Speaker 1: I look forward to to a class in school where
the young kids learn about us the way that we
learn about cavemen when we read that, Oh my god,
you know you used to step on the sharp stick
and get septis and die and that was the end
of that.
Speaker 2: And and they would.
Speaker 1: Learn about us, and they would say, wait a minute,
you're telling me. These people they would have to live
their whole life in whatever body they randomly got at birth.
So they just got you know, some some random cosmic
rate would hit their would hit their embryonic cells, and
they would be crippled or they would have you know,
whatever their limitations of IQ or whatever. They would just
have to stay in that body. And and and there
was nothing they could do about it. And they would,
you know, they would have to kill other things to
eat just to survive. Like these are all crazy. These
are a mature species. Shouldn't be shouldn't be doing any
of this. And and I feel like, if you know,
in the future, when they look back, this is going
to seem ridiculous.
Speaker 2: It's going to seem crazy that that that that.
Speaker 1: Our lives and the and the meaning and the and
the achievements of our lives would be limited to things
that we had absolutely no control because we didn't know
what to do.
Speaker 2: We didn't you know, the.
Speaker 1: Cells seemed to poop out after after eighty or ninety years.
We don't know what to do, and and and that's
and that's it. That's just that's just how that's how
we were born, and that's how we stayed. I I
you know, to to me, this is gonna this is
gonna seem the kids aren't even gonna.
Speaker 2: Believe that this is how we lived our lives.
Speaker 3: This is Jonathan Peche Welcome to the Symbolic World.
Speaker 4: So hello everyone. I am here with John Ervaki that
all of you know very well. But I'm also here
with Michael Levin. It is the first time that I
meet him. For years now, people have been telling me,
you have to talk to Michael, you have to talk
to him, you have to talk to him. And so finally,
with John's help, we were able to connect and hopefully
we can have a productive discussion. Michael runs a research
lab at Toughs University. He's doing some really amazing things
that we're going to talk about obviously in the podcast,
and that connect to, obviously to the things that John
and I care about.
Speaker 3: So, Michael, thank you for accepting this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you. It's very nice to meet you.
Speaker 1: And yeah, John and I have had many conversations and
he said I should come on, So yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 4: Yes, all right, So I mean I think we could
maybe start and maybe you can explain briefly what it
is that you do and especially in some ways, you know,
what are the things that you're bringing to the table
that are that have been surprising in terms of the
system that you're discovering and that you're implementing on the
biological world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, there's kind of many ways to describe it.
I think I think i'll try this one for today.
If you look from the outside at what it is
that my group does, and I run the Allen Discovery
Center at Toughs University, and we have applications that range
across birth defects, reach out of medicine, meaning trying to
repair really drastic injuries and aging and things like that.
We'd we have applications in cancer and bioengineering, and so
so one way to look at this as really pretty
pretty normal science. You know, we publish in all the
normal scientific journals. All all that is is that aspect
of it is conventional. But one of the interesting things
that I think is an unspoken assumption in that work
in general, in the in the community.
Speaker 2: Is that.
Speaker 1: There's a certain set of formal models. And these formal
models come from chemistry, they come from some some math,
and some physics. And there's this notion that those formal models,
specifically formal models that people associate with mechanisms or machine
like processes, right, and so we'll have to define that word,
but fundamentally it's defined by a set of structures like
you know, things around touring, you know, touring machines and
these these tools of computation. The idea is that those
kinds of things are going to be sufficient for the
life sciences. So this idea that those formal models, they've
done great for us in physics, they've done great for
us in engineering and all of that. And then if
we just keep using those those kinds of models, we
are going to get what we're looking for in life sciences,
which is to understand where we come from and why.
And then, more importantly than just explaining the stuff that's
already happened, is facilitating the research going forward and really
gaining control of our embodiment and repairing all these horrible
afflictions that plague living systems. And so one of the
things that I'm fundamentally interested in, and this has been
kind of the central point of my career, is understanding
embodied minds. So for me, I want to very much
help patients, that's for sure. But also the way we
use things like regenerative medicine and bioengineering and so on
is as model systems for testing our approach to various
very ancient filosophical questions. So there are some really deep
questions about what it means to be a mind in
the physical universe, how minds can be composed of parts,
so collective intelligence, that kind of stuf so so, so
my claim is that you can't just decide that chemistry
and those kinds of formal models are the right way
to go. You have to do experiments, and you have
to infact consider what you might be missing with those
models and try other tools that we have in our
toolbox to see if they might actually be more appropriate.
Some of those tools come from behavioral science, right, and
so then what we do is apply some of these
things that are typically used with brainy animals or you know,
the subjects of behavioral science, and we find and we
find that day wait a minute, actually those tools give
you some really good advantages in dealing with molecules, with cells,
with molecular networks, and even with some really weird things
that we can talk about that aren't even stranger than that.
And so that starts to open up some really fundamental
questions about how we've been thinking about cognitive intelligence and
how far to you know, how far in terms of
diversity of embodied minds can we go. So that's what
that's what my group does, is it teaks to understand
different ways to address our mind blindness and what I
think of as our very limited ability to see other
beings that are not like ours, that are not like this.
Speaker 4: So maybe you can tell people just a little bit
about the results that you've been having, you know, some
of the experiments you've been that you've been running, and
that you've been I mean, giving measurable results that are
at least to me when I first started seeing them,
just completely astonish me. I couldn't believe some of the
things I was thinking. He gives some examples of how
that that lands in practice and that'll help people understand
why why this is so important.
Speaker 1: Sure, Sure, I'll mention a few things. One important thing
to put this all this in context is that there's
a there's a there's a certain game that that tends
to get played, which is that we will we we
have discovered something and I describe it, and then people
will say, well, that's consistent and with chemistry and physics.
That doesn't prove anything. And so let me be very
clear about my claim. My claim is not that we've
discovered some sort of magic underneath that is inconsistent with physics.
That is not what I'm saying in the slightest. What
I'm saying is the reason that you're that people are
saying this now after we've discovered the thing that wasn't
discovered before, is that it's not just. The task here
is not to just find consistency when somebody does something new.
The thing is to find new frameworks that help you
find the new thing. It's not enough to look backwards
and say, well, I suppose I could tell a biochemical
story about this.
Speaker 2: Of course you can. It's not going to be fairies underneath.
Speaker 1: It's always good if you want to look underneath and
tell a biochemical story. You always can, But the question
is why didn't that biochemical story get you to this discovery?
And what other stories are needed to add to our toolbox. So, okay,
so some simple things that that we found. One of
the big things that we've been studying is how memories
exist in all kinds of living material that is not brain.
And so what we've discovered, for example, is that the
standard picture of morphogenesis or embryonic development or regeneration, so
basically cells getting together to build complex structures, is that
the standard version of Okay, the cells follow simple rules,
and we all know there's systems where if you follow
a bunch of simple rules, something very complex will happen.
That's kind of people call this emergence, this feed forward process.
You sort of turn the crank in something it emerges. Well,
we found out that sometimes that's what's happening in biology,
but other times there's a very specific goal directed process.
When I say goal, I don't mean human level purpose
as in I know what my goal is.
Speaker 2: I don't mean that.
Speaker 1: I mean goal in the sense in which your thermostat
has goals, or your self driving car has goals, or
a guided missile has goals. In other words, there's an
error minimization loop where the system represents some kind of
a state and it has different degrees of ingenuity to
get to that state even if things go wrong or
something get things change or whatever. Found that biology actually
stores set points or or morphological goals, and we can
rewrite those goals, and that cells are basically a collective intelligence,
not just your neural cells. We all know that's a
collective intelligence that helps make you, but all cells can
make a collective intelligence that can reach certain kinds of goals,
and you can rewrite those goals, which is amazing because
what we found is that those goals are encoded bioelectrically.
Looking backward, it's not such a shock because you know
this is how brains work. Turns out that's a much
more ancient system, so we can do things like you
take a flatworm and if and the flatworm is regenerative,
so you cut it into pieces and every piece makes
one head, one tail very reliably, and you get your
you get your worm back.
Speaker 2: So it turns out.
Speaker 1: That if you look, there's a there's a bioelectrical memory
in the tissues that tell you how many heads a
worm is supposed to have, and we can rewrite that
memory without touching the DNA. This is not about the hardware.
This is not about the genetic hardware. This is about
the memories that guide the problem solving intelligence of the cells.
And you say to those cells with a interface that
we worked out, no, actually a good worm should have
two heads, and then guess what they build? They build
two heads and now it's super cool. You can cut
it into pieces and those pieces will forever, as far
as we can tell, it's been what twenty years that
we've been doing this, those pieces will continue to make
two headed worms.
Speaker 4: So if you have a two headed worm and you
cut that one into two, then the part will continue
to make two headed worms.
Speaker 2: Correct that lineage.
Speaker 1: You have now made a lineage of two headed worms
that will forever be two headed worm. And by the way,
if you sequence it genetically sequence it, you will be
none the wiser about it. Because we haven't touched the genome.
The genome is completely normal, right, so it's invisible to
the standard methods of moleculogenetics. So we can do that.
We can alter these kinds of things in software as
it were. We've shown that certain kinds of birth defects.
And this is in animal models. This is not in
humans yet, but we're going hopefully to the clinic at
some point repair certain really nasty kinds of birth defects
by reminding the cells again through this bioelectric interface, reminding
the cells what is the pattern that they're supposed to
be building, So we can override certain kinds of birth defects.
We can create new organs where they don't belong. So
that we've made tadpoles with eyes in their guts and
things like this, what you can say to the cells,
build an eye.
Speaker 2: And this is.
Speaker 1: Important when we do this. We don't micromanage this genes.
We don't micromanage the cells. We figured out a message
that says build and eye here. And the reason that
works is because we're dealing with an agential material. Whether
it's a material that I don't have to be as
an engineer, I don't have to be in charge of everything.
It has competencies. All I'm doing is plugging into those competencies.
And if I can speak the language that it understands,
and if I'm convincing, because that's a key part of this,
you have to convince the material this is not there's
ways that it will ignore you. If you do it wrong,
it'll ignore you. So you have to be convincing. And
then you say, build an eye here, that's what it'll do.
It'll build an eye. We've done we've done normalization of cancer.
So injecting nasty human onca genes into the frog model,
normally they make tumors, basically a dissociated identity disorder of
this collective intelligence.
Speaker 2: We could talk about what I mean by.
Speaker 1: That, but you can reverse that by artificially forcing the
cells into a particular bi electrical state, and then you've
normalized the tumor. The cells will go on to do
normal build the healthy organs, and do normal things even
though the the oncoprotein is blazingly strongly expressed. And I
guess the final thing I'll mention you know, we've done
induction of regeneration, so allow animals that don't regenerate to
grow their legs back. And we've made some synthetic life
forms that are made of living cells, but in a
form and function that has never existed.
Speaker 2: On Earth before. These are some of the things that
we work on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so I mean this is demean it's amazing.
I mean it's amazing in the sense that this this
idea that because we we have to get to the
right terminology. And so you use the word memory, okay,
and when you mean what you mean by memory, and
you relate the notion of memory to purpose, right, Like
there's a goal and then there's a that goal produces
a memory. Because we always think of memory as something
in the past. But I keep telling people that actually
a goal is a type of memory because you're always
aligning yourself towards that goal. You have to remember what
you're doing, you know, as you're moving towards towards the goal.
Is that what you mean when you use the word memory, Well, I.
Speaker 1: Agree with everything you just said. A goal, I do think,
is a kind of memory that looks into the future.
But there are there are other kinds of memory. There
are many different kinds of memory, and there are other
kinds of memory that don't involve goals, right, So there's
a habituation, sensitization. They're very simple kinds of memories that
are not forward looking like that. But but but memory
is a requirement I think for for significant goal directedness,
you have to remember what your goal is. Otherwise otherwise
it's not going to happen.
Speaker 4: And so when you say that you give the day,
you give a you give certain being. You reprogram their memory.
Like what type of memory are you talking about here?
Speaker 1: So there's two okay in the in the experiment you're
talking about, So there's a one headed worm. And we've
created a technology that is kind of similar to what
the neuroscience is to when they try to scan your
brain and guess what you're thinking of. You have this
neural decoding kind of thing. So we have a technology
whereby we can look at the at the cells of
the plenarium and we can see the visually and we've
made videos movie like anybody can see these pictures and videos. Now,
the bioelectric pattern that encodes for the collective intelligence the
answer to the question how many heads should I be building?
Because all of this stuff, you know, when you're injured,
you have decisions to make. What are we going to build?
Are we going to build anything? Should we grow in
what direction? There are many decisions to make, and there's
a particular pattern that says how many heads we are
going to build? And what's important is that it's a
it's a homeostatic process because until that goal is satisfied,
the cells.
Speaker 2: Are going to work really hard.
Speaker 1: They're going to keep working like your thermostatic, it's going
to keep working until the error is within acceptable you know, bounds.
So we see that pattern that says one head, one tail,
and we figured out a way to rewrite it, and
so we go in and we rewrite it and we
say two hits. And my ultimate goal, the ultimate goal
of the regenerative medicine side of the lab is to
be able to write any pattern you want, so complete
freedom of embodiment. So so first to rewrite all the
normal human patterns. So you've lost a finger, or you've
lost an eye, or you need a new liver or
whatever it is, here is the pattern that will make
the cells grow that for you from scratch every time.
That's that's the goal. And then ultimately to be able
to say new patterns. You know, five fingers is good
and all that, but what if I wanted something else?
Speaker 2: Right, So ultimately you could have whatever. But that's that's
the idea.
Speaker 1: To be able to communicate your goals to the collective
intelligence of the cells in a way that they will
then build whatever you want them to build.
Speaker 4: And so in this in this vision, the genetics they
become a kind of of like bound potential that the
the these patterns are tapping into.
Speaker 3: Because I imagine there's a limit, right.
Speaker 4: You can't you can't How can I say this, like
you can't make uh or you know, row wings.
Speaker 3: Let's say, like you can't make a flat work or
maybe I don't know, I don't know how far it goes.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, that's a that's.
Speaker 1: A good question. So that's a good quation. So you're
asking if the morphogenetic machinery is universal, and uh, I
will I will I? We don't know yet the real
answers We don't know. But but but I'll tell you
what I think there There is a fundamental problem with
which is that the hardware does constrain some things you
can do. So for example, in the if in the
plenarian genome there is no genes, there are no genes
that will make hard materials. Right, so there's there's no
there's nothing to make bone rapp But you know any
of that stuff, you are no amount of bi electrics
is gonna is gonna make that thing grow up? You know,
something that it doesn't chemically is not able to do. However,
maybe that's that we don't We're not sure, but I
suspect that's reasonable limit. However, other than that, my strong
suspicion is that it's universal. So if you wanted to
have wings, and you had the hardware, you were capable
of making the molecules needed to for whatever your wings
are supposed to have. I bet, I bet you could
have wings and a propeller and a you know, whatever
whatever you.
Speaker 2: Want, as long as as the hardware is important.
Speaker 1: But boy, I I I don't think it is as
limiting as people think it is.
Speaker 3: Hmmm.
Speaker 4: So yeah, this is very it's this is very scary.
I mean it's it's exciting and it's scary, you know.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: The so the I mean, the thing that I'm interested in,
obviously is talking about patterns.
Speaker 3: So have you this type of idea.
Speaker 4: It does seem like it's something like a new like
it's kind of platonic. It's it's kind of Aristotelian platonic.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 4: You know, there's this you have a set of bound
potential that's quite malleable, you know, and then you have form,
you have information that is that is in some ways
calling it or helping it know where to direct its
energy towards in what direction? Uh, And then that's creating
this union between the pattern and the embodiment. Like if
you if you tried to put in a pattern that
didn't that couldn't be realized. It's if you tried to
force a good example, again, like you said you have,
if the genetic structure can't produce hard material and you
tried to use some pattern or try to force the
pattern on it, then it would just ignore it, or
it would it would just not work, Like what would happen?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, let's let's take a step back into the
because because you you've you've opened a very big kind
of issue here with these platonic patterns. So look, uh,
you know, if we had done this a year and
a half ago, I would not have been talking about
this at all. You know, I've been thinking about this
stuff for decades and I had not broached the topic
of platonic patterns until the until this year. And that's
because I think it is now actionable. In other words,
we're now to the point where we can actually make
useful progress and it's time to test out some of
those those ideas, and and the reason is, among other things,
is that when you let's let's just let's just ask
the question of where do these patterns come from? So
so we look at an early you know, like like,
for example, one thing that was discovered in my lab
by Danny Adams years ago. It was this thing we
call the electric face. And it's literally the fact that
when you look when you do the electrical profiling of
an early embryo, long before.
Speaker 2: It has a face.
Speaker 1: Okay, what you can see in the electrical pattern is
something that looks like a little face. It's like a
little pre pattern, a scaffold. Here's where the eyes are
going to go. Here's where the mouth is going to go.
Here like, it's all it's all there, right, So same
thing in the flatworm and and so on. So one
thing you might ask is, okay, but where did these
patterns come from? And so the standard answer is, well,
they come from selection. In other words, for eons, all
the other there were all kinds of patterns. All the
other ones died out, they were they weren't as good.
So now now you get this. That's the that's the
standard answer. So in the last few years, what we've
done in our lab, and other people have done relevant
things too, but they just don't they don't sort of
put it this way. We've made things like xenobots and anthrobots.
These are living constructs that are made from standard cells.
We do not touch the DNA, we don't put any
synthetic biology. There's no scaffolds, the three D printed anything.
Speaker 2: These are.
Speaker 1: These are stock stock hardware or standard cells. And what
we found is that if you give them a chance
to kind of reboot their embodiment, they make novel creatures
that have new behaviors, new patterns of gene expression, new
uh uh form, and new physiology and new capabilities that
don't look like anything that they've that we've had in
our in our evolutionary history. And they do this immediately
out of the box. You don't need to train them
to it. You don't need to force it. You know,
people say, how did you make them? I say, well,
all due respect to the hard working scientists in our lab,
we barely made them. They sort of make themselves. What
we did is we facilitated some of these things to
come forward, and now I think we have to Now
there's an important question, which is information costs energy to compute.
And if you ask when did we compute human form
and when did we compute the frog form?
Speaker 2: We know the answer, Well.
Speaker 1: For millions of years of the genome bashing against the
environment and sort of though, that's when the computations were done.
When were the computations done to make zenobots and anthwrobots.
There's never been any selection pressure to be a good
anthrobot or a good zenobot, right, And if you say that, well,
they sort of the genome sort of learned it at
the same time as it learned to be a frog
or a human. Well, that undercuts the whole point of
the specificity of the theory evolution is you're supposed to
be able to explain the things you see here by
a specific history of how you got here.
Speaker 2: If that history is not a good clue, then you
know what are we doing here?
Speaker 1: So so now it becomes time to ask a very
simple question, do you want to be pessimistic? Which I
think this view is, which is the standard view. It's
a very pessimistic view, which says, these are emergent phenomena.
There's surprises that we didn't see coming. They come for
they're just a random grab bag of facts that seem
to hold in our universe, and when we come across them,
we will write them down in our big book of
cool emergent surprises and that'll sort of be that, and
then we have to and then well, you know, at
some point we'll find some new ones and that'll be great.
Or I think the more optimistic and I can't you know,
I can't prove that this is correct.
Speaker 2: This is the metaphysics.
Speaker 1: I prefer the more optimistic view is what the Platonists
mathematicians do, which is they say, right, there are tons
of these weird facts about numbers and shapes and so on.
But they're not a random grab bag of surprises. They
are made by an ordered structure. They exist within an
ordered structured space. We know that space is not the
physical space because there's nothing you can do in the
physical world to change Figenbaumb's constant and you know the
value of E and all this stuff. You can't change
that from the physical world. It's a separate space of
all these roots and we can have And the reason
I say it's optimistic is because once you posit that
it's a structured space, you can have a research program
to explore the space as the mathematicians do. You can,
you know, you can systematically go from one to the
other and find out find new ones. And so the
model I'm proposing, and I'll send you guys, if I
haven't already, I'll send you a link to this where
I'm organizing an asynchronous symposium on the platonic space. We
have a bunch of computer scientists and mathematicians, and I
did the first talk on biology and so on, where
we'll be talking about this this idea that there is
this structured space of patterns. Some of these patterns are
the low agency things that mathematicians study. So you might
say that mathematics is like the behavioral science of kind
of simple inhabitants of that space. But some of those
patterns I think, and this is kind of like a crazy,
you know, sort of controversial claim that I wouldn't have made,
you know, until recently, I think that some of the
more complex high agency patterns from this space are behavioral propensities,
aka kinds of minds. I think that's what minds actually are,
is that they're they're actually the inhabitants of that of
that space. And so you get forms of forms that
ingress into the physical world. Some of these are shapes
of morphogenesis, some of these are behaviors. Some of these
are gene expression profiles or physiological circuits. But I am
with you in the sense that I think very quickly,
once you see what modern life sciences are doing, you
get into this idea that yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna,
we're gonna have to understand this. This not just the math,
but you know, the deeper contents of that space.
Speaker 6: Can I say something something, Yeah, yeah, I would. I
think I agree, of course, with what Mike's saying. Mike
and I talked about this. I think there's a further argument.
Mike isn't building this argument, but I'm building this argument.
I think when he moved uh that biology into a
platonic space or neoplatonic space, the already existing convergences between
his work and a lot of the work that's going
on in four ECOGSI, and Mike is talking about kinds
of minds now, so it's not inappropriate for me to
do this. I think when you move into that neoplatonic space,
you get a shared ontology that can bind that biology
and that cognitive science together even more tightly in a
mutually informative and mutually beneficial fashion. So some of the
action on the ground isn't just going to show up biologically.
It shows up in new ways and new things we
can do when we're trying to understand the nature of cognition.
And for me, that's a very exciting thing and one
of the things that shows you, like, you know, Mike
is talking about anomalies are building up and we'll just
note these in our notebook. Well, Thomas Kuon says, eventually
the anomalies become systematic, and then you make a paradigm shift,
and if the paradigm shift is fruitful, then it lives.
And I think that's what we're on the cusp of
right now. I think the anomalies have piled up too high.
We're looking for a kind of systematicity, and I think
Mike is pointing towards that. And I think a lot
of my work, you know, coming out of four ECOGSCI
and embodiment, you know, it converges in some very very
powerful ways. And I don't think I'm forcing anything on Michael.
You know, he's talking about collective intelligence. He's talking about levels.
He like, you know, he makes use of Eric Hole's
work as I do. That's that vertical dimension. Horizontally. He
talks about the cognitive light cone, which is very overlapped,
and he talks about it in terms of care, which
overlaps a lot with the work I do on predictive
processing and relevance realization. He talks about memory in terms
of agency, where agency is expressed in terms of ingenuity,
which is are there multiple pathways from the initial state
to the goal state? And can the system access multiple pathways?
Like all of this just goes like this, and for me,
that is a powerful reason. I think it's I think
it is a good epistemological reason to pursue, you know
what Mike is calling the optimistic frame, because it's potential
to massively like imagine if we really really wed, which
I'm trying to do, and I think Mike is trying
to do biology and cognition together in this way. I mean,
then embodiment, Look look at the tunes that are becoming
out here really powerfully. Embodiment becomes not just a phrase.
It becomes a deep ontological principle that explains so much.
Or Jonathan something like logos. Mike is talking about information patterns,
and you have to persuade and that makes things actualized
in different ways. And so Mike, if you want to
object anything I'm saying, please feel free. But I think
another argument, an argument I make by making use of
Mike's work is, Look, this has the potential we have
a convergence from for ECOGSCI and Mike's take on biology,
and they really overlap and reinforce them mutually, mutually afford insight.
I think this is a powerful justification for pursuing this program,
for taking it as something plausible, something that should be
taken seriously within scientific and philosophical UH domains. So I
just wanted to add that as an additional argument, and
that's why I am so excited about Mike's work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's great. I nothing for me to complain
about there. The only the only thing I would I
would add is is just that at the at the
end of the right before that, Jonathan was asking about, uh,
you know what happens if you try to force the
wrong pattern into the wrong embodiment, and I, you know,
I I view everything we do in the physical world
when we make the robots cells embryos, biobots, camera like,
whatever we make. I think these are interfaces what we're
making are they are the interfaces for these patterns. I
don't think it's a matter of trying to cram the
wrong pattern into the interface. I think they're in the way.
It's a weird way of putting it, and I don't
exactly know what it means, but I my strong suspicion
is that these patterns are kind of under positive pressure
in the sense that you don't need to do much
to get them to come through. You make an interface.
There they are, and and in fact, the key for
us I think going forward, as if we're going to
survive as a as a species, is to get much
better than we are now. About what patterns do you
get when you make specific kinds of interfaces. We make
Internet of things, swarm robotics, we make social and financial structures.
We never mind all the cyborgs and everything else. We
make all these things. We have no clue what patterns
we're picking up, and we may be picking up patterns
that have never had embodiments. And I have a feeling
that a lot of when we talk about AI and
things like that, we're fishing in a pool that maybe
has never been embodied on this planet maybe though I
doubt it, but maybe.
Speaker 2: Nowhere in the universe. You don't force these things in.
Speaker 1: You make an interface, and then you better have some
idea of what's going to show up.
Speaker 4: How I see it, because one of the things I mean,
as I'm listening to you speak, because we're if we're
bringing up these types of languages, and I like how
John mentioned the word logos. You know, at least in
some Christian metay physics, the ones that I care about
Sat Maximoths the Confessor, especially, the notion of form gets
fused with the idea of logos and logos in the
sense of reason, in the sense of purpose, right, and
so the form is actually purpose driven. It's not just
like a shape that doesn't have any it. It actually
is actually something that leads you towards purpose, which is
why we talked about.
Speaker 3: The idea of memory and of purpose.
Speaker 4: It really kind of lit me up that these patterns there,
they're active, right, They actively constrain reality towards the purpose
that they that they pattern, you know, And so to me,
all of that makes sense.
Speaker 1: It's important, right, because that's a very important point and
in the talk, So in that symposium I put up
last night, I put up an hour and a half
talk about this, this is the platonic space in biology,
and I spent I spend twenty minutes of that specifically
talking about these patterns being gold states and not just
you know, here are the patterns that happened to show up.
This is this is an actual goal state that a system,
that an intelligent system is pursuing. I think that's that's
actually a very important feature.
Speaker 5: Of all this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Kevin Corrigan has made quite a significant argument about
the ancient Greek notion of logos being understood much more
like the way we talk about, you know, the system
of constraints on feedback cycles within a dynamical system, rather
than just like.
Speaker 5: Connecting dots on a PC of paper.
Speaker 6: Right now, I want to, I want I want to,
I want to throw one potential fly in the ointment
if I can, uh, just just just just because I
want to see what both of you say about this. Uh,
and I you know, and I've been talking about this.
I've been talking. I was talking about this, uh to
Zevy Slavin about the work of Jewish neoplatonist called even
Gabbarol and other people and Whitehead too. Is this and Mike,
you used a white heady in terms, so it's not
you talked about aggression, right.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 6: Now, the thing, the thing that people often don't notice,
you know, Whitehead said he's a platonist, and he is,
but there's an inversion that's going on and in terms
of what classical platonism looks like because at the top
is form, and form is pure actuality, and at the
bottom is hule, it's pure potentiality. But when Whitehead talks
about up here, he's talking about he's talking about possibility,
space and potentiality. Right that that gets loaded or ingress
down to use the term you used, and it calls
out from call sort of causation up from the hule
at the bottom, the matter at the bottom.
Speaker 5: And that's it.
Speaker 6: That's that's an inversion of the classical platonic model. And
why that's important, I think paradigmatically, is because when we
had the older model where it's actuality at the top,
and we tended to set we tended to equate actuality
with reality. In fact, we use the terms synonymously in
our language, will say when we will say I actually
love her or I act and we use it synonymously.
But if you accept the inversion, then of course now
you've got possibility, real possibility being constitutive of reality in
a fundamental way. And I just want to note that
although we're talking and we're using a lot of the
platonic language, and I'm very happy to be there, as
you know, there's also an inversion that has occurred to
my mind, and I wanted to know what either one
of you or both of you thought of that is
that matter? Does it matter very much to either one
of you? And and and what is the relate how
do we I'm very much for reading these old authors.
You know that, Jonathan Man, But you know, there's there's
a promeneutic thing here. There's a lot of similarities, but
there's also this fundamental inversion.
Speaker 5: And so what we do there? And so who wants
to sorry for pregure?
Speaker 4: I mean, I can start in the sense that I
I tend to think incarnationally. That's that's the that's my
Christianity speaking, or my Christian metaphysics is that I and
and I'm maybe closer closer to Aristotle in that sense,
which is that the to me the the reality is
the embodiment. That's the reality. That's where reality happens. That
you have patterns and you have the potentiality into which
these patterns can get embodied. But for something to be real,
it has to be embodied, because the is. But I
have a problem with pattern doesn't exist without without its instantiation.
Speaker 6: But but how can you talk about what what Mike
is saying? The patterns have to be ordered, and you know,
and the old way of ordering them was there was
an actuality the mind of God, and that's how you
got around I.
Speaker 4: Like actual but pure actuality is not is not being
like it's not it's it's how can I say this?
Speaker 3: It's like, uh, in order.
Speaker 4: I think that the realist thing is that is the
relationship between the two.
Speaker 3: Like the realist thing is.
Speaker 4: When these forms they they they they embody themselves. That's
the thing that that at least that I care about
the most.
Speaker 5: Okay, well, I want to hear what Mike has to say.
Speaker 6: I mean because the model is very much like to
my mind, at least here your arrows where you have
top down constraints and you have bottom up causation in
a way where constraints are What patterns do is shape
what is possible. They're shapings of possibility. That's how most
mathematicians talk about mathematical formula or scientific laws. If you're
a realist about their law, about those laws. They're not events,
they're not actualities. They're constraints on what is possible for us.
So they're the real shaping of real possibility. And they're
top down and then bottom up.
Speaker 4: And if the constraint is a purpose, then then it
makes sense.
Speaker 5: To me, like that's good.
Speaker 4: But the constraining of possibility is a purpose, and that
purpose manifests itself ultimately in certain shapes, certain certain directions,
certain certain alignments, like all kinds of words we could use.
I mean, I might not be using the right words
for Michael, but but then to me that makes sense.
Speaker 5: Yes, I agree.
Speaker 6: But what I'm saying is we're opening up the kinds
of things we consider when we attempt to give explanations.
We're not just looking, like in a human fashion, for
relations between events. We're also looking for constraints on what's
possible because we we.
Speaker 5: We now long.
Speaker 6: So what I'm arguing for is you can't be a
nominalist about possibility anymore. You can't say possibility is just
something we humans do lack of knowledge. Possible has to
be real. The constraints have to be real, because you
have to be able to if they're not. I mean,
this is the I think this is part of an
implication of Mike's argument, like there seems to be a
real ordering and.
Speaker 5: A real I don't.
Speaker 6: I'm struggling for a real existence in order to explain
the radical novelty that he like. There hasn't been some
long historical process. You can't give a causal history for this, right,
but nevertheless it's playing a fundamental role.
Speaker 5: Mike. Maybe I'm misrepresenting you, but please.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm very yeah, a very really interesting question. So
so three things I'd like to say. First about the
views of a Plato and Whitehead and all of that,
None of what I do is meant to stick closely
to what any of these people thought.
Speaker 2: To whatever extent, we know what they thought.
Speaker 1: And I thought about this really hard about the naming
of this, and I may at some point need to
change the name. The reason I went with platonic space
is because it tied what I'm saying to a body
of work among mathematicians where they know exactly what I'm
talking about.
Speaker 2: That is that is that is really it.
Speaker 1: You know, other things that Plato may have thought about,
unchanging forms and all that I don't really you know,
go along with and so you know, within none of
these things am I trying to stick close to any
of that, right, And so we can talk about how
much of this I think is right or whatever. The
second thing I wanted to say is in terms of constraints.
So here, here's here's my here's my thought on this.
The kinds of things that are constrained by these forms.
I think these are the things we generally call physics.
In other words, you know, hey, you know why do
the fermions do x y z.
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 1: It's because this mathematical structure has a symmetry that only
allows what like. That's that's the constraints what I think
happens in biology. Okay, there are some constraints, but I
think it's much more than that. I think the things
we call life and that we call biology are things
that exploit and are potentiated by those forms, not just
constrained by them. So the big thing, and we can
talk about how I think biology exploits the hell out
of a lot of free lunches that are provided by
these forms, so that it is no longer enough if
you're just talking about constraints. You're talking about the low
end of my spectrum, which is machines and the kinds
of things physics likes to study. By the time you
get to the things biology likes to study, what you're
finding is that these forms are not just constraining what happens.
They're actually potentiating or greatly enhancing what can happen, right.
Speaker 6: Right, I get that, Mike, But there's a problem here
because they don't putotypically have the defining features of causal events.
They don't have a they don't have a definitive location
or time, right, and so talking about them as if
their causes is also equally problematic.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about this is really good and I'm
interested to see what you have to say about this, Chris.
Chrisfield said the same thing to me once, that it's
really hard to think about these things as causes because
causes are supposed to precede effects, for example, and if
there's no I don't know how to add a time
component to the platonic space at least yet I agree,
but I do think they're causal. And and and i'll
tell you how. I'm using a slightly different emphasis for causation.
I'm using the following.
Speaker 2: And I don't know.
Speaker 1: Who exactly this is due to, but but it goes
like this. You have you have two features, and you
want to know which one causes which one. What you
do is you tweak this one and you see if
this changes. And then you tweak this one and you
see if this one changes, and the driver right, So
so what I'm looking for is to find out which
one is the driver of the other one. And that's
the causation of causation is when you if I, if
I change thing A and thing b itever inevitably follows suit.
And I can say that A is causal to be.
What to do with time, I don't claim to know,
but but I'm interested in the in the functional causation,
And so in.
Speaker 4: Terms of in terms of time, it's not that it's
not that complicated, because purposes are causes, and you can't
measure the purpose until you've reached the goal. And so
the cause appears at the end in the many systems
because the purpose is drawing things into it, and then
you only see its result once.
Speaker 3: You've reached that reached there. It's like a when you watch.
Speaker 7: A movie and you okay, let's say you watch sixth
Sense and you don't understand what's happening, and then at
the end it reveals to you what all of these
things were doing, and once you see it, it becomes
the cause of the movie.
Speaker 3: But it's not it's not a cause like.
Speaker 4: A billiard ball hitting another it's a it's a I mean,
it's a formal cause. It's a it's a cause that
is explaining the reason why all these things are together
in the first place.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I get it, and I agree.
Speaker 6: And the wee Mike, the person's JS mill. It's called
the method of differences fantastical jsmell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, super super. I didn't know that. Okay, that's great.
Speaker 1: So so so here's here's the kind of thing I
have in mind for the for the causation bit. This
is just just one of a million examples we could
talk about. The ticket has come out at thirteen years
and seventeen years and so you're a biologist and you
ask was, so why is that? And and then you say, well,
it's because they're trying to I'm there make sure that
their predators don't time the cycles right, because if it's
twelve years, then every two years, every three years, every
four years, somebody would be And so you say, well,
that's amazing. So what is it about thirteen and seventeen
Is that, ah, these are prime okay?
Speaker 5: And so.
Speaker 1: Why specifically thirteen and seventeen? And so now what's happened
is you've left the realm of biology, you've left the
realm of physics. Now you're in the math department, and
they can explain to you why the distribution of primes is.
Speaker 2: The way it is.
Speaker 1: And so now we have this situation where if the
distribution of primes had been different, the tickedas would be
coming out at a different time. But on the other hand,
there is nothing I can do in biology and physics.
I can tweak the constants of the Big Bang. Whatever
I want to do at the physical world, I am
never going to change the distribution of primes, or the
value of E or fighting bombs constant. So what I
see as causation is simply this. I see that the
patterns are determining aspects of the physical world. And I
don't see anyway for things we do in the physical
world to feedback, although there is a there's a caveat
to this, but that is what I see as the
causation that the influence flows. That if we want to
understand what's happening here, the source is in these facts
of mathematics and the facts of other things that are
not mathematics, so that I think are actually psychology or
whatever they are.
Speaker 6: So I agree with you that there are determination relations.
I guess I'm pressing on this because one of the
classic problems, I mean, this is a standard trope in
the philosophy of mathematics for Platonism, is accounting for the
causal status. You can't seem to get any causal relation
out of these things because they don't seem to bear
a temporal or spatial location, Like where is any of
those functions? You just where are they? Like are they
over there? Like no, that they're nowhere? And then they're everywhere,
and they don't happen at a specific time or a
specific place.
Speaker 5: And so I think I hear what you're saying.
Speaker 6: And this is why I want to press you, Mike,
because I think I think something's happening. Let's take up
your proposal, because it's a really good one. Let's reserve
constraint for something where we're just talking about No, we
have to give them their due. By the way, there's
not only selective constraints that are enabling constraints.
Speaker 5: So it's not just this. So but you said it's
more than that. I get.
Speaker 6: There's a sense of almost an exploratory element to this
is that fair Okay, constraint does not convey that. But
you know, classically cause doesn't either, and the stuff you're
talking about doesn't have a lot of the other features
of cause. It sounds to me almost like and Dennis
Walsh is trying to do the same thing here, he's
a philosopher biology at the University of Toronto, is to
come up with, you know that there is something other
than what we mean by cause or constraints that we're
talking about here that we and this is why I
try to invoke the I think I mentioned it to you,
the neoplatonic notion of a paradigmatic cause, which is not
a formal cause and efficient cause, a mechanical cause, or
a final cause. It's it's this accessing and downloading vertical
kind of determination.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know, I I like that a lot
and I and I agree with you in the sense
that if the standard version of causation doesn't capture what's
going on here, too bad for the standard version of causation.
I mean, I agree with Okay, it doesn't have a location,
it doesn't have one, Well, too bad, Who cares. I
think there's something much more important going on here.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 1: I think those kind of causes were worked out by
largely by people focused on building steam engines and things
where this knob is over here touching this you know
thing and the gear, and this is why that that
kind of causation is not going to do us in
in the in the biological and the cognitive sciences.
Speaker 2: I don't think, and.
Speaker 1: In fact I make the I make the connection to
there's There was another case where this came up, which
is when when Descartes sort of announced this, this idea
of a non physical non of running the brain around
like a like a like a puppet, you know. The
Princess of Bohemia I forget her name wrote to him
and said, well, ok here, how that you said the
non physical mind doesn't have a location, and we have
conservation of mass. How how how is that going to happen?
And what I find really weird. And I've been playing
with a stupid idea of writing some sort of a
fictional dialogue between the two of them that I think
should have happened. If it didn't happen, because Descartes was
a mathematician, what it seems to me he should have
said is excuse me.
Speaker 2: We have had since since you know.
Speaker 1: The time of Pythagorism, before that, we have already had
examples of non physical facts determining reality in the physical world.
Speaker 2: We've already had this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but and your question is a good one.
Speaker 6: Why doesn't he because he gets committed to a completely
horizontal notion of causation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he gets committed to it.
Speaker 6: And because there is the rejection of any verticality to ontology,
there's a deep there's deeper ontological moves that are going
on that precludes him from considering. You're right, that answer
should have been available to him. But he's rejecting any
kind of platonic verticality. And what I see you doing,
and I think we're actually fleshing it out that was
an unintended pun. We're fleshing it out is like the
strong need to bring a verticality back into our ontology
in a deep way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and specifically I mean the kind of Uh. Just
to be clear, I'm not a philosopher.
Speaker 2: I don't, you know.
Speaker 1: I The reason that I prefer this kind of version
is driven by engineering. It's driven by by simply by
by the following the cause. When I'm looking for causes,
I'm not looking for, you know, to match any philosophical
notion of causation. What I want as an engineer is
where should I be looking in order to understand and
control the system that I want to understand and control.
And if this and if the traditional notion of causation
doesn't help me do that, then then then then fine,
then then I'm not interested. What I want to understand
is if I if I have a system that behaves
in a certain way, whether it's cicadas that come out
at thirteen years, or whether it's a zenobot that does
things that we didn't ask it to do, or a
bubble sort that has a side quests that are not
in the algorithm, of these kinds of things that we study,
if the answer lies in mathematic in the properties of
mathematical objects.
Speaker 2: Then, as far as I'm.
Speaker 1: Concerned, that's the cause i'm looking at. If somebody wants
to come up with a different terminology for it, fine,
But as an engineer, this is what I'm looking for.
I'm looking to understand what is actually driving the thing
that I'm interested in.
Speaker 6: And I think you're completely epistemically virtuous. I'm not making anything,
although I do think philosophical argument matters too sure, But
what I'm saying is, and you're basically doing you're following
the science. And I mean that in a good way,
not the way that phrase has been used in the past,
the recent past. But you're following the science, and it's
basically leading us out of a framework that was given
to us, a fundamental ontological epistemological framework given to us
by the Enlightenment, the framework called modernity, where we understand reality,
we understand causation this way, there's no vert account, et cetera,
et cetera, and this like I see you tell me
if this is wrong, but the science. You're following the science,
and it's leading us out of that framework.
Speaker 5: And I'm trying to point out how profound I think that.
Speaker 2: Is yeah, well, well, I appreciate that. I agree with you.
Speaker 1: I think we made certain assumptions around and again I'm
not a historian of science, but my understanding of what
happened during the Enlightenment is that we made certain assumptions
about the sets of tools we were going to use.
Like every set of tools, it has blind spots. We
are still sort of coasting along on those tools, assuming
that the turn the crank long enough and things will
be okay. I think we've gone way beyond now understanding
that a lot of these assumptions were not good. They
were fine at the time, they served us well for
some time, but they're not actually going to going to
keep going. And there's something else I wanted to mention,
which is this notion of embodiment. So the part that
people tend to agree with me on is the part
that I think embodiment is absolutely critical, It's very important.
The part where I tend to lose everyone is the following.
I think, as human beings with a very particular the
cognitive apparatus and evolutionary history and whatever, I think we
are obsessed with the three dimensional world. I think that
there are spaces in which kinds of minds, meaning beings,
and some of them are you know, morally important beings
do this perception decision action loop right the world in
which they strive, They solve problems, they suffer, they win,
they lose, they do things. I think there are numerous
spaces that are very difficult for us to visualize as humans.
And because we have trouble visualizing these spaces, we assume
that they don't exist. And we when we say embodiment,
we mean, you know, a physical body. It's if you're
a software agent, do you need to have a robot
and trundle around on wheels or now walk around or something.
You can't just be sitting in a box somewhere. You
don't engage with the physical world unless you're running around
touching things. Well, biology, long before nerve and muscle evolved,
biology was doing all of these kinds of problem solving,
navigational you know, goal directed things, in physiological state space,
in transcriptional space space, and metabolic state space, and anatomic
this is what we study. Anilib mostly is anatomical state space.
These spaces are as real to these beings that live
in those spaces. I think as the three dimensional world
is to us, they are as fictional and as constructed
as the three D world is by us, I think,
and they are real and also constructed to the same degree.
And there are many different kinds of embodiment that we
do not traditionally recognize as embodiment. Then there's actually a
good chunk of my lab now was devoted to creating tools,
empirical tools for people to use use to recognize beings
in non you know, in non traditional spaces, and to
communicate with them. This is one of our goals is
to enable you to recognize, communicate with, and ethically relate
to beings that live in all kinds of other crazy
spaces that we don't you know, we can't visualize. So
I just want to be really clear that it's to me,
it's not that. Okay, there are forms and then there's
like three D universe, there are many other spaces as
far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 6: Jonathan, Before you say, I just want to one more
point of conversion, Dan Champion, I did a lot of
work about the NASAU scientists moving the rovers around on Mars,
and does that violate embodiment because the scientists are here
and the rovers are up there and what we found
was no, No, there's a different way in which they
collectively organize themselves and make use of the information from
the rovers to create this overall dynamical system that has
the capacity to grow hyper patterns that like individual human
cognition can't grasp.
Speaker 5: Now, argued that was a kind of.
Speaker 6: Embodiment, even though it's not a physiological body. And we
were trying to understand embodiment as are you adaptively coupled
to your environment in a way that makes the difference
to your ability to solve problems in that environment or
something like like that, but again, very convergent. What was interesting,
and this is where my work overlaps with Jonathan, and
then I'll shut up so Jonathan can talk, is, you know,
the kinds of things that the scientists had to do
in order to participate into that in that collective intelligence,
in order to make it a sensed presence. They had
to do all this imaginal weird they had they had
to identify with the rover, they had.
Speaker 5: To internalize it. They had to do all this stuff.
Speaker 6: And you know, I'm being a little bit provocative here,
but it looks very similar to a lot of the
stuff people have typically done in religious settings. They do
imaginal things, they extend identity, they internalize like the saint
and and frankly, the scientists got kind of religious about
the rovers they really did. They started to talk as
if they had like a sympathetic magic connection to them.
These are these hard, hard headed scientists. But if you
do the actual ethnography, that's obviously not what they publish.
But if you go do the ethnography of how they're
doing the work, it's really messy like that. And so
I just wanted I put a fly in the ointment,
but now I'm putting a flower in the ointment as
a potential point. Like, yeah, we talk about this, but
you know, there's the question about I think it's very
plausible that human beings can participate in these collective intelligences
in some way or form, and given Eric Hole's work,
that gives us access to otherwise inaccessible causal power and
information access that's otherwise not available. I'm not invoking anything
wu here. You know, you and I know Eric Holes
got some pretty rigorous argument and some good simulations providing
evidence for this. But for me, you know, if we
got a verticalopy and we have that kind of participation,
and it seems to be actually allowing and I'm using
your language. Might the engineering to move the rovers around
and be able to study the hyper objects, the hyper
patterns of the Martian atmosphere. Then there's the possibility that
maybe stuff we had dismissed as being in the inlicighttenment
as being superstitious we should take seriously again. And now
I'm going to turn it over to Jonathan. And because
that so that's my flower in the ointment right.
Speaker 1: Well, well, just just very quickly, I like that a lot,
and I can tell you that something very similar I
think is the future of molecular medicine because because what
we are doing right now is uh pointing out that
you know, if if you have a bowling ball on
a landscape, then your view as a third person external
observer tells pretty much the whole story. You can see,
you know what's going to happen. But if you have
a mouse on a landscape, your view as an extra
observer is kind of useless. You need to know what
is the mousetak of this landscape, what does he see
and where. So now when we look at okay, we
want to control the physiology of the liver or we
want to control the blestedema to regenerate a limb or an.
Speaker 2: Eye or whatever.
Speaker 1: Which of those models is going to do And I'm
here to tell you that it's not the bowling ball model.
It's the first person perspective model. So that in the
future when you are going to and we're trying to
make tools for this, we're trying to make practical to
me for this. Instead of controlling the rover in three
dimensional space on Mars, you are controlling as a as
a worker in regender of medicine, you are controlling the
movement of cells in an invisible anatomical morpho space that
you can't see, or the movement of your liver in
physiological state space that has twenty nine dimensions that you
couldn't imagine. And so you need tools for you to
become that being, to share your inner perspective with it
and say, okay, I'm kind again like right, I'm not
trying to get wo here, but I think there will
be tools. There will be augmented reality tools that will say,
I want you to navigate the space.
Speaker 2: Thus, how are you going to do that?
Speaker 1: If you don't understand the space, how are you going
to communicate to this being if you're not part of
it in the same way that you were talking about
merging with that rover right, And I think we're going
to end up in a lot of very weird spaces
that are at different scales, different time scales, spatial scales, distributed, disconnected,
where we are going to be part of that first
person perspective of really weird beings like body organs, like cells,
like synthetic self growing houses, and god knows what that
we are going to have to be part of that,
you know, from the inside, not from the outside.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of a lot have been said.
But for sure, in terms of the idea of non
three D bodies, I think people have known about these
for a long time. We call them subtle bodies. They're
different iterations of it. Of course, most ancient traditions care
mostly about those that are at the personal and transpersonal level.
But you know, you can find embodiments, for example, at
a personal influence level in stories. That is the way
that I influence others through even just speech. Is that
type of non completely physical embodiment. If a very influential
celebrity endorses a product and then that gets taken up
in the minds of parents that then buy that product
for children. What you're encountering is a non physical pattern
that's embodying itself at different levels, and it's kind of
reaching all the way all the way down.
Speaker 3: And so in the human sphere and in the kind.
Speaker 4: Of social sphere, we have these types of bodies that
there are all different types of bodies that are not
completely gross, like that aren't brute, but we're used to
understanding how influence functions. And I don't know if you've
thought about the analogy between those types of influences, like
the way that you could say, the way that music
makes people dance and the types of things that you're doing,
because I mean, in music obviously is not a music
is an auditory pattern. It's not a brute it's not
a brute thing that runs into each other. But nonetheless,
what it does is that it embodies itself first in
just vibrations of sound, and then it slowly moves down
until it it manifests itself in a bunch of people
square dancing, you know, on the floor. And so I
don't know if there are analogies that you can see
between those types of transpersonal patterns kind of embodying themselves
and what it is you're doing at the biological level.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, there's there's a lot going on there.
Speaker 1: And and one person that you guys probably should should
talk to is Richard Watson so University of Southampton. So
he's a computer scientist evolutionary biologist, and he and I
have done a bunch of work together. He's he's very
interested in metaphors of music and and things like this,
in driving, collective intelligence and these spaces and and and
all all the everything you just said, Like you guys
could talk for hours with him, So I would suggest
that as well.
Speaker 6: That's interesting because I mean that first of all, that
for me, I've been doing Daoist practices for thirty years,
and that's and I really have objected to the very
North American way of talking about this in terms of
energy and stuff like that. In situ, the metaphor that's
used for the dow Is are almost always musical metaphors,
not energetic metaphors, and it's much more aligned.
Speaker 5: With that very much. Mike, could you link.
Speaker 2: I'll make I'll make I'll make a connection.
Speaker 5: Yes, thank you.
Speaker 4: So the biggest, the biggest question though that comes to
my mind is that I mean, I want to make
sure I understand correctly.
Speaker 3: If I'm not understanding correctly, please please do correct me.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: And so what you seem to be talking about, it
connects to this idea that in some ways these patterns.
Speaker 3: That are.
Speaker 4: Framing or that are you know, gathering this potential together
towards purposes, and that these are these bioelectrical patterns that
are manifest manifesting themselves that way, but that ultimately they
represent certain purposes or certain goals that this multiplicity not
organize itself towards. If that's right, then it seems that
there is I believe at least most traditions in the
history of the world have ascertained that there are that
there's a hierarchy of those goals, that there is a
natural hierarchy of the goods through which these patterns manifest
into the world. And in that way, that's why the
in some of the classical Darwinian system is almost easier
to understand in that sense, which is, if it survives,
then it it's closer, it's closer to the good in
some ways, that there's a goodness calling there's something that
makes being persist and through iterations know that that that
maintains itself and things get thrown off, thing get brought back,
Like there's all this, these this back and forth, but
in the space that you are able to enter now
and like in some ways by bringing human agency into
these systems. Uh, let me just frame this with one
last statement, which is that at least at the human level,
because of human consciousness and especially human self consciousness, we
have recognized that in the way that we act, that
there are certain patterns that are parasitic.
Speaker 3: There are certain wills.
Speaker 4: That you can download, that you can interact with, that
you can be influenced by, that are actually destructive, but
that we do so nonetheless for all kinds of perverse reasons,
which when I want to go into too much and
so the thing when I hear you talk about like
we could do anything right, We could give you know,
you could grow wings, you could grow five eyes, you
could you could do all these things. I also am
worried of the fall right, worried of worried of us
bringing our parasitic processes into into a space which until
now is in some ways been hasn't been completely tainted
by it. Of course it is tainted to some extent.
I mean, we do species breeding. These are slow, slow
versions of you know, imbibing patterns into into species. And
now you're doing it at like one generation. You create
a camera. Uh. And the reasons why we have warnings
about cameras in mythology is not completely I think irrelevant.
Right that we have this image of the sphinx that
will eat you.
Speaker 1: Well, there's there's there's many things that are not cameras
that will eat you.
Speaker 2: So I guess, uh, okay, So.
Speaker 1: You brought up to two things I'd like to I'd
like to talk about both of them. Let's let's do
let's do the first one first. So the patterns that
we pick up, So, so I want to I want
to float an idea roughly summarized in uh uh this
this this idea of of thoughts are thinkers and which
is which is this? Let's let's uh, let's just let's
visualize this idea that there are many patterns of one
way to do the hierarchy. And I don't know what
kind of hierarchy this this space has, but the but
I'm open to that, and I can see there's one
hierarchy that I can see immediately, which is there are
patterns that you might characterize as fleeting thoughts. They come
and they go, they sort of go through a cognitive
system and they're gone. Right, patterns, there are other patterns
that are persistent thoughts there there they they kind of
do a little niche construction in the cognitive agent that
prevent that that make it easier to keep having those thoughts.
And they're kind of they try to hold on a
little bit, right, But but they're not very complex. They
just kind of all they there's the sort of the
viruses of that world is they just kind of like
to hold on and that's pretty much it. Then then
there are more complex things that and and that that
we can see as for example, personality fragments. So if
someone has associated identity disorder, there are things that are
they're more than just intrusive thoughts because they have some
planning and they have some goal directedness, and they have
a little bit of cleverness to them. And then and
then and by the way, there's some things that we
could talk about in weird ancient traditions that are between
those two things.
Speaker 2: But let's just move on.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you know what I'm talking about then, and
you know, and then there's whatever is transhuman you know,
whatever else.
Speaker 2: Right, So, so if if.
Speaker 1: We like this, this continuum, we can say that we
ourselves are patterns. That's what I think we are. I
think we are embodied patterns. I think we are extremely sophisticated,
self constructing, self maintaining patterns. We interact with many other
In fact, we throw off, we spawn off patterns all
the time, which are are the results of our cognitive
and emotional activity. We are susceptible to other patterns. Some
of these patterns are autocarine, meaning that we generate them ourselves.
Other patterns are not that they don't come from us.
They come from some of the other other beings or whatever,
and we may or may not resonate with them, we
may or may not offer them a home to whatever
extent we indulge them. Some of these are patterns that
are known to for you know, computer science, as thoughts
that break the thinker. So there are patterns that once
you've seen them, you can't really unsee them, and it
actually feeds back to alter your structure. And so like
that's it in a certain sense, right, And so yeah,
I think. I think there's a perfectly reasonable I think
in all of these things it's not necessarily a difference
in kind as much as a difference in degree. And yeah,
we have to be very intentional in what kind of
patterns we we generate and what kind of patterns we accept,
because they all have they all have consequences. So I'm
I'm kind of one on board of that. I do
want to I do want to talk about the other thing,
which is this being worried about cameras and things like
this a fundamental claim that I'll make, and I make
it mostly because I'm not even a clinician. And you
should see the emails I get every day. Okay, fifty
to one hundred emails. Uh well, okay, maybe ten or
fifteen emails that say what you're doing is scary. The
frog sell the biobots too much, freaking me out. You know, planarians,
you know you shouldn't. They shouldn't have two heads. A
good old fashioned worm has one head. You should stick
to that, you know. Okay, So so some of that,
and then probably ten times more of that saying what
the hell are you waiting for? My kid has a
birth defect. I've got cancer, when somebody else has you
lost a limb?
Speaker 2: What are you screwing around for? When are we going
to get When are we going to get.
Speaker 1: Relief from these from these ridiculous, painful, you know maladies.
And and what I'll say is this, you know, are
we do we need humility in all of this? Absolutely?
One hundred thousand percent. Are we going to make mistakes occasionally?
One thousand percent We're gonna We're gonna make mistakes. However,
what I see as the status quo this is here's
here's what I don't believe because a lot of a
lot of people make this argument implicitly. They make this argument,
everything right now is cool, and you scientists better not
screw it up. Everything's great and don't do anything to
make it worse now. Granted, sometimes scientists come up with
some stuff that make things worse. It can happen, but
the claim that everything is fine now is I think incredibly,
you know, outrageous. And the people who are freaked out
about the two headed flatworms tend to be the young,
healthy people, And as soon as their kid has some
kind of problem, they run to the hospital and they
pray like hell that somebody had figured something out and
then and then they and then maybe they start wondering
where where do medical solutions come from? And so my point,
my point is this that I think where we are
now is in no way optimal. I don't believe, and
I am not I am not saying outright that that
there are not interesting verticalities that guide what happens here.
What I am saying is I do not believe that
the current status quo of our embodiment, meaning the obligate
loss of cognitive capacity and after about eight decades the know,
the the astigmatism, the lower back pain, the birth defects,
the cancer, I don't believe any of this was was,
was is optimal, or was intended to be this way.
We our our physical embodiments, as far as I can tell,
are the products of cosmic RaSE hitting our embryonic cells.
They're the process, They're the results of processes that really
don't have and I mean, I know this is a
controversial the opinion, but this is this is what I think. Uh,
they have not been looking out for us in terms
of any of the values that we care about, and
in the way to me, what's happening is that all
of this has been waiting basically for us to gain
the knowledge and hopefully the wisdom to improve on some
of this stuff so that everyone everywhere can have the
kind of quality and length of life that.
Speaker 2: It takes to have an an.
Speaker 1: Intentional life with meaning, not distracted by you know, by
by pain and avoidable, preventable you know, tragedies that we
are simply too stupid currently to do anything about. I
understand the worries, and there are many things to be
worried about, but the number one thing to be worried
about is where we are now. The status quo is unsupportable.
I think there's a massive amount of suffering for as
far as I can tell, no good reason, you know.
And people argue with this, and then you say, look,
you know, the shortness of our lives, that's what gives
it meaning because you have to like great?
Speaker 2: So how about maybe ten years? How would that be? No?
Speaker 1: No, No, ten is ridiculous? Eighty like eighties great? Why
is eighty grade? Why is ten too short and eighties great?
Speaker 2: Why not?
Speaker 1: Why is it not the fact that maybe you need
a good thousand years before you get to really understand
the wisdom of how to live a good life.
Speaker 5: Who you know.
Speaker 1: I just I don't see that any of the things
that we have now are chosen, were carefully chosen so
that we could have, you know, an appropriate set of values,
Like I don't think that's what's happening. So so yes,
we will make mistakes, but boy, the situation right now
is I think untenable, and it's on us, all of us,
I think, to try to improve it as best as
we can.
Speaker 6: That's can I amplify mic a little bit because I'm
a bit of a shit disturb myself, which is, not
only are there all those things that Mike talked about
non optimalities. I think the meaning crisis is a real thing,
and I've argued for at length, and I think the
kind of work where we're exploring this stuff, and I've
tried to argue that here right now gives us opportunities
to deeply, in philosophically and scientifically respectable manner address the
meaning crisis.
Speaker 5: And so that's right.
Speaker 6: I think that's a powerful benefit that we need to
put into our cost benefit analysis.
Speaker 5: I just want to amplify Mike that way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean I bring that
up because there's a lot of there are a lot
of mythological stories that talk about this problem, you know,
the problem of the making of cameras or the the
camera in some way of being a puzzle that destroys you.
But at the same time, I agree with you, John,
and I also agree with you, Mike. I think one
of the reason why I wanted to talk to you
is because I can see in the work you're doing
that you're opening up all kinds of ways of talking
about things that I think many people have forgotten what
they're about.
Speaker 3: You know, a lot of the.
Speaker 4: Ancient wisdom in some ways had become arbitrary and people
didn't understand what it was referring to. And so I
think some of the work that you're doing, and the
work that John's doing, is helping us understand what it
is we're talking about. Like when we talk about transpersonal agencies,
like you know, the language of angels and demons and
ancient gods, it became a kind of arbitrary marvel science
fiction thing, you know, with beings that exist, but we
don't know what that means. But when you start to
kind of understand these these the way that intelligences influence us,
you know, the way that our intelligence influence is the world.
And then the way that you can see intelligence is
running through systems purposes that are argentic. All of a
sudden you can start to at least read into or
look back at some of the things that we have
we've just tossed aside and forgotten, and it can help
us understand our our world again. So I want to
I wanted to put a cavea on what I said.
I mean, in some ways, I you know, I'm it's
a lot of the things you're doing are so wild
and new that.
Speaker 3: You know it is there.
Speaker 4: It is a little frightening, but I but I also
find it exciting because I can see that for a
lot of people that would have refused the possibility of
vertical causation, at some point it becomes impossible to ignore
it because.
Speaker 3: It's actually not yielding.
Speaker 4: You've reached the limit of what it can yield for
you without considering it. Like, if we don't start thinking
about things this way, then we'll go actually, even scientifically,
we reach a limit.
Speaker 3: We can't go for any further. So I just wanted
to covey.
Speaker 1: That, Yeah, thank you, Well, I think it is. It
is fright, I mean, here, I'll tell you why I
think it's frightening. It's because it is frightening. It's frightening
because it places the responsibility on us. I think that
when people people ask me, you know, well, what are
you most the most is scared of? And you know,
it's not that the zenobots will eat us all.
Speaker 2: It's that we.
Speaker 1: Will we will fail to rise to the level of
intelligence and wisdom that are needed to address these issues
that have plagued us forever.
Speaker 2: That is, that is what's frightening to me.
Speaker 1: Is that is that I don't you know, it's not
a foregone conclusion that we can do it, and it
places the responsibility on us, and it means that we are,
in an important sense, the adults in the room responsible,
all of us, responsible for relieving the level of suffering
and for solving the meaning crisis.
Speaker 2: I think that's absolutely, absolutely critical.
Speaker 1: And you know, I understand, you know, the ancient texts
warned about certain things. The one thing I haven't really
and this could just be me, maybe they exist. I'm
not a scholar of that stuff, so I don't know
the one thing I haven't seen, or maybe they did
exist and got suppressed for specific reasons is whether any
of these things warn of the dangers of the status quo,
like like, where are the ancient texts that say, look around,
are you seeing all the all this stuff?
Speaker 2: Don't don't let it sit like this? Do you know?
Do something, learn and let's get past this. Does that?
Speaker 5: Does that exist? Mike?
Speaker 6: I would put it to you that the Axial Revolution
was a significant change from the Bronze Age, in which
the status quo was taken as the normative, and the
Axial Revolution said no, no, the statics quo is somehow
fallen or decadent, or illusory or filled with foolishness and violence,
and we need to transcend it. And it brought about
a totally different conception of which.
Speaker 2: I think that's very interesting.
Speaker 1: And I, you know, I have this fantasy looking looking forward,
I assuming we all make it, which is also not
a foregone conclusion, but assume, assuming we all make it.
I look forward to to a class in school where
the young kids learn about us the way that we
learn about Caveman when we read that, oh my god,
you know you used to step on a sharp stick
and get septism and die and that was the end
of that. And they would learn about us, and they
would say, wait a minute, you're telling me these people
they would have to live their whole life in whatever
body they randomly got at birth, So they just got
you know, some some random cosmic rate would hit there,
would hit there embryonic cells, and they would be crippled
or they would have, you know, whatever their limitations of
IQ or whatever. They would just have to stay in
that body. And and and there was nothing they could
do about it. And they would, you know, they they
would have to kill other things to eat just to survive.
Like these are all crazy. These are a mature species.
Shouldn't be shouldn't be doing any of this. And and
I feel like, if you know, in the future, when
they look back, this is going to seem ridiculous.
Speaker 2: It's going to seem crazy that that that that.
Speaker 1: Our lives and the and the meaning and the and
the achievements of our lives would be limited to things
that we had absolutely no control because we didn't know
what to do. We didn't you know, the cells seem
to poop out after after eighty or ninety years. We
don't know what to do, and and and that's and
that's it. That's just that's just how That's how we
were born, and that's how we stay I I you know,
to to me, this is gonna this is gonna seem
the kids aren't even gonna believe that this is how
we lived our lives.
Speaker 4: One one of the things, I mean, this is something
I don't know. Hopefully I can and make it relate
and you can tell me if it sounds complete arbitrary.
But one of the differences that we see in traditional
way of seeing is that there seems to be a
difference between let's say.
Speaker 3: A liturgical practice.
Speaker 4: If you think about like a liturgical practice in which
you are in some ways coming together and you are
attending to something above you. Right, so you group come together,
they saying they posess, they do all these things, and
they in some ways are attending and making themselves dependent
is a good way of thinking about, like consciously making
themselves dependent on something that is a higher good, right,
the God of infinite love, a saint, a patron saint,
something that is a good and that has always been differentiated.
Speaker 3: From the sorcerer.
Speaker 4: Right, the sorcerer that is able to perceive these patterns
in the world and is able to kind of grab
them and manipulate.
Speaker 3: Them towards power, you could say.
Speaker 4: And there's a relationship between the two because in some
ways they're doing similar things, which is that you kind
of see this pattern and you want to bring it
into the world. And so in the first case, you
kind of submit yourself to something grand and higher and
you embody it through procession, through liturgy, through all these things,
and as then through behaviors. In the other sense, you
it's like you, you know, you create the interface. This
is a good a good example of a sorcer, like
you know, how to become more powerful? You find out
and you create the interface. You make a gollum where
you make a you know.
Speaker 2: A monter.
Speaker 3: The next question to ask you about about about AI.
Speaker 4: So you get already if you want feed into the
AI question right, and then basically you you pull right.
It's always an image to trap, right. This is the
image in mythological terms, you trap the spirit in a
in a body so that it serves your purpose, all right,
and then it acts in your as an extension of you.
That's the the kind of that's the mythological or kind
of you know, fantastical image. But there are of course
things to say about about a if you want to
bridge out together and go ahead.
Speaker 6: Can I just say one thing, because Mike, I mean
Mike's work as the potential And Mike, I'm not imposing
on you. You wrote up you wrote an article with
others about care and Buddhism, and Ai, I'm not so
I'm not bringing in something foreign here.
Speaker 5: And and I think I've made enough.
Speaker 6: Connections here to make the claim what Mike's work's doing,
especially you know, if it's if it can integrate with
my work and my work and integrate with his work,
is the possibility of stitching back knowledge and ontology and
the cultivation of wisdom rather than having them separate culturally,
separate and orthogonal from each other. So there's the possibility
of saying, well, the science would say that, you know,
we have to pay attention to have care. Mike's work
argues that in at least one paper, and then that matters,
and that you know, and maybe Mike, you made use
of Buddhism. You know, here's here's a set of an
ecology of practices that helps orient us in the right way,
like the possibility of bridging like between knowledge and wisdom.
To put it sort of simplistically is opened up by
the kind of work that Mike is doing, in the
kind of work that I'm doing, and we don't have
to live with the Enlightenment idea that there's knowledge over
here that is completely valueless or something like that, and
then there's wisdom over here which is kind of our cane,
and we could go back to a different way, which
is the possibility that our wisdom could impact on our knowing,
and our knowing could make an impact on our attempts
to cultivate wisdom and meaning. I think Mike's work and
my work is arguing for that possibility and strongly recommending
it to people. Mike, you've published on this, so I
don't think I'm putting anything into your mouth to say that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's that's absolutely true. And I apologize,
I'm already quite late and we have to go in
about three minutes. Sorry, and about three minutes and we
have to pop off for sure, just to say that, Look,
I I totally understand the distinction. You know, the Sorcerer
picture that you were painting. I get the distinction. I
am not claiming that, uh, you know, pure intelligence unsort
of guided by by wisdom, by compassion, by these other
things cannot be used for very sort of selfish, destructive aims.
Speaker 2: Of course, of course it can.
Speaker 1: I once I once did a pole of of of
the following situation. Just visualize you're you're og, and you
just discovered fire, and so you're on your way back
to your tribe to show them this like amazing thing,
and then you're you have this vision of everything that
follows after that, steel weapons, you know, artificial hearts, nuclear bomb,
you know, the submarine's antibiotics, like the whole the whole thing, right,
So now the so now the question do you sort
of put the stick out and be like, Nope, I
haven't got anything, or do you or do you roll right?
So about so about six percent of and these are
people who read my stuff, so presumably they're, you know,
sort of they like some of this. Six percent of
them said you should have put out the fire and
and and stayed outdoors freezing, you know, freezing and and
stuff like that. So look, I understand the difference. I
think that difference would be more convincing to me if
there was some way to be sure that if you
do the former thing you described someone with great wisdom
and power is going to take care of stuff and
has your back if someone has your back. I understand
there are large swaths of people in the world who
think that that is the case.
Speaker 2: I get it.
Speaker 1: I suspect, and I'm not even necessarily arguing against that.
I suspect that whatever whatever exists along those lines is
more along the lines of that old joke like, well,
how come you didn't save me from the flood A
I sent you three boats?
Speaker 6: What?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 2: I'm I'm more.
Speaker 1: Thinking that there's a there's a sense of impatience going on,
which is like figure it out, people, and then and
and and everything you know can be can be elevated. So,
you know, I don't think the right framing and who
am I to say anything on these matters, right, I
don't know. But this is just my own personal My
own personal view is that the way I see it
is not as a matter of we got to find
the right way to relinguish responsibility and then things will
be good. No, it's to what as what John said,
is to is to try to couple the intelligence, the
rise in capacity with the rise in the cone of compassion. Right,
the level of care that we can and wisdom that
we can manage so that we can actually be the
positive agents of change, because I just don't see waiting
for somebody else to do it.
Speaker 2: It's it doesn't seem to be working out.
Speaker 3: Oh, Michael, thank you so much.
Speaker 4: Thanks for your patience and thanks for this was in
some ways kind of exploratory to try to figure out
how we could we can discuss together. But I think
there's some really great nuggets that have come out of
the conversation.
Speaker 3: I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Fabulous, Thank you so much. Yeah, lots lots more to
talk about. Happy to happy to do it anytime. Yeah,
thank you, I appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Great seeing you again, Mike.
Speaker 2: Thanks John, Yeah, very good to see you both. Take
it easy right.
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