722
00:35:54,480 --> 00:35:57,280
So they're the real shaping of real possibility. And they're

723
00:35:57,320 --> 00:35:58,760
top down and then bottom up.

724
00:35:59,599 --> 00:36:04,000
Speaker 4: And if the constraint is a purpose, then then it

725
00:36:04,119 --> 00:36:04,760
makes sense.

726
00:36:04,599 --> 00:36:07,079
Speaker 5: To me, like that's good.

727
00:36:08,039 --> 00:36:11,719
Speaker 4: But the constraining of possibility is a purpose, and that

728
00:36:11,800 --> 00:36:18,199
purpose manifests itself ultimately in certain shapes, certain certain directions,

729
00:36:18,199 --> 00:36:23,079
certain certain alignments, like all kinds of words we could use.

730
00:36:23,119 --> 00:36:24,679
I mean, I might not be using the right words

731
00:36:24,719 --> 00:36:27,960
for Michael, but but then to me that makes sense.

732
00:36:29,719 --> 00:36:30,559
Speaker 5: Yes, I agree.

733
00:36:30,599 --> 00:36:33,320
Speaker 6: But what I'm saying is we're opening up the kinds

734
00:36:33,360 --> 00:36:37,320
of things we consider when we attempt to give explanations.

735
00:36:37,679 --> 00:36:41,039
We're not just looking, like in a human fashion, for

736
00:36:41,159 --> 00:36:45,239
relations between events. We're also looking for constraints on what's

737
00:36:45,400 --> 00:36:48,199
possible because we we.

738
00:36:47,800 --> 00:36:48,440
Speaker 5: We now long.

739
00:36:48,840 --> 00:36:51,480
Speaker 6: So what I'm arguing for is you can't be a

740
00:36:51,559 --> 00:36:56,159
nominalist about possibility anymore. You can't say possibility is just

741
00:36:56,280 --> 00:37:00,599
something we humans do lack of knowledge. Possible has to

742
00:37:00,639 --> 00:37:03,719
be real. The constraints have to be real, because you

743
00:37:03,760 --> 00:37:05,880
have to be able to if they're not. I mean,

744
00:37:05,880 --> 00:37:07,639
this is the I think this is part of an

745
00:37:07,679 --> 00:37:10,360
implication of Mike's argument, like there seems to be a

746
00:37:10,400 --> 00:37:11,280
real ordering and.

747
00:37:13,599 --> 00:37:14,360
Speaker 5: A real I don't.

748
00:37:14,400 --> 00:37:17,400
Speaker 6: I'm struggling for a real existence in order to explain

749
00:37:17,639 --> 00:37:21,400
the radical novelty that he like. There hasn't been some

750
00:37:21,519 --> 00:37:25,679
long historical process. You can't give a causal history for this, right,

751
00:37:25,760 --> 00:37:27,880
but nevertheless it's playing a fundamental role.

752
00:37:28,320 --> 00:37:30,920
Speaker 5: Mike. Maybe I'm misrepresenting you, but please.

753
00:37:31,280 --> 00:37:34,159
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm very yeah, a very really interesting question. So

754
00:37:34,159 --> 00:37:36,480
so three things I'd like to say. First about the

755
00:37:36,559 --> 00:37:38,400
views of a Plato and Whitehead and all of that,

756
00:37:40,320 --> 00:37:44,000
None of what I do is meant to stick closely

757
00:37:44,079 --> 00:37:45,480
to what any of these people thought.

758
00:37:45,519 --> 00:37:47,119
Speaker 2: To whatever extent, we know what they thought.

759
00:37:48,199 --> 00:37:51,119
Speaker 1: And I thought about this really hard about the naming

760
00:37:51,199 --> 00:37:53,159
of this, and I may at some point need to

761
00:37:53,280 --> 00:37:56,239
change the name. The reason I went with platonic space

762
00:37:56,760 --> 00:38:00,000
is because it tied what I'm saying to a body

763
00:38:00,079 --> 00:38:02,519
of work among mathematicians where they know exactly what I'm

764
00:38:02,519 --> 00:38:03,000
talking about.

765
00:38:03,159 --> 00:38:05,039
Speaker 2: That is that is that is really it.

766
00:38:05,360 --> 00:38:07,480
Speaker 1: You know, other things that Plato may have thought about,

767
00:38:07,559 --> 00:38:09,960
unchanging forms and all that I don't really you know,

768
00:38:10,119 --> 00:38:12,719
go along with and so you know, within none of

769
00:38:12,800 --> 00:38:14,599
these things am I trying to stick close to any

770
00:38:14,599 --> 00:38:16,480
of that, right, And so we can talk about how

771
00:38:16,559 --> 00:38:19,119
much of this I think is right or whatever. The

772
00:38:19,519 --> 00:38:23,320
second thing I wanted to say is in terms of constraints.

773
00:38:23,719 --> 00:38:26,800
So here, here's here's my here's my thought on this.

774
00:38:27,440 --> 00:38:32,199
The kinds of things that are constrained by these forms.

775
00:38:32,639 --> 00:38:35,679
I think these are the things we generally call physics.

776
00:38:36,039 --> 00:38:38,440
In other words, you know, hey, you know why do

777
00:38:38,599 --> 00:38:40,440
the fermions do x y z.

778
00:38:40,679 --> 00:38:40,840
Speaker 5: Oh?

779
00:38:40,880 --> 00:38:43,880
Speaker 1: It's because this mathematical structure has a symmetry that only

780
00:38:43,880 --> 00:38:46,920
allows what like. That's that's the constraints what I think

781
00:38:46,960 --> 00:38:50,480
happens in biology. Okay, there are some constraints, but I

782
00:38:50,480 --> 00:38:52,119
think it's much more than that. I think the things

783
00:38:52,119 --> 00:38:54,880
we call life and that we call biology are things

784
00:38:54,920 --> 00:38:58,760
that exploit and are potentiated by those forms, not just

785
00:38:58,800 --> 00:39:01,039
constrained by them. So the big thing, and we can

786
00:39:01,039 --> 00:39:03,559
talk about how I think biology exploits the hell out

787
00:39:03,559 --> 00:39:06,039
of a lot of free lunches that are provided by

788
00:39:06,079 --> 00:39:08,480
these forms, so that it is no longer enough if

789
00:39:08,480 --> 00:39:10,800
you're just talking about constraints. You're talking about the low

790
00:39:10,920 --> 00:39:13,800
end of my spectrum, which is machines and the kinds

791
00:39:13,840 --> 00:39:15,880
of things physics likes to study. By the time you

792
00:39:15,880 --> 00:39:18,719
get to the things biology likes to study, what you're

793
00:39:18,760 --> 00:39:21,880
finding is that these forms are not just constraining what happens.

794
00:39:21,880 --> 00:39:26,559
They're actually potentiating or greatly enhancing what can happen, right.

795
00:39:26,480 --> 00:39:29,119
Speaker 6: Right, I get that, Mike, But there's a problem here

796
00:39:29,159 --> 00:39:33,360
because they don't putotypically have the defining features of causal events.

797
00:39:33,360 --> 00:39:35,679
They don't have a they don't have a definitive location

798
00:39:37,039 --> 00:39:39,159
or time, right, and so talking about them as if

799
00:39:39,159 --> 00:39:41,800
their causes is also equally problematic.

800
00:39:42,000 --> 00:39:44,079
Speaker 1: So let's talk about this is really good and I'm

801
00:39:44,079 --> 00:39:46,639
interested to see what you have to say about this, Chris.

802
00:39:46,760 --> 00:39:49,840
Chrisfield said the same thing to me once, that it's

803
00:39:49,880 --> 00:39:52,119
really hard to think about these things as causes because

804
00:39:52,159 --> 00:39:55,280
causes are supposed to precede effects, for example, and if

805
00:39:55,320 --> 00:39:56,840
there's no I don't know how to add a time

806
00:39:56,920 --> 00:40:00,639
component to the platonic space at least yet I agree,

807
00:40:01,280 --> 00:40:03,199
but I do think they're causal. And and and i'll

808
00:40:03,199 --> 00:40:06,440
tell you how. I'm using a slightly different emphasis for causation.

809
00:40:07,159 --> 00:40:09,199
I'm using the following.

810
00:40:09,239 --> 00:40:09,960
Speaker 2: And I don't know.

811
00:40:10,039 --> 00:40:12,440
Speaker 1: Who exactly this is due to, but but it goes

812
00:40:12,480 --> 00:40:14,519
like this. You have you have two features, and you

813
00:40:14,519 --> 00:40:16,599
want to know which one causes which one. What you

814
00:40:16,639 --> 00:40:18,960
do is you tweak this one and you see if

815
00:40:18,960 --> 00:40:21,320
this changes. And then you tweak this one and you

816
00:40:21,320 --> 00:40:24,719
see if this one changes, and the driver right, So

817
00:40:24,719 --> 00:40:26,639
so what I'm looking for is to find out which

818
00:40:26,679 --> 00:40:28,880
one is the driver of the other one. And that's

819
00:40:28,920 --> 00:40:31,280
the causation of causation is when you if I, if

820
00:40:31,280 --> 00:40:35,599
I change thing A and thing b itever inevitably follows suit.

821
00:40:35,639 --> 00:40:37,480
And I can say that A is causal to be.

822
00:40:37,920 --> 00:40:40,280
What to do with time, I don't claim to know,

823
00:40:40,519 --> 00:40:43,000
but but I'm interested in the in the functional causation,

824
00:40:43,280 --> 00:40:43,840
And so in.

825
00:40:43,800 --> 00:40:45,920
Speaker 4: Terms of in terms of time, it's not that it's

826
00:40:45,960 --> 00:40:49,559
not that complicated, because purposes are causes, and you can't

827
00:40:49,599 --> 00:40:53,840
measure the purpose until you've reached the goal. And so

828
00:40:55,119 --> 00:40:58,599
the cause appears at the end in the many systems

829
00:40:58,679 --> 00:41:02,480
because the purpose is drawing things into it, and then

830
00:41:02,519 --> 00:41:04,280
you only see its result once.

831
00:41:04,039 --> 00:41:06,920
Speaker 3: You've reached that reached there. It's like a when you watch.

832
00:41:06,800 --> 00:41:09,840
Speaker 7: A movie and you okay, let's say you watch sixth

833
00:41:09,840 --> 00:41:13,280
Sense and you don't understand what's happening, and then at

834
00:41:13,280 --> 00:41:15,800
the end it reveals to you what all of these

835
00:41:15,840 --> 00:41:18,440
things were doing, and once you see it, it becomes

836
00:41:18,440 --> 00:41:19,440
the cause of the movie.

837
00:41:20,079 --> 00:41:22,000
Speaker 3: But it's not it's not a cause like.

838
00:41:21,920 --> 00:41:25,119
Speaker 4: A billiard ball hitting another it's a it's a I mean,

839
00:41:25,159 --> 00:41:27,320
it's a formal cause. It's a it's a cause that

840
00:41:27,440 --> 00:41:30,400
is explaining the reason why all these things are together

841
00:41:30,480 --> 00:41:31,239
in the first place.

842
00:41:31,719 --> 00:41:33,480
Speaker 2: Yeah, I get it, and I agree.

843
00:41:33,480 --> 00:41:36,039
Speaker 6: And the wee Mike, the person's JS mill. It's called

844
00:41:36,599 --> 00:41:39,480
the method of differences fantastical jsmell.

845
00:41:39,599 --> 00:41:41,760
Speaker 2: Yeah, super super. I didn't know that. Okay, that's great.

846
00:41:41,920 --> 00:41:44,079
Speaker 1: So so so here's here's the kind of thing I

847
00:41:44,599 --> 00:41:48,400
have in mind for the for the causation bit. This

848
00:41:48,519 --> 00:41:50,440
is just just one of a million examples we could

849
00:41:50,480 --> 00:41:53,440
talk about. The ticket has come out at thirteen years

850
00:41:53,480 --> 00:41:56,159
and seventeen years and so you're a biologist and you

851
00:41:56,239 --> 00:41:58,880
ask was, so why is that? And and then you say, well,

852
00:41:58,920 --> 00:42:01,480
it's because they're trying to I'm there make sure that

853
00:42:01,519 --> 00:42:03,679
their predators don't time the cycles right, because if it's

854
00:42:03,719 --> 00:42:05,639
twelve years, then every two years, every three years, every

855
00:42:05,639 --> 00:42:07,840
four years, somebody would be And so you say, well,

856
00:42:07,880 --> 00:42:10,079
that's amazing. So what is it about thirteen and seventeen

857
00:42:10,159 --> 00:42:11,800
Is that, ah, these are prime okay?

858
00:42:11,840 --> 00:42:12,039
Speaker 5: And so.

859
00:42:13,599 --> 00:42:16,119
Speaker 1: Why specifically thirteen and seventeen? And so now what's happened

860
00:42:16,159 --> 00:42:17,920
is you've left the realm of biology, you've left the

861
00:42:17,960 --> 00:42:19,960
realm of physics. Now you're in the math department, and

862
00:42:20,519 --> 00:42:23,159
they can explain to you why the distribution of primes is.

863
00:42:23,119 --> 00:42:23,679
Speaker 2: The way it is.

864
00:42:23,920 --> 00:42:26,719
Speaker 1: And so now we have this situation where if the

865
00:42:26,760 --> 00:42:29,920
distribution of primes had been different, the tickedas would be

866
00:42:29,920 --> 00:42:32,760
coming out at a different time. But on the other hand,

867
00:42:32,800 --> 00:42:35,199
there is nothing I can do in biology and physics.

868
00:42:35,239 --> 00:42:37,599
I can tweak the constants of the Big Bang. Whatever

869
00:42:37,639 --> 00:42:39,239
I want to do at the physical world, I am

870
00:42:39,280 --> 00:42:41,920
never going to change the distribution of primes, or the

871
00:42:42,039 --> 00:42:45,480
value of E or fighting bombs constant. So what I

872
00:42:45,519 --> 00:42:48,599
see as causation is simply this. I see that the

873
00:42:48,639 --> 00:42:54,159
patterns are determining aspects of the physical world. And I

874
00:42:54,239 --> 00:42:56,320
don't see anyway for things we do in the physical

875
00:42:56,360 --> 00:43:01,039
world to feedback, although there is a there's a caveat

876
00:43:01,079 --> 00:43:03,519
to this, but that is what I see as the

877
00:43:03,559 --> 00:43:07,920
causation that the influence flows. That if we want to

878
00:43:08,000 --> 00:43:11,800
understand what's happening here, the source is in these facts

879
00:43:11,840 --> 00:43:13,920
of mathematics and the facts of other things that are

880
00:43:13,920 --> 00:43:16,800
not mathematics, so that I think are actually psychology or

881
00:43:16,800 --> 00:43:17,719
whatever they are.

882
00:43:18,360 --> 00:43:21,679
Speaker 6: So I agree with you that there are determination relations.

883
00:43:22,679 --> 00:43:24,639
I guess I'm pressing on this because one of the

884
00:43:24,639 --> 00:43:28,239
classic problems, I mean, this is a standard trope in

885
00:43:28,280 --> 00:43:31,480
the philosophy of mathematics for Platonism, is accounting for the

886
00:43:31,480 --> 00:43:34,920
causal status. You can't seem to get any causal relation

887
00:43:35,000 --> 00:43:37,199
out of these things because they don't seem to bear

888
00:43:37,360 --> 00:43:41,639
a temporal or spatial location, Like where is any of

889
00:43:41,679 --> 00:43:44,039
those functions? You just where are they? Like are they

890
00:43:44,039 --> 00:43:48,519
over there? Like no, that they're nowhere? And then they're everywhere,

891
00:43:49,519 --> 00:43:51,480
and they don't happen at a specific time or a

892
00:43:51,519 --> 00:43:52,360
specific place.

893
00:43:53,000 --> 00:43:58,280
Speaker 5: And so I think I hear what you're saying.

894
00:43:58,320 --> 00:43:59,679
Speaker 6: And this is why I want to press you, Mike,

895
00:43:59,679 --> 00:44:04,320
because I think I think something's happening. Let's take up

896
00:44:04,320 --> 00:44:06,880
your proposal, because it's a really good one. Let's reserve

897
00:44:06,960 --> 00:44:10,000
constraint for something where we're just talking about No, we

898
00:44:10,079 --> 00:44:11,559
have to give them their due. By the way, there's

899
00:44:11,559 --> 00:44:15,039
not only selective constraints that are enabling constraints.

900
00:44:15,159 --> 00:44:18,239
Speaker 5: So it's not just this. So but you said it's

901
00:44:18,239 --> 00:44:19,639
more than that. I get.

902
00:44:19,679 --> 00:44:22,480
Speaker 6: There's a sense of almost an exploratory element to this

903
00:44:22,840 --> 00:44:26,480
is that fair Okay, constraint does not convey that. But

904
00:44:27,239 --> 00:44:31,079
you know, classically cause doesn't either, and the stuff you're

905
00:44:31,079 --> 00:44:32,960
talking about doesn't have a lot of the other features

906
00:44:32,960 --> 00:44:36,039
of cause. It sounds to me almost like and Dennis

907
00:44:36,039 --> 00:44:37,800
Walsh is trying to do the same thing here, he's

908
00:44:37,800 --> 00:44:41,159
a philosopher biology at the University of Toronto, is to

909
00:44:41,199 --> 00:44:43,840
come up with, you know that there is something other

910
00:44:44,000 --> 00:44:47,360
than what we mean by cause or constraints that we're

911
00:44:47,400 --> 00:44:49,719
talking about here that we and this is why I

912
00:44:49,719 --> 00:44:51,920
try to invoke the I think I mentioned it to you,

913
00:44:52,559 --> 00:44:56,639
the neoplatonic notion of a paradigmatic cause, which is not

914
00:44:57,159 --> 00:45:00,400
a formal cause and efficient cause, a mechanical cause, or

915
00:45:00,400 --> 00:45:05,559
a final cause. It's it's this accessing and downloading vertical

916
00:45:06,320 --> 00:45:07,679
kind of determination.

917
00:45:08,119 --> 00:45:11,599
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know, I I like that a lot

918
00:45:11,679 --> 00:45:13,400
and I and I agree with you in the sense

919
00:45:13,480 --> 00:45:17,639
that if the standard version of causation doesn't capture what's

920
00:45:17,679 --> 00:45:20,360
going on here, too bad for the standard version of causation.

921
00:45:21,119 --> 00:45:24,119
I mean, I agree with Okay, it doesn't have a location,

922
00:45:24,239 --> 00:45:26,679
it doesn't have one, Well, too bad, Who cares. I

923
00:45:27,039 --> 00:45:28,920
think there's something much more important going on here.

924
00:45:28,920 --> 00:45:29,159
Speaker 3: I think.

925
00:45:29,320 --> 00:45:32,599
Speaker 1: I think those kind of causes were worked out by

926
00:45:33,239 --> 00:45:36,960
largely by people focused on building steam engines and things

927
00:45:36,960 --> 00:45:40,000
where this knob is over here touching this you know

928
00:45:40,119 --> 00:45:43,320
thing and the gear, and this is why that that

929
00:45:43,599 --> 00:45:46,159
kind of causation is not going to do us in

930
00:45:46,159 --> 00:45:48,280
in the in the biological and the cognitive sciences.

931
00:45:48,400 --> 00:45:49,519
Speaker 2: I don't think, and.

932
00:45:49,480 --> 00:45:52,360
Speaker 1: In fact I make the I make the connection to

933
00:45:52,920 --> 00:45:55,320
there's There was another case where this came up, which

934
00:45:55,360 --> 00:45:58,400
is when when Descartes sort of announced this, this idea

935
00:45:58,440 --> 00:46:01,519
of a non physical non of running the brain around

936
00:46:01,519 --> 00:46:04,320
like a like a like a puppet, you know. The

937
00:46:04,679 --> 00:46:07,320
Princess of Bohemia I forget her name wrote to him

938
00:46:07,320 --> 00:46:10,039
and said, well, ok here, how that you said the

939
00:46:10,079 --> 00:46:13,199
non physical mind doesn't have a location, and we have

940
00:46:13,280 --> 00:46:16,119
conservation of mass. How how how is that going to happen?

941
00:46:16,400 --> 00:46:19,159
And what I find really weird. And I've been playing

942
00:46:19,199 --> 00:46:21,000
with a stupid idea of writing some sort of a

943
00:46:21,039 --> 00:46:23,280
fictional dialogue between the two of them that I think

944
00:46:23,320 --> 00:46:25,559
should have happened. If it didn't happen, because Descartes was

945
00:46:25,599 --> 00:46:28,280
a mathematician, what it seems to me he should have

946
00:46:28,320 --> 00:46:29,480
said is excuse me.

947
00:46:29,639 --> 00:46:32,280
Speaker 2: We have had since since you know.

948
00:46:32,239 --> 00:46:35,079
Speaker 1: The time of Pythagorism, before that, we have already had

949
00:46:35,119 --> 00:46:40,559
examples of non physical facts determining reality in the physical world.

950
00:46:40,599 --> 00:46:41,400
Speaker 2: We've already had this.

951
00:46:42,639 --> 00:46:44,719
Speaker 5: Yeah, but and your question is a good one.

952
00:46:44,760 --> 00:46:48,639
Speaker 6: Why doesn't he because he gets committed to a completely

953
00:46:48,679 --> 00:46:50,199
horizontal notion of causation.

954
00:46:50,360 --> 00:46:51,960
Speaker 5: Yeah, he gets committed to it.

955
00:46:52,159 --> 00:46:57,039
Speaker 6: And because there is the rejection of any verticality to ontology,

956
00:46:57,280 --> 00:46:59,840
there's a deep there's deeper ontological moves that are going

957
00:46:59,880 --> 00:47:03,480
on that precludes him from considering. You're right, that answer

958
00:47:03,559 --> 00:47:06,519
should have been available to him. But he's rejecting any

959
00:47:06,639 --> 00:47:10,440
kind of platonic verticality. And what I see you doing,

960
00:47:10,519 --> 00:47:13,079
and I think we're actually fleshing it out that was

961
00:47:13,159 --> 00:47:17,719
an unintended pun. We're fleshing it out is like the

962
00:47:17,760 --> 00:47:20,800
strong need to bring a verticality back into our ontology

963
00:47:20,800 --> 00:47:21,599
in a deep way.

964
00:47:22,079 --> 00:47:24,920
Speaker 1: Yeah, and specifically I mean the kind of Uh. Just

965
00:47:24,960 --> 00:47:27,239
to be clear, I'm not a philosopher.

966
00:47:26,719 --> 00:47:27,320
Speaker 2: I don't, you know.

967
00:47:27,440 --> 00:47:31,760
Speaker 1: I The reason that I prefer this kind of version

968
00:47:31,960 --> 00:47:35,719
is driven by engineering. It's driven by by simply by

969
00:47:35,880 --> 00:47:38,679
by the following the cause. When I'm looking for causes,

970
00:47:38,760 --> 00:47:42,360
I'm not looking for, you know, to match any philosophical

971
00:47:42,400 --> 00:47:45,280
notion of causation. What I want as an engineer is

972
00:47:45,639 --> 00:47:48,719
where should I be looking in order to understand and

973
00:47:48,760 --> 00:47:51,320
control the system that I want to understand and control.

974
00:47:51,639 --> 00:47:53,880
And if this and if the traditional notion of causation

975
00:47:53,920 --> 00:47:56,719
doesn't help me do that, then then then then fine,

976
00:47:56,719 --> 00:47:58,679
then then I'm not interested. What I want to understand

977
00:47:58,719 --> 00:48:00,840
is if I if I have a system that behaves

978
00:48:00,840 --> 00:48:03,079
in a certain way, whether it's cicadas that come out

979
00:48:03,079 --> 00:48:06,639
at thirteen years, or whether it's a zenobot that does

980
00:48:06,679 --> 00:48:08,440
things that we didn't ask it to do, or a

981
00:48:08,440 --> 00:48:11,320
bubble sort that has a side quests that are not

982
00:48:11,440 --> 00:48:13,440
in the algorithm, of these kinds of things that we study,

983
00:48:14,360 --> 00:48:17,679
if the answer lies in mathematic in the properties of

984
00:48:17,719 --> 00:48:18,800
mathematical objects.

985
00:48:19,079 --> 00:48:19,960
Speaker 2: Then, as far as I'm.

986
00:48:19,840 --> 00:48:24,880
Speaker 1: Concerned, that's the cause i'm looking at. If somebody wants

987
00:48:24,880 --> 00:48:27,920
to come up with a different terminology for it, fine,

988
00:48:28,000 --> 00:48:29,719
But as an engineer, this is what I'm looking for.

989
00:48:29,760 --> 00:48:32,880
I'm looking to understand what is actually driving the thing

990
00:48:32,920 --> 00:48:33,880
that I'm interested in.

991
00:48:34,159 --> 00:48:38,760
Speaker 6: And I think you're completely epistemically virtuous. I'm not making anything,

992
00:48:38,760 --> 00:48:45,199
although I do think philosophical argument matters too sure, But

993
00:48:45,559 --> 00:48:54,199
what I'm saying is, and you're basically doing you're following

994
00:48:54,239 --> 00:48:57,000
the science. And I mean that in a good way,

995
00:48:57,079 --> 00:48:59,039
not the way that phrase has been used in the past,

996
00:48:59,599 --> 00:49:02,000
the recent past. But you're following the science, and it's

997
00:49:02,039 --> 00:49:04,559
basically leading us out of a framework that was given

998
00:49:04,599 --> 00:49:07,920
to us, a fundamental ontological epistemological framework given to us

999
00:49:08,039 --> 00:49:12,480
by the Enlightenment, the framework called modernity, where we understand reality,

1000
00:49:12,480 --> 00:49:15,800
we understand causation this way, there's no vert account, et cetera,

1001
00:49:15,840 --> 00:49:19,239
et cetera, and this like I see you tell me

1002
00:49:19,280 --> 00:49:21,440
if this is wrong, but the science. You're following the science,

1003
00:49:21,599 --> 00:49:24,079
and it's leading us out of that framework.

1004
00:49:24,360 --> 00:49:26,480
Speaker 5: And I'm trying to point out how profound I think that.

1005
00:49:26,599 --> 00:49:30,960
Speaker 2: Is yeah, well, well, I appreciate that. I agree with you.

1006
00:49:31,039 --> 00:49:34,559
Speaker 1: I think we made certain assumptions around and again I'm

1007
00:49:34,599 --> 00:49:36,800
not a historian of science, but my understanding of what

1008
00:49:36,880 --> 00:49:39,719
happened during the Enlightenment is that we made certain assumptions

1009
00:49:39,760 --> 00:49:41,800
about the sets of tools we were going to use.

1010
00:49:42,199 --> 00:49:45,280
Like every set of tools, it has blind spots. We

1011
00:49:45,719 --> 00:49:48,800
are still sort of coasting along on those tools, assuming

1012
00:49:48,840 --> 00:49:51,320
that the turn the crank long enough and things will

1013
00:49:51,360 --> 00:49:55,079
be okay. I think we've gone way beyond now understanding

1014
00:49:55,079 --> 00:49:57,199
that a lot of these assumptions were not good. They

1015
00:49:57,199 --> 00:49:59,119
were fine at the time, they served us well for

1016
00:49:59,159 --> 00:50:02,079
some time, but they're not actually going to going to

1017
00:50:02,119 --> 00:50:05,039
keep going. And there's something else I wanted to mention,

1018
00:50:05,079 --> 00:50:09,119
which is this notion of embodiment. So the part that

1019
00:50:09,760 --> 00:50:11,719
people tend to agree with me on is the part

1020
00:50:11,760 --> 00:50:14,440
that I think embodiment is absolutely critical, It's very important.

1021
00:50:14,599 --> 00:50:17,239
The part where I tend to lose everyone is the following.

1022
00:50:17,679 --> 00:50:22,440
I think, as human beings with a very particular the

1023
00:50:22,519 --> 00:50:25,360
cognitive apparatus and evolutionary history and whatever, I think we

1024
00:50:25,440 --> 00:50:28,760
are obsessed with the three dimensional world. I think that

1025
00:50:28,920 --> 00:50:34,559
there are spaces in which kinds of minds, meaning beings,

1026
00:50:34,559 --> 00:50:37,599
and some of them are you know, morally important beings

1027
00:50:37,920 --> 00:50:41,639
do this perception decision action loop right the world in

1028
00:50:41,679 --> 00:50:44,719
which they strive, They solve problems, they suffer, they win,

1029
00:50:44,760 --> 00:50:47,440
they lose, they do things. I think there are numerous

1030
00:50:47,480 --> 00:50:52,639
spaces that are very difficult for us to visualize as humans.

1031
00:50:52,960 --> 00:50:56,119
And because we have trouble visualizing these spaces, we assume

1032
00:50:56,159 --> 00:50:58,440
that they don't exist. And we when we say embodiment,

1033
00:50:58,480 --> 00:51:01,679
we mean, you know, a physical body. It's if you're

1034
00:51:01,719 --> 00:51:03,840
a software agent, do you need to have a robot

1035
00:51:03,920 --> 00:51:06,320
and trundle around on wheels or now walk around or something.

1036
00:51:06,559 --> 00:51:08,320
You can't just be sitting in a box somewhere. You

1037
00:51:08,400 --> 00:51:11,400
don't engage with the physical world unless you're running around

1038
00:51:11,400 --> 00:51:15,400
touching things. Well, biology, long before nerve and muscle evolved,

1039
00:51:15,719 --> 00:51:19,320
biology was doing all of these kinds of problem solving,

1040
00:51:19,400 --> 00:51:24,559
navigational you know, goal directed things, in physiological state space,

1041
00:51:24,960 --> 00:51:28,760
in transcriptional space space, and metabolic state space, and anatomic

1042
00:51:28,840 --> 00:51:31,480
this is what we study. Anilib mostly is anatomical state space.

1043
00:51:31,920 --> 00:51:34,679
These spaces are as real to these beings that live

1044
00:51:34,719 --> 00:51:37,840
in those spaces. I think as the three dimensional world

1045
00:51:37,880 --> 00:51:40,719
is to us, they are as fictional and as constructed

1046
00:51:40,840 --> 00:51:43,079
as the three D world is by us, I think,

1047
00:51:43,480 --> 00:51:47,480
and they are real and also constructed to the same degree.

1048
00:51:47,800 --> 00:51:51,920
And there are many different kinds of embodiment that we

1049
00:51:51,960 --> 00:51:55,440
do not traditionally recognize as embodiment. Then there's actually a

1050
00:51:55,440 --> 00:51:57,960
good chunk of my lab now was devoted to creating tools,

1051
00:51:58,000 --> 00:52:02,519
empirical tools for people to use use to recognize beings

1052
00:52:02,559 --> 00:52:06,079
in non you know, in non traditional spaces, and to

1053
00:52:06,159 --> 00:52:08,079
communicate with them. This is one of our goals is

1054
00:52:08,079 --> 00:52:11,280
to enable you to recognize, communicate with, and ethically relate

1055
00:52:11,360 --> 00:52:13,400
to beings that live in all kinds of other crazy

1056
00:52:13,400 --> 00:52:17,159
spaces that we don't you know, we can't visualize. So

1057
00:52:17,440 --> 00:52:19,239
I just want to be really clear that it's to me,

1058
00:52:19,320 --> 00:52:21,039
it's not that. Okay, there are forms and then there's

1059
00:52:21,079 --> 00:52:24,440
like three D universe, there are many other spaces as

1060
00:52:24,480 --> 00:52:25,800
far as I'm concerned.

1061
00:52:25,599 --> 00:52:27,760
Speaker 6: Jonathan, Before you say, I just want to one more

1062
00:52:27,599 --> 00:52:30,039
point of conversion, Dan Champion, I did a lot of

1063
00:52:30,039 --> 00:52:35,679
work about the NASAU scientists moving the rovers around on Mars,

1064
00:52:35,719 --> 00:52:38,800
and does that violate embodiment because the scientists are here

1065
00:52:39,079 --> 00:52:41,559
and the rovers are up there and what we found

1066
00:52:41,719 --> 00:52:44,360
was no, No, there's a different way in which they

1067
00:52:44,840 --> 00:52:48,320
collectively organize themselves and make use of the information from

1068
00:52:48,320 --> 00:52:53,119
the rovers to create this overall dynamical system that has

1069
00:52:53,159 --> 00:52:57,519
the capacity to grow hyper patterns that like individual human

1070
00:52:57,559 --> 00:52:58,960
cognition can't grasp.

1071
00:52:59,400 --> 00:53:01,280
Speaker 5: Now, argued that was a kind of.

1072
00:53:01,239 --> 00:53:07,000
Speaker 6: Embodiment, even though it's not a physiological body. And we

1073
00:53:07,000 --> 00:53:10,599
were trying to understand embodiment as are you adaptively coupled

1074
00:53:10,880 --> 00:53:14,119
to your environment in a way that makes the difference

1075
00:53:14,360 --> 00:53:16,880
to your ability to solve problems in that environment or

1076
00:53:16,920 --> 00:53:21,880
something like like that, but again, very convergent. What was interesting,

1077
00:53:22,599 --> 00:53:24,599
and this is where my work overlaps with Jonathan, and

1078
00:53:24,639 --> 00:53:27,519
then I'll shut up so Jonathan can talk, is, you know,

1079
00:53:27,559 --> 00:53:29,480
the kinds of things that the scientists had to do

1080
00:53:29,559 --> 00:53:32,639
in order to participate into that in that collective intelligence,

1081
00:53:32,920 --> 00:53:35,119
in order to make it a sensed presence. They had

1082
00:53:35,119 --> 00:53:37,840
to do all this imaginal weird they had they had

1083
00:53:37,840 --> 00:53:39,840
to identify with the rover, they had.

1084
00:53:39,760 --> 00:53:42,400
Speaker 5: To internalize it. They had to do all this stuff.

1085
00:53:42,920 --> 00:53:45,880
Speaker 6: And you know, I'm being a little bit provocative here,

1086
00:53:45,880 --> 00:53:47,320
but it looks very similar to a lot of the

1087
00:53:47,360 --> 00:53:51,039
stuff people have typically done in religious settings. They do

1088
00:53:51,119 --> 00:53:55,960
imaginal things, they extend identity, they internalize like the saint

1089
00:53:57,079 --> 00:54:01,159
and and frankly, the scientists got kind of religious about

1090
00:54:01,159 --> 00:54:04,559
the rovers they really did. They started to talk as

1091
00:54:04,599 --> 00:54:06,920
if they had like a sympathetic magic connection to them.

1092
00:54:07,039 --> 00:54:09,840
These are these hard, hard headed scientists. But if you

1093
00:54:09,840 --> 00:54:12,800
do the actual ethnography, that's obviously not what they publish.

1094
00:54:12,880 --> 00:54:14,599
But if you go do the ethnography of how they're

1095
00:54:14,599 --> 00:54:17,760
doing the work, it's really messy like that. And so

1096
00:54:18,079 --> 00:54:20,559
I just wanted I put a fly in the ointment,

1097
00:54:20,559 --> 00:54:22,880
but now I'm putting a flower in the ointment as

1098
00:54:22,920 --> 00:54:26,599
a potential point. Like, yeah, we talk about this, but

1099
00:54:27,000 --> 00:54:32,960
you know, there's the question about I think it's very

1100
00:54:32,960 --> 00:54:36,239
plausible that human beings can participate in these collective intelligences

1101
00:54:36,280 --> 00:54:39,280
in some way or form, and given Eric Hole's work,

1102
00:54:39,360 --> 00:54:45,280
that gives us access to otherwise inaccessible causal power and

1103
00:54:45,480 --> 00:54:49,840
information access that's otherwise not available. I'm not invoking anything

1104
00:54:49,880 --> 00:54:52,719
wu here. You know, you and I know Eric Holes

1105
00:54:52,760 --> 00:54:57,519
got some pretty rigorous argument and some good simulations providing

1106
00:54:57,559 --> 00:55:01,079
evidence for this. But for me, you know, if we

1107
00:55:01,159 --> 00:55:03,760
got a verticalopy and we have that kind of participation,

1108
00:55:05,400 --> 00:55:08,119
and it seems to be actually allowing and I'm using

1109
00:55:08,159 --> 00:55:11,320
your language. Might the engineering to move the rovers around

1110
00:55:11,400 --> 00:55:13,800
and be able to study the hyper objects, the hyper

1111
00:55:13,840 --> 00:55:18,000
patterns of the Martian atmosphere. Then there's the possibility that

1112
00:55:18,719 --> 00:55:22,639
maybe stuff we had dismissed as being in the inlicighttenment

1113
00:55:22,639 --> 00:55:26,159
as being superstitious we should take seriously again. And now

1114
00:55:26,159 --> 00:55:28,280
I'm going to turn it over to Jonathan. And because

1115
00:55:28,559 --> 00:55:31,960
that so that's my flower in the ointment right.

1116
00:55:32,000 --> 00:55:34,920
Speaker 1: Well, well, just just very quickly, I like that a lot,

1117
00:55:35,079 --> 00:55:37,480
and I can tell you that something very similar I

1118
00:55:37,519 --> 00:55:42,159
think is the future of molecular medicine because because what

1119
00:55:42,199 --> 00:55:45,920
we are doing right now is uh pointing out that

1120
00:55:46,039 --> 00:55:49,199
you know, if if you have a bowling ball on

1121
00:55:49,239 --> 00:55:52,280
a landscape, then your view as a third person external

1122
00:55:52,320 --> 00:55:55,679
observer tells pretty much the whole story. You can see,

1123
00:55:55,800 --> 00:55:57,440
you know what's going to happen. But if you have

1124
00:55:57,480 --> 00:55:59,920
a mouse on a landscape, your view as an extra

1125
00:56:00,159 --> 00:56:02,079
observer is kind of useless. You need to know what

1126
00:56:02,159 --> 00:56:04,960
is the mousetak of this landscape, what does he see

1127
00:56:05,000 --> 00:56:08,280
and where. So now when we look at okay, we

1128
00:56:08,320 --> 00:56:10,599
want to control the physiology of the liver or we

1129
00:56:10,639 --> 00:56:13,159
want to control the blestedema to regenerate a limb or an.

1130
00:56:13,119 --> 00:56:13,679
Speaker 2: Eye or whatever.

1131
00:56:14,400 --> 00:56:17,199
Speaker 1: Which of those models is going to do And I'm

1132
00:56:17,199 --> 00:56:19,119
here to tell you that it's not the bowling ball model.

1133
00:56:20,000 --> 00:56:22,599
It's the first person perspective model. So that in the

1134
00:56:22,599 --> 00:56:25,960
future when you are going to and we're trying to

1135
00:56:25,960 --> 00:56:27,480
make tools for this, we're trying to make practical to

1136
00:56:27,559 --> 00:56:30,119
me for this. Instead of controlling the rover in three

1137
00:56:30,119 --> 00:56:33,719
dimensional space on Mars, you are controlling as a as

1138
00:56:33,760 --> 00:56:36,599
a worker in regender of medicine, you are controlling the

1139
00:56:36,639 --> 00:56:40,119
movement of cells in an invisible anatomical morpho space that

1140
00:56:40,199 --> 00:56:42,599
you can't see, or the movement of your liver in

1141
00:56:42,679 --> 00:56:45,559
physiological state space that has twenty nine dimensions that you

1142
00:56:45,559 --> 00:56:49,360
couldn't imagine. And so you need tools for you to

1143
00:56:49,400 --> 00:56:53,320
become that being, to share your inner perspective with it

1144
00:56:53,480 --> 00:56:55,880
and say, okay, I'm kind again like right, I'm not

1145
00:56:55,880 --> 00:56:57,199
trying to get wo here, but I think there will

1146
00:56:57,239 --> 00:56:59,960
be tools. There will be augmented reality tools that will say,

1147
00:57:00,280 --> 00:57:01,920
I want you to navigate the space.

1148
00:57:01,960 --> 00:57:03,239
Speaker 2: Thus, how are you going to do that?

1149
00:57:03,239 --> 00:57:05,159
Speaker 1: If you don't understand the space, how are you going

1150
00:57:05,199 --> 00:57:07,519
to communicate to this being if you're not part of

1151
00:57:07,519 --> 00:57:09,159
it in the same way that you were talking about

1152
00:57:09,320 --> 00:57:12,280
merging with that rover right, And I think we're going

1153
00:57:12,320 --> 00:57:14,480
to end up in a lot of very weird spaces

1154
00:57:14,679 --> 00:57:19,679
that are at different scales, different time scales, spatial scales, distributed, disconnected,

1155
00:57:19,960 --> 00:57:21,960
where we are going to be part of that first

1156
00:57:22,000 --> 00:57:26,280
person perspective of really weird beings like body organs, like cells,

1157
00:57:26,360 --> 00:57:30,519
like synthetic self growing houses, and god knows what that

1158
00:57:30,559 --> 00:57:33,039
we are going to have to be part of that,

1159
00:57:33,239 --> 00:57:35,159
you know, from the inside, not from the outside.

1160
00:57:37,599 --> 00:57:40,199
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of a lot have been said.

1161
00:57:40,239 --> 00:57:43,880
But for sure, in terms of the idea of non

1162
00:57:44,480 --> 00:57:48,119
three D bodies, I think people have known about these

1163
00:57:48,400 --> 00:57:50,840
for a long time. We call them subtle bodies. They're

1164
00:57:50,840 --> 00:57:55,119
different iterations of it. Of course, most ancient traditions care

1165
00:57:55,199 --> 00:57:59,280
mostly about those that are at the personal and transpersonal level.

1166
00:57:59,440 --> 00:58:02,960
But you know, you can find embodiments, for example, at

1167
00:58:03,000 --> 00:58:07,000
a personal influence level in stories. That is the way

1168
00:58:07,039 --> 00:58:11,400
that I influence others through even just speech. Is that

1169
00:58:11,519 --> 00:58:16,519
type of non completely physical embodiment. If a very influential

1170
00:58:17,599 --> 00:58:22,880
celebrity endorses a product and then that gets taken up

1171
00:58:22,960 --> 00:58:25,920
in the minds of parents that then buy that product

1172
00:58:25,920 --> 00:58:30,119
for children. What you're encountering is a non physical pattern

1173
00:58:30,199 --> 00:58:32,760
that's embodying itself at different levels, and it's kind of

1174
00:58:32,800 --> 00:58:34,639
reaching all the way all the way down.

1175
00:58:34,679 --> 00:58:37,320
Speaker 3: And so in the human sphere and in the kind.

1176
00:58:37,199 --> 00:58:40,039
Speaker 4: Of social sphere, we have these types of bodies that

1177
00:58:40,719 --> 00:58:43,239
there are all different types of bodies that are not

1178
00:58:43,400 --> 00:58:47,559
completely gross, like that aren't brute, but we're used to

1179
00:58:47,639 --> 00:58:52,119
understanding how influence functions. And I don't know if you've

1180
00:58:52,159 --> 00:58:55,119
thought about the analogy between those types of influences, like

1181
00:58:55,159 --> 00:58:59,039
the way that you could say, the way that music

1182
00:58:59,119 --> 00:59:04,239
makes people dance and the types of things that you're doing,

1183
00:59:04,320 --> 00:59:06,840
because I mean, in music obviously is not a music

1184
00:59:06,960 --> 00:59:09,760
is an auditory pattern. It's not a brute it's not

1185
00:59:09,800 --> 00:59:12,840
a brute thing that runs into each other. But nonetheless,

1186
00:59:12,840 --> 00:59:16,760
what it does is that it embodies itself first in

1187
00:59:16,960 --> 00:59:20,199
just vibrations of sound, and then it slowly moves down

1188
00:59:20,280 --> 00:59:23,599
until it it manifests itself in a bunch of people

1189
00:59:23,639 --> 00:59:26,679
square dancing, you know, on the floor. And so I

1190
00:59:26,679 --> 00:59:28,199
don't know if there are analogies that you can see

1191
00:59:28,199 --> 00:59:32,000
between those types of transpersonal patterns kind of embodying themselves

1192
00:59:32,000 --> 00:59:34,440
and what it is you're doing at the biological level.

1193
00:59:35,280 --> 00:59:37,119
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, there's there's a lot going on there.

1194
00:59:37,159 --> 00:59:39,639
Speaker 1: And and one person that you guys probably should should

1195
00:59:39,639 --> 00:59:43,559
talk to is Richard Watson so University of Southampton. So

1196
00:59:43,559 --> 00:59:47,199
he's a computer scientist evolutionary biologist, and he and I

1197
00:59:47,239 --> 00:59:49,039
have done a bunch of work together. He's he's very

1198
00:59:49,039 --> 00:59:53,360
interested in metaphors of music and and things like this,

1199
00:59:53,719 --> 00:59:57,639
in driving, collective intelligence and these spaces and and and

1200
00:59:57,679 --> 00:59:59,960
all all the everything you just said, Like you guys

1201
01:00:00,039 --> 01:00:02,400
could talk for hours with him, So I would suggest

1202
01:00:02,400 --> 01:00:02,880
that as well.

1203
01:00:03,880 --> 01:00:06,280
Speaker 6: That's interesting because I mean that first of all, that

1204
01:00:06,800 --> 01:00:10,760
for me, I've been doing Daoist practices for thirty years,

1205
01:00:10,800 --> 01:00:15,400
and that's and I really have objected to the very

1206
01:00:15,400 --> 01:00:17,920
North American way of talking about this in terms of

1207
01:00:18,079 --> 01:00:23,639
energy and stuff like that. In situ, the metaphor that's

1208
01:00:23,760 --> 01:00:28,079
used for the dow Is are almost always musical metaphors,

1209
01:00:28,159 --> 01:00:32,199
not energetic metaphors, and it's much more aligned.

1210
01:00:31,840 --> 01:00:38,119
Speaker 5: With that very much. Mike, could you link.

1211
01:00:39,280 --> 01:00:40,920
Speaker 2: I'll make I'll make I'll make a connection.

1212
01:00:41,440 --> 01:00:42,280
Speaker 5: Yes, thank you.

1213
01:00:43,199 --> 01:00:45,320
Speaker 4: So the biggest, the biggest question though that comes to

1214
01:00:45,360 --> 01:00:47,920
my mind is that I mean, I want to make

1215
01:00:47,960 --> 01:00:48,880
sure I understand correctly.

1216
01:00:48,880 --> 01:00:51,400
Speaker 3: If I'm not understanding correctly, please please do correct me.

1217
01:00:51,840 --> 01:00:51,960
Speaker 5: Uh.

1218
01:00:52,320 --> 01:00:54,679
Speaker 4: And so what you seem to be talking about, it

1219
01:00:54,719 --> 01:00:59,639
connects to this idea that in some ways these patterns.

1220
01:00:59,159 --> 01:00:59,760
Speaker 3: That are.

1221
01:01:01,400 --> 01:01:04,840
Speaker 4: Framing or that are you know, gathering this potential together

1222
01:01:04,920 --> 01:01:09,199
towards purposes, and that these are these bioelectrical patterns that

1223
01:01:09,239 --> 01:01:12,360
are manifest manifesting themselves that way, but that ultimately they

1224
01:01:12,400 --> 01:01:16,960
represent certain purposes or certain goals that this multiplicity not

1225
01:01:17,119 --> 01:01:23,199
organize itself towards. If that's right, then it seems that

1226
01:01:23,239 --> 01:01:27,360
there is I believe at least most traditions in the

1227
01:01:27,400 --> 01:01:31,119
history of the world have ascertained that there are that

1228
01:01:31,199 --> 01:01:34,480
there's a hierarchy of those goals, that there is a

1229
01:01:34,639 --> 01:01:40,159
natural hierarchy of the goods through which these patterns manifest

1230
01:01:40,840 --> 01:01:43,119
into the world. And in that way, that's why the

1231
01:01:43,360 --> 01:01:47,159
in some of the classical Darwinian system is almost easier

1232
01:01:47,199 --> 01:01:50,679
to understand in that sense, which is, if it survives,

1233
01:01:50,960 --> 01:01:54,039
then it it's closer, it's closer to the good in

1234
01:01:54,079 --> 01:01:56,920
some ways, that there's a goodness calling there's something that

1235
01:01:57,000 --> 01:02:01,000
makes being persist and through iterations know that that that

1236
01:02:01,159 --> 01:02:04,719
maintains itself and things get thrown off, thing get brought back,

1237
01:02:04,760 --> 01:02:08,480
Like there's all this, these this back and forth, but

1238
01:02:08,639 --> 01:02:11,519
in the space that you are able to enter now

1239
01:02:11,679 --> 01:02:14,960
and like in some ways by bringing human agency into

1240
01:02:15,000 --> 01:02:20,880
these systems. Uh, let me just frame this with one

1241
01:02:20,960 --> 01:02:23,679
last statement, which is that at least at the human level,

1242
01:02:23,719 --> 01:02:27,840
because of human consciousness and especially human self consciousness, we

1243
01:02:27,960 --> 01:02:30,159
have recognized that in the way that we act, that

1244
01:02:30,199 --> 01:02:32,719
there are certain patterns that are parasitic.

1245
01:02:33,199 --> 01:02:34,719
Speaker 3: There are certain wills.

1246
01:02:34,280 --> 01:02:37,119
Speaker 4: That you can download, that you can interact with, that

1247
01:02:37,199 --> 01:02:41,360
you can be influenced by, that are actually destructive, but

1248
01:02:41,440 --> 01:02:45,119
that we do so nonetheless for all kinds of perverse reasons,

1249
01:02:45,159 --> 01:02:47,320
which when I want to go into too much and

1250
01:02:47,400 --> 01:02:49,760
so the thing when I hear you talk about like

1251
01:02:49,800 --> 01:02:51,960
we could do anything right, We could give you know,

1252
01:02:51,960 --> 01:02:54,400
you could grow wings, you could grow five eyes, you

1253
01:02:54,440 --> 01:02:57,400
could you could do all these things. I also am

1254
01:02:57,599 --> 01:03:02,119
worried of the fall right, worried of worried of us

1255
01:03:02,159 --> 01:03:07,079
bringing our parasitic processes into into a space which until

1256
01:03:07,119 --> 01:03:11,559
now is in some ways been hasn't been completely tainted

1257
01:03:11,559 --> 01:03:13,320
by it. Of course it is tainted to some extent.

1258
01:03:13,360 --> 01:03:17,239
I mean, we do species breeding. These are slow, slow

1259
01:03:17,360 --> 01:03:21,679
versions of you know, imbibing patterns into into species. And

1260
01:03:21,719 --> 01:03:24,639
now you're doing it at like one generation. You create

1261
01:03:25,239 --> 01:03:28,599
a camera. Uh. And the reasons why we have warnings

1262
01:03:28,599 --> 01:03:32,960
about cameras in mythology is not completely I think irrelevant.

1263
01:03:33,119 --> 01:03:35,119
Right that we have this image of the sphinx that

1264
01:03:35,159 --> 01:03:35,800
will eat you.

1265
01:03:36,960 --> 01:03:39,280
Speaker 1: Well, there's there's there's many things that are not cameras

1266
01:03:39,280 --> 01:03:39,880
that will eat you.

1267
01:03:39,960 --> 01:03:43,559
Speaker 2: So I guess, uh, okay, So.

1268
01:03:43,559 --> 01:03:45,639
Speaker 1: You brought up to two things I'd like to I'd

1269
01:03:45,679 --> 01:03:47,320
like to talk about both of them. Let's let's do

1270
01:03:47,400 --> 01:03:50,400
let's do the first one first. So the patterns that

1271
01:03:50,440 --> 01:03:52,480
we pick up, So, so I want to I want

1272
01:03:52,519 --> 01:04:00,079
to float an idea roughly summarized in uh uh this

1273
01:04:00,280 --> 01:04:04,280
this this idea of of thoughts are thinkers and which

1274
01:04:04,320 --> 01:04:07,039
is which is this? Let's let's uh, let's just let's

1275
01:04:07,079 --> 01:04:12,000
visualize this idea that there are many patterns of one

1276
01:04:12,000 --> 01:04:13,679
way to do the hierarchy. And I don't know what

1277
01:04:13,760 --> 01:04:16,119
kind of hierarchy this this space has, but the but

1278
01:04:16,800 --> 01:04:18,880
I'm open to that, and I can see there's one

1279
01:04:18,960 --> 01:04:21,719
hierarchy that I can see immediately, which is there are

1280
01:04:21,719 --> 01:04:25,159
patterns that you might characterize as fleeting thoughts. They come

1281
01:04:25,199 --> 01:04:27,119
and they go, they sort of go through a cognitive

1282
01:04:27,159 --> 01:04:30,239
system and they're gone. Right, patterns, there are other patterns

1283
01:04:30,280 --> 01:04:33,480
that are persistent thoughts there there they they kind of

1284
01:04:33,639 --> 01:04:36,039
do a little niche construction in the cognitive agent that

1285
01:04:36,079 --> 01:04:38,880
prevent that that make it easier to keep having those thoughts.

1286
01:04:38,880 --> 01:04:40,599
And they're kind of they try to hold on a

1287
01:04:40,639 --> 01:04:43,440
little bit, right, But but they're not very complex. They

1288
01:04:43,519 --> 01:04:45,119
just kind of all they there's the sort of the

1289
01:04:45,199 --> 01:04:47,440
viruses of that world is they just kind of like

1290
01:04:47,480 --> 01:04:49,679
to hold on and that's pretty much it. Then then

1291
01:04:49,719 --> 01:04:53,920
there are more complex things that and and that that

1292
01:04:54,119 --> 01:04:57,440
we can see as for example, personality fragments. So if

1293
01:04:57,440 --> 01:05:01,000
someone has associated identity disorder, there are things that are

1294
01:05:01,039 --> 01:05:03,559
they're more than just intrusive thoughts because they have some

1295
01:05:03,679 --> 01:05:05,920
planning and they have some goal directedness, and they have

1296
01:05:05,960 --> 01:05:07,920
a little bit of cleverness to them. And then and

1297
01:05:07,960 --> 01:05:09,880
then and by the way, there's some things that we

1298
01:05:09,920 --> 01:05:12,599
could talk about in weird ancient traditions that are between

1299
01:05:12,639 --> 01:05:13,400
those two things.

1300
01:05:13,440 --> 01:05:14,719
Speaker 2: But let's just move on.

1301
01:05:14,800 --> 01:05:17,559
Speaker 1: I'm sure you know what I'm talking about then, and

1302
01:05:17,639 --> 01:05:20,360
you know, and then there's whatever is transhuman you know,

1303
01:05:20,400 --> 01:05:21,000
whatever else.

1304
01:05:21,079 --> 01:05:23,960
Speaker 2: Right, So, so if if.

1305
01:05:23,800 --> 01:05:26,960
Speaker 1: We like this, this continuum, we can say that we

1306
01:05:27,000 --> 01:05:29,679
ourselves are patterns. That's what I think we are. I

1307
01:05:29,679 --> 01:05:34,280
think we are embodied patterns. I think we are extremely sophisticated,

1308
01:05:34,559 --> 01:05:38,880
self constructing, self maintaining patterns. We interact with many other

1309
01:05:38,960 --> 01:05:41,199
In fact, we throw off, we spawn off patterns all

1310
01:05:41,239 --> 01:05:43,719
the time, which are are the results of our cognitive

1311
01:05:43,719 --> 01:05:47,039
and emotional activity. We are susceptible to other patterns. Some

1312
01:05:47,079 --> 01:05:50,440
of these patterns are autocarine, meaning that we generate them ourselves.

1313
01:05:50,840 --> 01:05:54,039
Other patterns are not that they don't come from us.

1314
01:05:54,079 --> 01:05:57,320
They come from some of the other other beings or whatever,

1315
01:05:57,800 --> 01:05:59,840
and we may or may not resonate with them, we

1316
01:06:00,039 --> 01:06:01,920
may or may not offer them a home to whatever

1317
01:06:01,960 --> 01:06:04,719
extent we indulge them. Some of these are patterns that

1318
01:06:04,760 --> 01:06:08,480
are known to for you know, computer science, as thoughts

1319
01:06:08,480 --> 01:06:11,760
that break the thinker. So there are patterns that once

1320
01:06:11,800 --> 01:06:14,400
you've seen them, you can't really unsee them, and it

1321
01:06:14,440 --> 01:06:16,840
actually feeds back to alter your structure. And so like

1322
01:06:16,920 --> 01:06:20,039
that's it in a certain sense, right, And so yeah,

1323
01:06:20,079 --> 01:06:24,239
I think. I think there's a perfectly reasonable I think

1324
01:06:24,239 --> 01:06:26,440
in all of these things it's not necessarily a difference

1325
01:06:26,480 --> 01:06:31,159
in kind as much as a difference in degree. And yeah,

1326
01:06:31,239 --> 01:06:34,360
we have to be very intentional in what kind of

1327
01:06:34,440 --> 01:06:38,480
patterns we we generate and what kind of patterns we accept,

1328
01:06:38,599 --> 01:06:41,079
because they all have they all have consequences. So I'm

1329
01:06:41,239 --> 01:06:44,320
I'm kind of one on board of that. I do

1330
01:06:44,360 --> 01:06:45,800
want to I do want to talk about the other thing,

1331
01:06:45,840 --> 01:06:48,760
which is this being worried about cameras and things like

1332
01:06:48,800 --> 01:06:53,639
this a fundamental claim that I'll make, and I make

1333
01:06:53,679 --> 01:06:57,159
it mostly because I'm not even a clinician. And you

1334
01:06:57,199 --> 01:07:00,480
should see the emails I get every day. Okay, fifty

1335
01:07:00,480 --> 01:07:04,840
to one hundred emails. Uh well, okay, maybe ten or

1336
01:07:04,880 --> 01:07:08,719
fifteen emails that say what you're doing is scary. The

1337
01:07:08,880 --> 01:07:14,159
frog sell the biobots too much, freaking me out. You know, planarians,

1338
01:07:14,599 --> 01:07:16,199
you know you shouldn't. They shouldn't have two heads. A

1339
01:07:16,199 --> 01:07:18,119
good old fashioned worm has one head. You should stick

1340
01:07:18,159 --> 01:07:20,400
to that, you know. Okay, So so some of that,

1341
01:07:20,960 --> 01:07:24,719
and then probably ten times more of that saying what

1342
01:07:24,760 --> 01:07:26,840
the hell are you waiting for? My kid has a

1343
01:07:26,840 --> 01:07:29,920
birth defect. I've got cancer, when somebody else has you

1344
01:07:30,039 --> 01:07:30,719
lost a limb?

1345
01:07:31,280 --> 01:07:33,440
Speaker 2: What are you screwing around for? When are we going

1346
01:07:33,480 --> 01:07:34,719
to get When are we going to get.

1347
01:07:34,599 --> 01:07:38,800
Speaker 1: Relief from these from these ridiculous, painful, you know maladies.

1348
01:07:39,400 --> 01:07:42,199
And and what I'll say is this, you know, are

1349
01:07:42,519 --> 01:07:45,599
we do we need humility in all of this? Absolutely?

1350
01:07:45,639 --> 01:07:49,280
One hundred thousand percent. Are we going to make mistakes occasionally?

1351
01:07:49,840 --> 01:07:53,960
One thousand percent We're gonna We're gonna make mistakes. However,

1352
01:07:54,280 --> 01:07:56,800
what I see as the status quo this is here's

1353
01:07:56,840 --> 01:07:58,800
here's what I don't believe because a lot of a

1354
01:07:58,800 --> 01:08:01,880
lot of people make this argument implicitly. They make this argument,

1355
01:08:02,280 --> 01:08:05,320
everything right now is cool, and you scientists better not

1356
01:08:05,400 --> 01:08:08,800
screw it up. Everything's great and don't do anything to

1357
01:08:09,000 --> 01:08:11,960
make it worse now. Granted, sometimes scientists come up with

1358
01:08:12,000 --> 01:08:14,679
some stuff that make things worse. It can happen, but

1359
01:08:15,119 --> 01:08:19,119
the claim that everything is fine now is I think incredibly,

1360
01:08:19,720 --> 01:08:22,760
you know, outrageous. And the people who are freaked out

1361
01:08:22,760 --> 01:08:24,920
about the two headed flatworms tend to be the young,

1362
01:08:24,960 --> 01:08:27,279
healthy people, And as soon as their kid has some

1363
01:08:27,359 --> 01:08:29,199
kind of problem, they run to the hospital and they

1364
01:08:29,279 --> 01:08:31,920
pray like hell that somebody had figured something out and

1365
01:08:31,960 --> 01:08:33,960
then and then they and then maybe they start wondering

1366
01:08:33,960 --> 01:08:37,079
where where do medical solutions come from? And so my point,

1367
01:08:37,279 --> 01:08:39,279
my point is this that I think where we are

1368
01:08:39,319 --> 01:08:41,960
now is in no way optimal. I don't believe, and

1369
01:08:42,000 --> 01:08:45,039
I am not I am not saying outright that that

1370
01:08:45,079 --> 01:08:49,079
there are not interesting verticalities that guide what happens here.

1371
01:08:49,119 --> 01:08:51,279
What I am saying is I do not believe that

1372
01:08:51,359 --> 01:08:56,399
the current status quo of our embodiment, meaning the obligate

1373
01:08:56,600 --> 01:09:00,199
loss of cognitive capacity and after about eight decades the know,

1374
01:09:00,239 --> 01:09:03,880
the the astigmatism, the lower back pain, the birth defects,

1375
01:09:03,920 --> 01:09:07,920
the cancer, I don't believe any of this was was,

1376
01:09:07,920 --> 01:09:10,600
was is optimal, or was intended to be this way.

1377
01:09:10,840 --> 01:09:13,720
We our our physical embodiments, as far as I can tell,

1378
01:09:13,920 --> 01:09:18,039
are the products of cosmic RaSE hitting our embryonic cells.

1379
01:09:18,319 --> 01:09:21,640
They're the process, They're the results of processes that really

1380
01:09:21,680 --> 01:09:23,840
don't have and I mean, I know this is a

1381
01:09:23,840 --> 01:09:27,680
controversial the opinion, but this is this is what I think. Uh,

1382
01:09:28,119 --> 01:09:30,640
they have not been looking out for us in terms

1383
01:09:30,640 --> 01:09:34,079
of any of the values that we care about, and

1384
01:09:33,840 --> 01:09:36,840
in the way to me, what's happening is that all

1385
01:09:36,880 --> 01:09:40,960
of this has been waiting basically for us to gain

1386
01:09:41,079 --> 01:09:44,319
the knowledge and hopefully the wisdom to improve on some

1387
01:09:44,439 --> 01:09:47,560
of this stuff so that everyone everywhere can have the

1388
01:09:47,680 --> 01:09:49,800
kind of quality and length of life that.

1389
01:09:49,760 --> 01:09:52,199
Speaker 2: It takes to have an an.

1390
01:09:52,159 --> 01:09:56,239
Speaker 1: Intentional life with meaning, not distracted by you know, by

1391
01:09:56,319 --> 01:10:00,159
by pain and avoidable, preventable you know, tragedies that we

1392
01:10:00,560 --> 01:10:03,359
are simply too stupid currently to do anything about. I

1393
01:10:04,520 --> 01:10:06,760
understand the worries, and there are many things to be

1394
01:10:06,800 --> 01:10:09,439
worried about, but the number one thing to be worried

1395
01:10:09,439 --> 01:10:12,399
about is where we are now. The status quo is unsupportable.

1396
01:10:12,439 --> 01:10:16,119
I think there's a massive amount of suffering for as

1397
01:10:16,159 --> 01:10:19,000
far as I can tell, no good reason, you know.

1398
01:10:19,039 --> 01:10:20,800
And people argue with this, and then you say, look,

1399
01:10:21,159 --> 01:10:23,920
you know, the shortness of our lives, that's what gives

1400
01:10:23,920 --> 01:10:25,600
it meaning because you have to like great?

1401
01:10:25,640 --> 01:10:27,760
Speaker 2: So how about maybe ten years? How would that be? No?

1402
01:10:27,760 --> 01:10:30,159
Speaker 1: No, No, ten is ridiculous? Eighty like eighties great? Why

1403
01:10:30,239 --> 01:10:32,920
is eighty grade? Why is ten too short and eighties great?

1404
01:10:32,960 --> 01:10:33,279
Speaker 2: Why not?

1405
01:10:33,520 --> 01:10:35,119
Speaker 1: Why is it not the fact that maybe you need

1406
01:10:35,159 --> 01:10:38,439
a good thousand years before you get to really understand

1407
01:10:38,479 --> 01:10:40,560
the wisdom of how to live a good life.

1408
01:10:40,600 --> 01:10:41,199
Speaker 5: Who you know.

1409
01:10:41,760 --> 01:10:44,720
Speaker 1: I just I don't see that any of the things

1410
01:10:44,720 --> 01:10:49,239
that we have now are chosen, were carefully chosen so

1411
01:10:49,279 --> 01:10:52,039
that we could have, you know, an appropriate set of values,

1412
01:10:52,039 --> 01:10:54,760
Like I don't think that's what's happening. So so yes,

1413
01:10:55,000 --> 01:10:57,640
we will make mistakes, but boy, the situation right now

1414
01:10:57,800 --> 01:11:00,439
is I think untenable, and it's on us, all of us,

1415
01:11:00,439 --> 01:11:03,279
I think, to try to improve it as best as

1416
01:11:03,279 --> 01:11:03,560
we can.

1417
01:11:03,720 --> 01:11:07,079
Speaker 6: That's can I amplify mic a little bit because I'm

1418
01:11:07,079 --> 01:11:11,439
a bit of a shit disturb myself, which is, not

1419
01:11:11,479 --> 01:11:14,079
only are there all those things that Mike talked about

1420
01:11:15,119 --> 01:11:17,840
non optimalities. I think the meaning crisis is a real thing,

1421
01:11:17,880 --> 01:11:20,079
and I've argued for at length, and I think the

1422
01:11:20,159 --> 01:11:22,800
kind of work where we're exploring this stuff, and I've

1423
01:11:22,800 --> 01:11:26,600
tried to argue that here right now gives us opportunities

1424
01:11:26,680 --> 01:11:31,560
to deeply, in philosophically and scientifically respectable manner address the

1425
01:11:31,600 --> 01:11:32,439
meaning crisis.

1426
01:11:32,880 --> 01:11:34,000
Speaker 5: And so that's right.

1427
01:11:34,680 --> 01:11:36,720
Speaker 6: I think that's a powerful benefit that we need to

1428
01:11:36,760 --> 01:11:39,000
put into our cost benefit analysis.

1429
01:11:39,039 --> 01:11:40,560
Speaker 5: I just want to amplify Mike that way.

1430
01:11:41,199 --> 01:11:43,079
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean I bring that

1431
01:11:43,239 --> 01:11:45,600
up because there's a lot of there are a lot

1432
01:11:45,600 --> 01:11:48,760
of mythological stories that talk about this problem, you know,

1433
01:11:48,880 --> 01:11:52,399
the problem of the making of cameras or the the

1434
01:11:52,560 --> 01:11:55,640
camera in some way of being a puzzle that destroys you.

1435
01:11:56,920 --> 01:11:59,319
But at the same time, I agree with you, John,

1436
01:11:59,399 --> 01:12:02,159
and I also agree with you, Mike. I think one

1437
01:12:02,199 --> 01:12:03,600
of the reason why I wanted to talk to you

1438
01:12:03,720 --> 01:12:06,039
is because I can see in the work you're doing

1439
01:12:06,640 --> 01:12:10,279
that you're opening up all kinds of ways of talking

1440
01:12:10,359 --> 01:12:13,079
about things that I think many people have forgotten what

1441
01:12:13,119 --> 01:12:13,640
they're about.

1442
01:12:13,680 --> 01:12:14,600
Speaker 3: You know, a lot of the.

1443
01:12:14,520 --> 01:12:18,560
Speaker 4: Ancient wisdom in some ways had become arbitrary and people

1444
01:12:18,600 --> 01:12:21,279
didn't understand what it was referring to. And so I

1445
01:12:21,319 --> 01:12:22,880
think some of the work that you're doing, and the

1446
01:12:22,920 --> 01:12:26,479
work that John's doing, is helping us understand what it

1447
01:12:26,600 --> 01:12:30,399
is we're talking about. Like when we talk about transpersonal agencies,

1448
01:12:30,479 --> 01:12:32,600
like you know, the language of angels and demons and

1449
01:12:32,680 --> 01:12:36,439
ancient gods, it became a kind of arbitrary marvel science

1450
01:12:36,439 --> 01:12:38,479
fiction thing, you know, with beings that exist, but we

1451
01:12:38,479 --> 01:12:40,399
don't know what that means. But when you start to

1452
01:12:40,479 --> 01:12:45,239
kind of understand these these the way that intelligences influence us,

1453
01:12:45,279 --> 01:12:48,479
you know, the way that our intelligence influence is the world.

1454
01:12:48,560 --> 01:12:51,760
And then the way that you can see intelligence is

1455
01:12:51,840 --> 01:12:56,600
running through systems purposes that are argentic. All of a

1456
01:12:56,600 --> 01:13:01,159
sudden you can start to at least read into or

1457
01:13:01,720 --> 01:13:03,640
look back at some of the things that we have

1458
01:13:03,800 --> 01:13:06,520
we've just tossed aside and forgotten, and it can help

1459
01:13:06,600 --> 01:13:09,680
us understand our our world again. So I want to

1460
01:13:09,720 --> 01:13:11,720
I wanted to put a cavea on what I said.

1461
01:13:11,760 --> 01:13:14,039
I mean, in some ways, I you know, I'm it's

1462
01:13:14,239 --> 01:13:16,880
a lot of the things you're doing are so wild

1463
01:13:16,920 --> 01:13:17,760
and new that.

1464
01:13:17,880 --> 01:13:18,920
Speaker 3: You know it is there.

1465
01:13:19,159 --> 01:13:21,279
Speaker 4: It is a little frightening, but I but I also

1466
01:13:21,319 --> 01:13:24,880
find it exciting because I can see that for a

1467
01:13:24,880 --> 01:13:28,319
lot of people that would have refused the possibility of

1468
01:13:28,399 --> 01:13:32,880
vertical causation, at some point it becomes impossible to ignore

1469
01:13:32,880 --> 01:13:33,720
it because.

1470
01:13:34,199 --> 01:13:35,439
Speaker 3: It's actually not yielding.

1471
01:13:35,479 --> 01:13:37,439
Speaker 4: You've reached the limit of what it can yield for

1472
01:13:37,479 --> 01:13:40,119
you without considering it. Like, if we don't start thinking

1473
01:13:40,119 --> 01:13:42,760
about things this way, then we'll go actually, even scientifically,

1474
01:13:42,800 --> 01:13:43,520
we reach a limit.

1475
01:13:43,560 --> 01:13:45,760
Speaker 3: We can't go for any further. So I just wanted

1476
01:13:45,760 --> 01:13:47,119
to covey.

1477
01:13:46,199 --> 01:13:49,319
Speaker 1: That, Yeah, thank you, Well, I think it is. It

1478
01:13:49,359 --> 01:13:50,960
is fright, I mean, here, I'll tell you why I

1479
01:13:50,960 --> 01:13:53,840
think it's frightening. It's because it is frightening. It's frightening

1480
01:13:53,880 --> 01:13:57,600
because it places the responsibility on us. I think that

1481
01:13:57,960 --> 01:14:00,600
when people people ask me, you know, well, what are

1482
01:14:00,600 --> 01:14:03,319
you most the most is scared of? And you know,

1483
01:14:03,399 --> 01:14:05,159
it's not that the zenobots will eat us all.

1484
01:14:05,239 --> 01:14:06,119
Speaker 2: It's that we.

1485
01:14:06,039 --> 01:14:09,199
Speaker 1: Will we will fail to rise to the level of

1486
01:14:09,439 --> 01:14:12,600
intelligence and wisdom that are needed to address these issues

1487
01:14:12,600 --> 01:14:13,720
that have plagued us forever.

1488
01:14:14,000 --> 01:14:15,600
Speaker 2: That is, that is what's frightening to me.

1489
01:14:15,720 --> 01:14:17,560
Speaker 1: Is that is that I don't you know, it's not

1490
01:14:17,600 --> 01:14:19,640
a foregone conclusion that we can do it, and it

1491
01:14:19,720 --> 01:14:23,159
places the responsibility on us, and it means that we are,

1492
01:14:23,319 --> 01:14:26,800
in an important sense, the adults in the room responsible,

1493
01:14:27,000 --> 01:14:31,199
all of us, responsible for relieving the level of suffering

1494
01:14:31,239 --> 01:14:32,680
and for solving the meaning crisis.

1495
01:14:32,680 --> 01:14:34,840
Speaker 2: I think that's absolutely, absolutely critical.

1496
01:14:35,199 --> 01:14:38,319
Speaker 1: And you know, I understand, you know, the ancient texts

1497
01:14:38,479 --> 01:14:41,239
warned about certain things. The one thing I haven't really

1498
01:14:41,239 --> 01:14:43,279
and this could just be me, maybe they exist. I'm

1499
01:14:43,279 --> 01:14:44,880
not a scholar of that stuff, so I don't know

1500
01:14:45,000 --> 01:14:47,199
the one thing I haven't seen, or maybe they did

1501
01:14:47,239 --> 01:14:51,119
exist and got suppressed for specific reasons is whether any

1502
01:14:51,159 --> 01:14:54,359
of these things warn of the dangers of the status quo,

1503
01:14:54,880 --> 01:14:57,720
like like, where are the ancient texts that say, look around,

1504
01:14:57,840 --> 01:14:59,520
are you seeing all the all this stuff?

1505
01:14:59,680 --> 01:15:02,119
Speaker 2: Don't don't let it sit like this? Do you know?

1506
01:15:02,640 --> 01:15:06,039
Do something, learn and let's get past this. Does that?

1507
01:15:06,239 --> 01:15:07,439
Speaker 5: Does that exist? Mike?

1508
01:15:07,479 --> 01:15:09,359
Speaker 6: I would put it to you that the Axial Revolution

1509
01:15:09,800 --> 01:15:14,319
was a significant change from the Bronze Age, in which

1510
01:15:14,319 --> 01:15:16,880
the status quo was taken as the normative, and the

1511
01:15:16,920 --> 01:15:19,800
Axial Revolution said no, no, the statics quo is somehow

1512
01:15:19,920 --> 01:15:24,399
fallen or decadent, or illusory or filled with foolishness and violence,

1513
01:15:24,600 --> 01:15:26,520
and we need to transcend it. And it brought about

1514
01:15:26,520 --> 01:15:28,840
a totally different conception of which.

1515
01:15:29,239 --> 01:15:30,359
Speaker 2: I think that's very interesting.

1516
01:15:30,399 --> 01:15:33,079
Speaker 1: And I, you know, I have this fantasy looking looking forward,

1517
01:15:34,319 --> 01:15:37,239
I assuming we all make it, which is also not

1518
01:15:37,279 --> 01:15:39,880
a foregone conclusion, but assume, assuming we all make it.

1519
01:15:40,199 --> 01:15:44,399
I look forward to to a class in school where

1520
01:15:44,439 --> 01:15:46,600
the young kids learn about us the way that we

1521
01:15:46,680 --> 01:15:48,720
learn about Caveman when we read that, oh my god,

1522
01:15:48,800 --> 01:15:50,479
you know you used to step on a sharp stick

1523
01:15:50,520 --> 01:15:52,159
and get septism and die and that was the end

1524
01:15:52,199 --> 01:15:54,279
of that. And they would learn about us, and they

1525
01:15:54,279 --> 01:15:57,239
would say, wait a minute, you're telling me these people

1526
01:15:57,560 --> 01:16:00,479
they would have to live their whole life in whatever

1527
01:16:00,520 --> 01:16:03,279
body they randomly got at birth, So they just got

1528
01:16:03,399 --> 01:16:05,399
you know, some some random cosmic rate would hit there,

1529
01:16:05,439 --> 01:16:07,560
would hit there embryonic cells, and they would be crippled

1530
01:16:07,640 --> 01:16:09,720
or they would have, you know, whatever their limitations of

1531
01:16:09,760 --> 01:16:11,880
IQ or whatever. They would just have to stay in

1532
01:16:11,880 --> 01:16:13,680
that body. And and and there was nothing they could

1533
01:16:13,680 --> 01:16:16,399
do about it. And they would, you know, they they

1534
01:16:16,399 --> 01:16:18,800
would have to kill other things to eat just to survive.

1535
01:16:18,880 --> 01:16:21,319
Like these are all crazy. These are a mature species.

1536
01:16:21,319 --> 01:16:24,119
Shouldn't be shouldn't be doing any of this. And and

1537
01:16:24,199 --> 01:16:27,119
I feel like, if you know, in the future, when

1538
01:16:27,159 --> 01:16:29,560
they look back, this is going to seem ridiculous.

1539
01:16:29,560 --> 01:16:32,479
Speaker 2: It's going to seem crazy that that that that.

1540
01:16:32,520 --> 01:16:34,399
Speaker 1: Our lives and the and the meaning and the and

1541
01:16:34,439 --> 01:16:37,880
the achievements of our lives would be limited to things

1542
01:16:37,920 --> 01:16:40,840
that we had absolutely no control because we didn't know

1543
01:16:40,840 --> 01:16:42,359
what to do. We didn't you know, the cells seem

1544
01:16:42,399 --> 01:16:44,239
to poop out after after eighty or ninety years. We

1545
01:16:44,279 --> 01:16:46,079
don't know what to do, and and and that's and

1546
01:16:46,079 --> 01:16:47,960
that's it. That's just that's just how That's how we

1547
01:16:47,960 --> 01:16:50,039
were born, and that's how we stay I I you know,

1548
01:16:50,079 --> 01:16:52,079
to to me, this is gonna this is gonna seem

1549
01:16:52,279 --> 01:16:53,960
the kids aren't even gonna believe that this is how

1550
01:16:54,000 --> 01:16:54,760
we lived our lives.

1551
01:16:55,359 --> 01:16:57,399
Speaker 4: One one of the things, I mean, this is something

1552
01:16:57,560 --> 01:17:00,680
I don't know. Hopefully I can and make it relate

1553
01:17:00,720 --> 01:17:02,840
and you can tell me if it sounds complete arbitrary.

1554
01:17:02,880 --> 01:17:06,159
But one of the differences that we see in traditional

1555
01:17:06,560 --> 01:17:09,239
way of seeing is that there seems to be a

1556
01:17:09,319 --> 01:17:11,039
difference between let's say.

1557
01:17:10,880 --> 01:17:12,560
Speaker 3: A liturgical practice.

1558
01:17:12,720 --> 01:17:15,039
Speaker 4: If you think about like a liturgical practice in which

1559
01:17:15,039 --> 01:17:18,399
you are in some ways coming together and you are

1560
01:17:18,520 --> 01:17:22,279
attending to something above you. Right, so you group come together,

1561
01:17:22,359 --> 01:17:24,720
they saying they posess, they do all these things, and

1562
01:17:24,760 --> 01:17:28,399
they in some ways are attending and making themselves dependent

1563
01:17:28,560 --> 01:17:31,199
is a good way of thinking about, like consciously making

1564
01:17:31,239 --> 01:17:34,680
themselves dependent on something that is a higher good, right,

1565
01:17:34,720 --> 01:17:37,399
the God of infinite love, a saint, a patron saint,

1566
01:17:37,479 --> 01:17:42,520
something that is a good and that has always been differentiated.

1567
01:17:42,359 --> 01:17:45,359
Speaker 3: From the sorcerer.

1568
01:17:45,439 --> 01:17:49,319
Speaker 4: Right, the sorcerer that is able to perceive these patterns

1569
01:17:49,359 --> 01:17:52,199
in the world and is able to kind of grab

1570
01:17:52,279 --> 01:17:54,119
them and manipulate.

1571
01:17:53,600 --> 01:17:55,680
Speaker 3: Them towards power, you could say.

1572
01:17:56,119 --> 01:17:58,359
Speaker 4: And there's a relationship between the two because in some

1573
01:17:58,399 --> 01:18:01,000
ways they're doing similar things, which is that you kind

1574
01:18:01,000 --> 01:18:03,560
of see this pattern and you want to bring it

1575
01:18:03,600 --> 01:18:05,800
into the world. And so in the first case, you

1576
01:18:05,880 --> 01:18:08,239
kind of submit yourself to something grand and higher and

1577
01:18:08,279 --> 01:18:11,319
you embody it through procession, through liturgy, through all these things,

1578
01:18:11,359 --> 01:18:14,079
and as then through behaviors. In the other sense, you

1579
01:18:14,119 --> 01:18:17,439
it's like you, you know, you create the interface. This

1580
01:18:17,520 --> 01:18:19,640
is a good a good example of a sorcer, like

1581
01:18:20,000 --> 01:18:22,760
you know, how to become more powerful? You find out

1582
01:18:22,800 --> 01:18:25,560
and you create the interface. You make a gollum where

1583
01:18:25,600 --> 01:18:26,600
you make a you know.

1584
01:18:27,239 --> 01:18:27,800
Speaker 2: A monter.

1585
01:18:29,840 --> 01:18:32,079
Speaker 3: The next question to ask you about about about AI.

1586
01:18:32,239 --> 01:18:34,359
Speaker 4: So you get already if you want feed into the

1587
01:18:34,399 --> 01:18:38,359
AI question right, and then basically you you pull right.

1588
01:18:38,399 --> 01:18:40,760
It's always an image to trap, right. This is the

1589
01:18:40,760 --> 01:18:43,760
image in mythological terms, you trap the spirit in a

1590
01:18:44,319 --> 01:18:46,880
in a body so that it serves your purpose, all right,

1591
01:18:46,920 --> 01:18:50,479
and then it acts in your as an extension of you.

1592
01:18:50,640 --> 01:18:53,520
That's the the kind of that's the mythological or kind

1593
01:18:53,560 --> 01:18:56,399
of you know, fantastical image. But there are of course

1594
01:18:56,439 --> 01:18:58,359
things to say about about a if you want to

1595
01:18:58,399 --> 01:18:59,960
bridge out together and go ahead.

1596
01:19:00,119 --> 01:19:03,359
Speaker 6: Can I just say one thing, because Mike, I mean

1597
01:19:03,840 --> 01:19:06,560
Mike's work as the potential And Mike, I'm not imposing

1598
01:19:06,640 --> 01:19:08,640
on you. You wrote up you wrote an article with

1599
01:19:08,720 --> 01:19:12,640
others about care and Buddhism, and Ai, I'm not so

1600
01:19:12,680 --> 01:19:14,600
I'm not bringing in something foreign here.

1601
01:19:15,199 --> 01:19:17,760
Speaker 5: And and I think I've made enough.

1602
01:19:19,239 --> 01:19:22,600
Speaker 6: Connections here to make the claim what Mike's work's doing,

1603
01:19:22,720 --> 01:19:25,760
especially you know, if it's if it can integrate with

1604
01:19:25,840 --> 01:19:27,800
my work and my work and integrate with his work,

1605
01:19:28,119 --> 01:19:32,479
is the possibility of stitching back knowledge and ontology and

1606
01:19:32,520 --> 01:19:36,479
the cultivation of wisdom rather than having them separate culturally,

1607
01:19:36,520 --> 01:19:39,800
separate and orthogonal from each other. So there's the possibility

1608
01:19:39,960 --> 01:19:43,319
of saying, well, the science would say that, you know,

1609
01:19:43,760 --> 01:19:46,439
we have to pay attention to have care. Mike's work

1610
01:19:46,680 --> 01:19:50,520
argues that in at least one paper, and then that matters,

1611
01:19:50,880 --> 01:19:54,079
and that you know, and maybe Mike, you made use

1612
01:19:54,079 --> 01:19:56,840
of Buddhism. You know, here's here's a set of an

1613
01:19:56,840 --> 01:19:59,680
ecology of practices that helps orient us in the right way,

1614
01:20:00,079 --> 01:20:07,119
like the possibility of bridging like between knowledge and wisdom.

1615
01:20:07,159 --> 01:20:10,079
To put it sort of simplistically is opened up by

1616
01:20:10,159 --> 01:20:11,800
the kind of work that Mike is doing, in the

1617
01:20:11,880 --> 01:20:14,000
kind of work that I'm doing, and we don't have

1618
01:20:14,039 --> 01:20:18,279
to live with the Enlightenment idea that there's knowledge over

1619
01:20:18,319 --> 01:20:21,520
here that is completely valueless or something like that, and

1620
01:20:21,560 --> 01:20:24,319
then there's wisdom over here which is kind of our cane,

1621
01:20:24,760 --> 01:20:28,840
and we could go back to a different way, which

1622
01:20:28,880 --> 01:20:33,039
is the possibility that our wisdom could impact on our knowing,

1623
01:20:33,119 --> 01:20:36,399
and our knowing could make an impact on our attempts

1624
01:20:36,399 --> 01:20:39,319
to cultivate wisdom and meaning. I think Mike's work and

1625
01:20:39,399 --> 01:20:43,680
my work is arguing for that possibility and strongly recommending

1626
01:20:43,680 --> 01:20:45,279
it to people. Mike, you've published on this, so I

1627
01:20:45,279 --> 01:20:48,279
don't think I'm putting anything into your mouth to say that.

1628
01:20:48,720 --> 01:20:51,800
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's that's absolutely true. And I apologize,

1629
01:20:51,840 --> 01:20:54,239
I'm already quite late and we have to go in

1630
01:20:54,239 --> 01:20:56,199
about three minutes. Sorry, and about three minutes and we

1631
01:20:56,720 --> 01:21:00,439
have to pop off for sure, just to say that, Look,

1632
01:21:00,479 --> 01:21:03,960
I I totally understand the distinction. You know, the Sorcerer

1633
01:21:04,039 --> 01:21:06,920
picture that you were painting. I get the distinction. I

1634
01:21:06,960 --> 01:21:14,520
am not claiming that, uh, you know, pure intelligence unsort

1635
01:21:14,520 --> 01:21:17,399
of guided by by wisdom, by compassion, by these other

1636
01:21:17,439 --> 01:21:22,199
things cannot be used for very sort of selfish, destructive aims.

1637
01:21:22,199 --> 01:21:23,520
Speaker 2: Of course, of course it can.

1638
01:21:24,680 --> 01:21:28,800
Speaker 1: I once I once did a pole of of of

1639
01:21:28,840 --> 01:21:32,239
the following situation. Just visualize you're you're og, and you

1640
01:21:32,359 --> 01:21:34,960
just discovered fire, and so you're on your way back

1641
01:21:35,159 --> 01:21:37,399
to your tribe to show them this like amazing thing,

1642
01:21:37,720 --> 01:21:39,960
and then you're you have this vision of everything that

1643
01:21:40,000 --> 01:21:44,399
follows after that, steel weapons, you know, artificial hearts, nuclear bomb,

1644
01:21:44,880 --> 01:21:47,880
you know, the submarine's antibiotics, like the whole the whole thing, right,

1645
01:21:48,119 --> 01:21:50,279
So now the so now the question do you sort

1646
01:21:50,319 --> 01:21:52,359
of put the stick out and be like, Nope, I

1647
01:21:52,399 --> 01:21:54,720
haven't got anything, or do you or do you roll right?

1648
01:21:55,000 --> 01:21:57,520
So about so about six percent of and these are

1649
01:21:57,520 --> 01:22:00,119
people who read my stuff, so presumably they're, you know,

1650
01:22:00,199 --> 01:22:02,159
sort of they like some of this. Six percent of

1651
01:22:02,199 --> 01:22:03,800
them said you should have put out the fire and

1652
01:22:03,800 --> 01:22:07,199
and and stayed outdoors freezing, you know, freezing and and

1653
01:22:07,319 --> 01:22:10,880
stuff like that. So look, I understand the difference. I

1654
01:22:11,279 --> 01:22:16,840
think that difference would be more convincing to me if

1655
01:22:16,880 --> 01:22:19,560
there was some way to be sure that if you

1656
01:22:19,640 --> 01:22:23,680
do the former thing you described someone with great wisdom

1657
01:22:23,880 --> 01:22:26,720
and power is going to take care of stuff and

1658
01:22:27,079 --> 01:22:29,279
has your back if someone has your back. I understand

1659
01:22:29,279 --> 01:22:31,239
there are large swaths of people in the world who

1660
01:22:31,239 --> 01:22:32,279
think that that is the case.

1661
01:22:32,279 --> 01:22:33,239
Speaker 2: I get it.

1662
01:22:33,600 --> 01:22:36,840
Speaker 1: I suspect, and I'm not even necessarily arguing against that.

1663
01:22:37,159 --> 01:22:42,319
I suspect that whatever whatever exists along those lines is

1664
01:22:42,399 --> 01:22:44,920
more along the lines of that old joke like, well,

1665
01:22:44,960 --> 01:22:46,560
how come you didn't save me from the flood A

1666
01:22:46,680 --> 01:22:47,720
I sent you three boats?

1667
01:22:47,840 --> 01:22:47,920
Speaker 6: What?

1668
01:22:48,479 --> 01:22:48,560
Speaker 5: Like?

1669
01:22:48,760 --> 01:22:50,079
Speaker 2: I'm I'm more.

1670
01:22:50,039 --> 01:22:52,960
Speaker 1: Thinking that there's a there's a sense of impatience going on,

1671
01:22:53,279 --> 01:22:56,119
which is like figure it out, people, and then and

1672
01:22:56,319 --> 01:22:59,640
and and everything you know can be can be elevated. So,

1673
01:23:00,319 --> 01:23:02,720
you know, I don't think the right framing and who

1674
01:23:02,760 --> 01:23:04,560
am I to say anything on these matters, right, I

1675
01:23:04,760 --> 01:23:06,800
don't know. But this is just my own personal My

1676
01:23:06,840 --> 01:23:09,319
own personal view is that the way I see it

1677
01:23:09,399 --> 01:23:11,560
is not as a matter of we got to find

1678
01:23:11,600 --> 01:23:14,880
the right way to relinguish responsibility and then things will

1679
01:23:14,920 --> 01:23:18,039
be good. No, it's to what as what John said,

1680
01:23:18,159 --> 01:23:20,880
is to is to try to couple the intelligence, the

1681
01:23:20,960 --> 01:23:25,199
rise in capacity with the rise in the cone of compassion. Right,

1682
01:23:25,239 --> 01:23:28,000
the level of care that we can and wisdom that

1683
01:23:28,000 --> 01:23:30,159
we can manage so that we can actually be the

1684
01:23:30,199 --> 01:23:33,159
positive agents of change, because I just don't see waiting

1685
01:23:33,159 --> 01:23:33,960
for somebody else to do it.

1686
01:23:34,000 --> 01:23:35,319
Speaker 2: It's it doesn't seem to be working out.

1687
01:23:37,119 --> 01:23:38,479
Speaker 3: Oh, Michael, thank you so much.

1688
01:23:38,520 --> 01:23:40,680
Speaker 4: Thanks for your patience and thanks for this was in

1689
01:23:40,720 --> 01:23:42,880
some ways kind of exploratory to try to figure out

1690
01:23:42,880 --> 01:23:45,279
how we could we can discuss together. But I think

1691
01:23:45,279 --> 01:23:47,920
there's some really great nuggets that have come out of

1692
01:23:47,960 --> 01:23:48,439
the conversation.

1693
01:23:48,520 --> 01:23:49,399
Speaker 3: I really appreciate it.

1694
01:23:49,439 --> 01:23:51,399
Speaker 1: Fabulous, Thank you so much. Yeah, lots lots more to

1695
01:23:51,439 --> 01:23:53,319
talk about. Happy to happy to do it anytime. Yeah,

1696
01:23:53,319 --> 01:23:54,119
thank you, I appreciate it.

1697
01:23:54,800 --> 01:23:55,800
Speaker 5: Great seeing you again, Mike.

1698
01:23:55,840 --> 01:23:57,920
Speaker 2: Thanks John, Yeah, very good to see you both. Take

1699
01:23:58,000 --> 01:23:58,760
it easy right.

1700
01:23:59,279 --> 01:24:02,159
Speaker 4: If you enjoyed the videos and podcasts, please go to

1701
01:24:02,199 --> 01:24:04,880
the Symbolic world dot com website and see how you

1702
01:24:04,920 --> 01:24:08,039
can support what we're doing. There are multiple subscriber tiers

1703
01:24:08,079 --> 01:24:11,039
with perks. There are apparel and books to purchase, So

1704
01:24:11,119 --> 01:24:13,199
go to the Symbolic World dot com and thank you

1705
01:24:13,520 --> 01:24:14,279
for your support.