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as always you can click on the timestamp in the description as well as here to skip this longish introduction the theories of everything channel is back with a new season starting with last week's ama which will be in the description
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from this point forward there will be new content approximately once a week sometimes even more frequently today's guests are carl fristen mike 11 and chris field the former two have been on this channel and mentioned several times
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prior whereas chris fields is making his debut chris fields is a researcher in topological quantum field theory as well as information theory and publishes work on what constitutes an observer carl fristin is a professor of neuroscience
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at the university college london and is the inventor of the free energy principle michael levin is the developmental and synthetic biologist at the tufts university the links to all their previous podcasts on the toad
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channel will be in the description my name is kurt jaymungal i'm a torontonian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics dedicated to the explication quote unquote of the variegated terrain of theories of
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everything primarily from a theoretical physics perspective but as well as trying to understand what role does consciousness have as constitutive reality is it emergent is it fundamental now the goals of theo locutions is to
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interject seldomly if at all allowing each guest to give their perspectives on one another's thoughts essentially giving us the experience of a fly on the wall for the sorts of academic conversations that would ordinarily
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occur behind closed doors spurring research in real time one of the central issues of today's podcast is the concept of babbling which i haven't heard discussed virtually anywhere else outside of child development or language
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acquisition though it can be generalized metaphorically perhaps even literally to the vacuum fluctuations to interpret what vacuum fluctuations are doing as an indicator of the universe's proto-consciousness that is the universe
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babbling to understand itself but i won't spoil the surprise if you'd like to hear more podcasts like these then do consider going to patreon.com kurtjmungle as the patrons and the sponsors are the only reasons that i'm
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able to do this full time with regard to sponsors there's one for today's episode and that is brilliant during the winter break i decided to brush up on the fundamentals of information theory which is what constructor theory is heavily based in and i'd like to do an episode
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on that so i took brilliant's course on knowledge and uncertainty and random variables and after taking that course i could finally see why entropy is defined the way it is why the formula for it is extremely natural there are plenty of
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courses you can even learn group theory which is what's being referenced when you hear that the internal symmetries of the standard model is u1 cross s2 cross su 3 those are league groups visit
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brilliant.org toe to get 20 off the annual subscription i recommend that you don't stop before four lessons just keep pursuing until you've accomplished at least four and i think you'll be greatly surprised at the ease at which you can
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now comprehend subjects you previously had a difficult time grocking and now on to today's episode which is one that i'm extremely lucky to be able to present to you all you'll be able to see the mutual respect that the guests have for one
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another we start off actually by asking what is it that you respect about each other's work enjoy this theo locution between carl fristen michael levin and chris fields i've been extremely excited about this
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so professor what do you find unique about carl's and chris's work and what is it that you respect about them well what a great question i think all discussions should uh should should start with that question um uh there's a
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lot i mean i think i think uh the most basic thing i can say is this that i'm i'm often asked by by uh conference organizers and students as far as who who they should follow yeah who's whose work they should um keep track of and
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and so i keep lists and uh and and carl and chris are at the very top of two specific lists for me and i'm just always amazed about this is that the first the first is that um both of them are experts in at least three different
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fields but probably more so so so they have the ability to kind of merge really deep um understanding of different fields i mean there's many people that are experts in one thing but i'm just i'm just always incredibly impressed that's how they uh both of
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them can we weave together a really deep knowledge from from from diverse disciplines and and and that leads to the kind of the second thing that that i'm really inspired by which is just the kind of the sheer density of new ideas
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you know it's hard enough to push things in one just kind of one known direction and do science and so on but both both chris and carl's work um consistently make me think in new ways uh give me ideas i've never never thought of before
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it's just just just amazing so yeah so i'm super excited to be able to work with both of them and to have this discussion great chris same question but toward michael and carl
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uh well i can say that one thing i certainly admire is that uh michael and carl are both top-level biologists who are interested
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in theory and and deeply involved in theory and have a deep understanding of uh theory and
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uh something that i enormously admire is that both of them have that interest and yet are deeply engaged in practical applications
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uh carl and mental health and mike and regenerative biology and that's a rare combination
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carl what is it that you find unique about michael's and chris's work and what do you particularly respect about them as people perhaps i deliberately haven't rehearsed an answer so what i say comes from the
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heart um so with mike um i first met him vicariously through a friend giovanni pizzulo and didn't really know very much about his
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work until i visited his website and then i realized how influential and important he was and then i recognized all the little bulletins you get on social media and emails i started to
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recognize his name and realize that he was you know he was quite a mover and shaker out there what i like about both of them they both think really really fast and they both think out of the box um
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so i think what characterizes both of their thinking really is just to ask what is a thing in and of itself without making any prior assumptions and then putting it back together
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from basic principles and coming up with some sometimes counter-intuitive um conclusions and but for me almost uh universally exactly the same
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counter-intuitive conclusions i've come to after about 10 years of thinking about a particular problem but never dare tell anybody but they do they write it down very eloquently and they're very very productive
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chris i've known for less long and i've met him via mike um and in addition to that in the same way that many people i meet have physics envy and
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i've got quantum envy uh for about chris yeah he just seems to know so much and think about the world in a way which i don't have that sort of fluency in but it sounds really really useful and and
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quite correct so i'm hoping if i hang around long enough some of it will rub off on me should be able to use the words without sounding like an idiot what would be an example of this out-of-the-box thinking you mentioned
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thinking about what is a thing in and of itself what else there are numerous examples um the first thing that just came to mind was just putting together fundamental questions about
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self-organization if you were varela uh you know so autophagus self-assembly self-construction if you're a chemist it would be self-assembly if you're a theoretical biologist um you will be wondering about why on
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earth is it that um all multicellular organisms form because there's a deep paradox there yep if it is the case that i have to have a surface as a little organ then some of myself have cells have to
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stop replicating and yet that is in direct contradiction to the principles of natural selection i'm going to turn off my reproductive capacity my adaptive fitness so defined in a theoretical context so i just really sit down
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grasping the nettle i'm thinking about well these things exist what principles could possibly explain the paradoxes were looked at from sort of the unilateral the monothematic view of natural selection for example or the
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monothematic view of self-organization in physics so thinking out of the box literally in this instance um entails being able to take multiple perspectives on a particular problem and seeing the
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contradictions and seeing how they can be resolved now they'll be one of many examples uh look there was a paper like i'm afraid i can't remember the specific one perhaps mike and chris will be able to enlighten me but there was one
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paper written i i think about a year or two ago where they actually listed i think there were 15 basic conclusions about the the fundaments and the and the
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the nature of self-organization and self as distinct from other uh in any system and you know this listing uh 15 really interesting points and
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predictions all of which either um i'm sure will be formally demonstrably analytically um true uh or at least yield or be amenable to a
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mathematical analysis um or would be empirically verifiable um over the next few years what was that there was a paper in neuroscience of consciousness
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of arguing for a an approach to consciousness that spanned phylogeny and we were very interested in that paper
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specifically to look at bacteria and single cells and um facultative multicellular such as microbial biofilms
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and ask what do these systems know about the world how did they see the world uh how does it how does e coli perceive the
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world for example and we suggested that the the answer is in in terms of of the sorts of things that we call taste and
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viscosity but that experiences of taste and viscosity are perfectly good kinds of experiences and that if we think about how
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these kinds of systems deal with their worlds and solve problems within their worlds that that would give us a more unified understanding of what it meant
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to be a system that was aware and so you're trying to use e coli as a means of understanding yourself or humans by the way is this a project do
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you feel like your undertaking is an attempt for you to understand yourself or you're trying to understand humans like i'm wondering is this more philanthropic or it's selfish and then it bleeds into the philanthropic
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well i i actually also want to understand e coli and b we have we don't have a great understanding of of the lives of other organisms professor levin
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what puzzle do you find most important what do you think about on a semi daily basis or even perhaps multiple times a day and then we'll go around the table here with chris fields and carl fursten
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next and then it's essentially me taking a backseat and allowing you all to free flow just for the audience to know i know you all know this template already yeah um so so the thing i think about many times a day has to do with the
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scaling of cognition so i want to understand to two two major things one is how it is that uh some collection of competent uh parts comes together to form a
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an emergent self with preferences goals memories cognitive capacities that belong to it but not to the individual parts so i want to understand how that how that emerges how the goals of uh you know sort of humble um
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a simple uh simple kinds of systems scale up into much more grandiose goals that we see in during during development during behavior uh you know during uh culture and and so on and and i'm also very interested in uh the sort of the
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left side of that spectrum where does it begin you know is there really a zero on the spectrum i think that uh all of us we here would agree that there is a spectrum for these things it's not a set of binary categories but what happens at the very left side of the spectrum and
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so one of the first questions you know when we get to that that um that i'd written down to ask both chris and carlos to sort of comment on what does the what does the venn diagram look like of of the set of things that are alive versus the set of things that
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are cognitive yeah how do those two categories relate to each other until they overlap is one a subset of the other and what really happens at the very beginning you know like can we can we develop a kind of um
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which which i think i think both of them have been working on a kind of basically a kind of pan psychism that doesn't doesn't sort of paint on new cognitive mysteries on top of physics that works perfectly well but instead to try and to
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try to view physics from the bottom up as having already a useful cognitive lens on it and how does that help us to build up cognition so that's that's something that i think about every day
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chris um i i thought every day or almost every day for a long time about why we
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humans see objects embedded in space-time so why do we see things that we treat as independent of each
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other and why do we see them operate on them interact with them think about them as embedded in this coordinate system that
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we call space and uh equally important why do we see them as maintaining their identities as things over this other coordinate that we call
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time carl um i have to confess i spend recurrently most of my time thinking about me um but in an academic sense you know how do i
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work so it's a curious mixture of introspection and trying to understand why i can introspect uh in from the perspective or through the lens of a
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physicist so i i spend most of my time dissembling preconceptions the gifts that uh our sentience has given us um and try to reassemble them in relation to
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physics density dynamics uh you know that that has to be articulated in terms of the kind of maths that a physicist would use which would be effectively differential equations and the calculus of variations
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and having done that there are so many um there are sufficient number of moving parts but not that many uh but the combinatorics then lead you to the the kinds of questions that mike was was
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talking about so you know what different ways could this um physics of sentience um be manifest what possible ways could it be manifest and how does that address
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the distinction between um things particles creatures um that would show the kind of sense-making and to my mind an important aspect is planning that this would disambiguate them from other
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natural kinds or particular kinds that don't have that kind of facility and what underwrites that um so that's what i spend most of my time doing i have to say in conversation both with
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mike and chris and other people um there you can easily get distracted um in in a rightful way um by um thinking about that mechanics in uh
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exactly what chris was talking to which is a scale-free way but in my rhetoric that scale freeness speaks more to the coupling between different scales that mike was alluding to
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so how does this um mechanics this physics of sentience which which i understand largely in terms of probability theory and effectively bayesian um probability
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theory so what you have is a bayesian mechanics how does that basic mechanics apply at one scale and another scale and then of course the big questions is how did the two scales couple to each other so that
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that that for me is something that i i find myself increasingly pressed upon largely through conversations and collaborations um that does mean that i spend a lot of my time thinking about that and you're
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writing demos or mathematical equations trying to try to get to the um the uh the underpinnings of it mike i see you nodding so what is it about what carl said i'm sorry okay professor 11 i apologize and what is it
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that what is it that professor fristen said that has you feeling like you agree with it well as as usual i mean he said it perfectly i couldn't i couldn't say it better myself i think that's uh that's
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that's exactly the kind of um uh research agenda that i'm interested in i mean that's that really is the kind of a very good um description of what i think we're all looking for in a certain sense
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is there a difference between cognition and consciousness is one distinct is there overlap is someone a subset i i actually can't conceive of cognition without
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consciousness which i i prefer to call awareness not just to be perverse but because in many cases consciousness is
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used in a way that implicitly means self-consciousness whereas awareness is often used in a way that does not make that implication
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and it's i i find it difficult to conceive of cognition without any kind of awareness at all so so so could i just so i'll ask a question then based on what what chris just said and then what when you know
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and what carl has to say about it so so what do you think about the so-called hard problem is there in fact a hard problem at all i would um i would take andy clark's view on this
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uh who has worked closely with david chalmers i i i don't think so no i i i don't think that the hard problem in and of itself is um
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is the um interesting um focus of inquiry i think the um the move that i see in philosophy um has been to the meta problem or the meta hard problem which
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is um as andy clark puts it quite succinctly is why do we spend so much time puzzling about why we are aware so just asking that question
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um speaks to i think the nature of the heart problem which is a sort of very much a second order a meta um a metric capability that we can make sense of our own sense-making and
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we um associate that with selfhood so one has to ask the question what kinds of systems again i think particles or creatures would have the capacity
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to represent selfhood and furthermore represent the counterfactuals that would enable you to ask the question why am i conscious that immediately just logically presupposes
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that there is an alternative hypothesis some other counterfactual that i'm not conscious so imagine now you're talking to a creature you're talking to me that has this capacity to imagine
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counterfactuals that cannot exist so that's a remarkable capacity to have you know um from my point of view a sort of internal world moral regenerative model where counterfactuals can exist is quite
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remarkable i i don't imagine that a thermostat or a virus or an e coli will have a sufficiently sophisticated set of you know electrochemical uh dynamics or kinetics
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that would enable them to physically represent counterfactuals of this sort and i could go on um the the usual line of argument is why do we have models why do we have the capacity to represent counterfactuals um
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the you end up with saying yes you have to have them just if you [Music] contemplate things at plan so things plan
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they have to have um an ability to simulate the future that because they have to simulate or represent at some elemental level the consequences of their action upon the
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world and if they have now the capacity to represent something that has not yet happened namely in the future then they now have the capacity to represent counter factual outcomes so i think
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the meta hard problem inherits simply because we have a sufficiently temporally deep generative model that can represent the consequences of our actions and of course using the word
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our implies some kind of elemental agency and some kind of self-worth because it's only me that's doing the acting and the consequences of my action not your action uh so so
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in in that sense i think that the hard problem um sort of pales into into insignificance in relation to the the meta problem of why it is that we have philosophers
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can i pursue that just a little bit i think you raise an extraordinarily interesting point here carl and so i want to ask you
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from a phylogenetic perspective do you think that organisms that can plan necessarily are able to represent multiple
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counterfactuals so let's give an example of suppose you're a cheetah chasing a gazelle you're planning your moves
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while looking at the gazelle's moves and your objective is success do you think that the cheetah worries about the other counterfactual condition
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where the gazelle isn't caught or does it just represent this one counterfactual condition that is in a sense the goal state i think that's an excellent question i personally think that
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and when i answer these questions i think how would i simulate this how would i put a cheater in silico and integrate according to the differential equations that must be present under certain
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assumptions um and my guess is that the cheetah chasing the gazelle would as you say just be pursuing a path of least action and it would not have an explicit representation of alternative paths so
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it would be responding in the moment in a reflexive habitual way so that's a really important question because if we don't have or all of our behavior is just a manifestation of pursuing
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those paths of least resistance or mathematically those you know paths of space reaction um then there is no counterfactual to select from and there is no notion of planning in the sense of i am going to
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do this as opposed to that but that doesn't mean to say biological organisms um don't have the capacity to plan multiple futures and i'll just give you one real simple example of um
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your our brains and i would imagine even the brains of reptiles to a certain extent um being able to plan multiple um actions in the future and that's in eye movements
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so if i just take one of the simplest problems in terms of planning or perhaps not the simplest but one of the um the the the problems of planning that have to be resolved within um
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you know several hundred milliseconds given that we have to choose where to look every 250 milliseconds in order to gather the right kind of information to make you know to construct the scene in which we are situated and coming back to
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your preoccupation chris your you know how on earth do we then explain these sparse um uh psychotic samples within some frame of reference and
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space-time sort of phrase how do we you know sense make with reference to some constructs such as space and time but the point i'm making here is the anatomy of um
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many uh brains many phenotypes does have the capacity to represent the consequences of looking everywhere at the same time at once before they have looked so these
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are sort of sometimes referred to as salience maps and we know that there are good candidates for these salience maps for example the deep layers of the superior colliculus and what could have argue um possibly some
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anatomy of the pulvina so if you look at the um if you like the neuronal encoding of the salience of where the salience of the next place to look
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what's going to grab my attention and make that be manifest overtly with an eye movement to go look over there then there you can interpret i think the anatomy the oculomotor system and
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especially the um that which underlies uh circadian control synthetic eye movements as entertaining a whole range possibly millions of potential um
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plans of action and the consequences and then the brain literally selects the one that's most likely which you can simulate by doing bump attractors on these sort of salience maps or representations of the the
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salience of the epistemic affordance or the expected information again if i looked over here and over here and over here looked over here you select that your eyes jump over there and off you go again so i think it's a great question and in a sense speaks i think to a
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certain extent to what mike was alluding to before that there are certain setups or a certain sort of neuronal electrochemical um infrastructures out there
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that can be read as just pursuing passively such action in a reflexive way and there are others that may have this um richer structure this deeper structure that could be uh support the
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you know the the the active sentence and the sort of what i i'm reading now is cognition if cognition entails planning uh then i certainly think there has to be an act of selection in play here um
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selection what does that mean from something from what well multiple alternatives and then we come back to the central notion of this this counter factual mike is that what you had in mind in terms of breaking this sort of uh pan
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psychism uh sort of trap you know the different kinds of self-organization yeah i mean that's certainly certainly related you know uh the thing the the thing that i and and so i agree with
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chris's kind of gut feeling on this i find it very difficult to imagine cognition without some sort of awareness or or simple consciousness however what what strikes me as different than real about the hard
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problem is that unlike all the quote unquote easy problems and maybe unlike the meta hard problem we kind of know the format or the shape of answers to those questions right they're either they're numbers or their
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equations or their lists of capacities you know we we know what what a proper answer would look like and yet i find it very hard to imagine if we if somebody claimed to have a a good theory of consciousness and i
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were to ask them okay well what is the prediction of your theory in this particular case i don't know what the format of the answer looks like because numbers and the typical things we get don't do the trick they you know they're sort of third person descriptions and so
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so is the answer does the answer come in the form of a poem is it art is it you know something you have to literally plug yourself into to then have that experience like what's the i i find it different because i don't know what if
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we had a true a correct theory i don't know what that theory would output you know unlike for all these other theories where at least we have some idea of what the output looks like well that's a better answer to the hard problem then that's very good
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before i'm sure the answer is quantum physics and that's that's what it's going to look like if we could if we could understand it the answer would be in quantum physics
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chris do you agree well i i'd like to to back up a little bit uh and in a sense play off what carl was just saying about alternatives and the role of
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alternatives in the heart problem i mean chalmers drives his arguments about the hard problem with the alternative of unconsciousness and
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this alternative makes great sense against the background of a particular set of assumptions about
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physics uh which is the assumption that nothing is going on cognitively in the
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physical world that there's that there's no reason to talk about uh experience or awareness or anything like that
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when we're talking about rocks or billiard balls or planets or electrons or anything else and in that case
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there is this cut that is not really a cut in scale of spatial scale or temporal scale
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but is in a sense a cut in some measure of complexity that suggests that below some cut point which may be a bright line and
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maybe a fuzzy area who knows there's the possibility or below some cut point there's there's no awareness at all none zero and above that cut point there's some
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possibility of awareness and in that case one's forced to say how what what could be added by complexity other than complexity
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to produce awareness and it's that intuition i believe that drives the hard problem do you mind explaining that a bit more what can be added by complexity that's not complexity or the sentence
00:33:06
well um yeah and one way to put it is complexity as complexity increases some magic has to happen and
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you suddenly get awareness and it's not clear quite how much complexity one has to add but as soon as one reaches the the right amount then uh
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out of the blue you've got awareness whereas without crossing that threshold you you had no awareness whatsoever so there's a zero point and the zero points somewhere on the scale of
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complexity and it's nowhere near the bottom so i think one can i can i think one can view a lot of research on consciousness
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as a way to escape that argument so i'll consider integrated information theory oh
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in integrated information theory the criterion for consciousness or awareness is actually very simple you you need to have an internal feedback loop
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and if you've got an internal feedback loop you're at least a candidate for being aware as long as you're not embedded in something bigger that has bigger internal feedback loops
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and if one thinks about the work of peter strawson for example from a philosophical perspective his arguments toward
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pansysm are all arguments of the form there's no way to draw the lie in the scale of complexity
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and get a place where magic basically plausibly happens so i think i think chalmers did a real service in in
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posing the problem in that way because it forced us to think about this idea of magic or you could call it emergence if you wanted to of something completely new that was
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awareness now i i do agree with carl that quantum theory can help us dispel the problem uh by by being in effect a theory that's
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about awareness but we can we can get to that farther down the road do you have any reason to believe that we're embedded in something larger you mentioned in iit there's the feedback loop that is
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necessary for consciousness and you said that one is conscious as long as one is not embedded in something else that's of which that is conscious like there's a larger feedback loop there do you see there being some larger
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feedback loop some people say the universe itself is conscious or that societies can act as some larger level consciousness like with each of us acting as neurons in some sense
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well i would certainly wouldn't want to rule that view out a priori i mean it's it's obvious that we're embedded in much bigger systems and
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i think we understand essentially nothing about the cognitive capacities of those systems yeah michael yeah yeah i think i think that's a
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really important question and i i think a lot about the perspective of let's say you know if you were a neural network or something like this being trained and so on what would the perspective of a sub component of that be what you know let's
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say if you had the capacity as a neuron to sort of look around and ask yourself you know do i do i live in a cold mechanical universe that doesn't care what happens or uh is there some some sort of uh agency in my environment that
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you know am i when i'm as a piece of that network am i am i learning from my environment or am i being trained right because when you're being trained right the real question is like how many how many um agents are there in that interaction is it just you learning as
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you will you're the boss and you're sort of learning whatever from your environment or are you actually being trained because the environment is an agent with an agenda that is training you for some particular purpose right and so so this question of uh how would
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you know so so you look around and you see you say to yourself well if you're a piece of this of this network and it's being trained for some image image recognition task you know you you would be i think wrong to come to the conclusion that you live in a in
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a mechanical universe you would you should come to the conclusion that it's actually it's clearly rewarding you and punishing you for for specific things it's not neutral with respect to what you do and for some reason it really likes it when you find you know you find
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um pictures of dog eyes or something like this and you have no idea that what what it does is recognize dog faces out of you know all the other all the other inputs so no doubt there's some kind of gerdelian limit to to be able to actually
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understand what the larger system is doing but i wonder if we can even have some evidence that uh just just for the fact that yes there is a greater you know sort of a agential dynamic going on in which i'm caught up even if you're
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not able to you know sort of comprehend what that's going to what that's going to be i i don't know i don't know what that's going to look like but i think it's pretty important and i think as chris said we really don't have a very good science at all of
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trying to predict or control the cognitive capacities of systems made up of parts so so we can know many things about parts cells robotics or whatever and we routinely make these
00:38:59
larger systems have then and then get surprised about what it does or doesn't do or what what what the goals are going to be what goals is it capable of pursuing what preferences does it have this is probably an existential level um
00:39:11
job for for society is to get a good science of that of that going you have done that there haven't you well we've started anyway i mean you couldn't i i would go film that i think i think your work would
00:39:30
represent a substantive and established um formal framework to address exactly those issues um and you can see your embryonic versions
00:39:41
arising in many different fields i just came back from a meeting of economists and financiers and they are trying to make the move from behavioral economics to cognitive
00:39:54
economics and they were exactly addressing these kinds of issues you're understanding the um the notion of distributed cognition in a market um so you know and ultimately
00:40:07
that they cannot they'll come knocking at your door i can see that i can see exactly the sequence of people um you know searching around for people to talk about um illuminating
00:40:18
that realization that the i mean it comes back to what we were talking about before where you've started and you know i was picking up on the um on the the link between different scales of self-organization where every scale
00:40:30
has you know complies with the same principles but how does that contextualize and i think one really interesting example of that um is to think about an individual in an ensemble or a society and just to
00:40:44
wrestle the argument back to pick up on something that chris was saying about you know you know if if there is a bright line between the kind of mechanics that would qualify
00:40:57
as conscious in the sense of being self-aware and i'm distinguishing that from the kind of consciousness that would just entail qualitative experience
00:41:09
you know a loss of phenomenal uh transparency so i'm talking about now self-awareness is you know one of one of the bright lines that may be very blurry blurry and vague but certainly one which
00:41:21
is induced by uh the hard problem you know just asking a simple question your what kind of explanation for my world whether i'm a single neuron or a single person
00:41:35
and would enable me or justify the notion that i am myself and the obvious answer is when i have to disambiguate between the
00:41:47
consequences of my action and your action if you are very similar to me so if i you know managed to survive in on an alien planet where there are no structures like like me that could cause the same sense to
00:42:01
consequences then there would be no problem inferring did i cause that or did you cause that so just having um the existence of a population of con specifics in some sort
00:42:14
of formal structural sense suddenly induces the inference problem did you cause that do i cause that and of course that naturally calls for generative models or internal dynamics representations on the inside
00:42:27
um that entertain the hypothesis on the notion that that's me as opposed to not me so you get for free in and only in this context where you've
00:42:38
put lots of these particles together like you know the if you like the license or the motivation to have a hypothesis um you know a representation of selfhood um
00:42:51
that you know from the statisticians point of view is exactly the justification for the increased complexity that chris was talking about so i was listening to that really interesting sort of uh um sort of
00:43:05
nod to iit and all it brings to the table in terms of this sort of you know commitment to some threshold crossing or trans traversing a cut with increasing complexity but why i
00:43:18
mean one simple answer is that um you know if you ask a statistician what is complexity and they'll tell you well um it's basically the degrees of freedom you're using up to explain some sensory
00:43:31
data um you could articulate it as a kl or relative entry between a posterior prior if you're a bayesian but in essence it's just the degrees of freedom you're um using in order to accurately
00:43:44
explain these data so mathematically the evidence is equal to the accuracy minus the complexity so why would you need what why why is that useful well an increase in complexity
00:43:56
license is only licensed by an increase in the accuracy so the simple argument would go and if i am obliged to model and predict and explain
00:44:07
a world and that is constituted by other things like me then the accuracy of my predictions will be greatly enhanced if i have a representation of me as distinct from
00:44:19
you and if that entails an increase in the degrees of freedom namely adding in this extra kind of a hypothesis and everything that it entails then
00:44:30
i'm going to have a greater complexity but it's a complexity that is more than paid for by the uh by the increase increase in the accuracy and i you know just coming back to you know my original
00:44:43
point um yeah i think a lot of the work um that you've done at the cellular level um would be very gracefully translated to the societal level and to things like
00:44:55
economics and to echo niche construction and in ethology and i know chris is probably wanting to say this but language has one way of facilitating
00:45:07
that notion that ability to um to efficiently with minimum complexity in this instance um do this distributed cognition so i'm both trained being trained and learning at the same time and we're doing it
00:45:20
together to invent some kind of generalized synchrony so i mentioned language for chris there the font hope he wants to pick that one up
00:45:32
oh well well again what i'd actually like to do is back up a little bit and uh put some of what you just said into very simple active inference language
00:45:46
if if i see something happening on my markov blanket on my interface with the world then i always have the question
00:45:59
did i do that or did the world do that where the world means everything outside me and in a sense the answer is always the world did it so
00:46:14
the question becomes did the world do that in response to something i did to it or did it just do it not not in consequence of any of my
00:46:27
actions and so one gets immediately to this kind of babbling scenario that we've talked about many times in which an infant or a robot or some system
00:46:41
is trying to figure out by measuring correlations whether the world's inputs to it have anything
00:46:53
to do with its inputs to the world and just asking that question requires enormous representative capacity because one has to represent one's
00:47:10
actions and represent them pretty well in time and one has to have a good memory to represent enough actions to get any
00:47:24
kind of statistical support for drawing an inference about correlation and that memory has to be represented as a memory
00:47:38
uh not just part of one's own current input so i think this question that you posed is really the key question faced by any
00:47:53
agent at all that's trying to get a model off the ground which which in a sense gets back to the question that mike asked early early on about how does this all start
00:48:06
uh maybe it starts with babbling in very simple systems you know i i was thinking recently uh this this this whole issue of how many
00:48:18
agents are there and where is the border between the agent and the world and how do you self-model that border is is a fascinating topic and there's a there's an amazing um developmental model for this which is which is that you know we often talk
00:48:30
about one embryo and the embryo does this in the embryo does that but actually what happens at the beginning let's say for example an amniote embryos is that there's a there's a flat blasted disc which has just a few cell layers thick so it's kind of think of it like a
00:48:43
like a frisbee and it just has a few cell layers and normally what has to happen is that one point in this in this disc breaks symmetry and then organizes the primary axis of the first embryo and basically
00:48:55
tells all the other cells don't do it because because i'm doing it and that's how you end up with one embryo now that process is very easily perturbed and and i many people have done it i used to do it in my in my graduate work and what you can do is if
00:49:07
you perturb that process that initial blasto disc that undifferentiated sort of pool of of cells which are these sort of proto uh low-level proto-proto-agents that pool can break up into not one embryo
00:49:20
but actually multiple and so you can have so i did this in in bird embryos and you could have twins and chicken and duck and things like this you can have in humans humans have exactly the same structure you can get them head to head you can have to get them side by side you can
00:49:32
get all sorts of geometries you can get triplets you can get multiple individuals awry emerging by different partitions of this of this really kind of medium this particular medium where
00:49:44
where you have a bunch of cells and you don't know ahead of time how many individuals at the level of how many larger individuals so embryos are going to arise from this medium because the the dynamics by which in that's you know local activation and long-range
00:49:57
inhibition and things like that the the dynamics that break up that that undifferentiated ocean of of potential selves into one two or three or more selves is actually um it's very dynamic it can it can go different ways
00:50:10
and then you get interesting interesting things like this so for example you might know that human conjoined twins that are you know sort of stuck together side to side one of the twins often has left right asymmetry defects and it's
00:50:22
because when you have two twins side by side the cells in the middle both twins can't quite agree on who they belong to are they the right side of this twin or are they the left side of that twin and both twins think they belong to them but in fact they're overlapping they're the
00:50:34
same cells and so one side will have correct left and right the other guy the other side will have like two rights for example right and this ends up this ends up giving one of the twins laterality defects with respect to heart and gut patterning and so so their models each
00:50:47
twins as as the collective of cells tries to compute uh things like which which where things are and what's left and what's right and so on their models can disagree with each other they can they can draw the boundary between self and
00:51:00
world in different ways and you can have these sort of disputes over certain areas as to where who they actually belong to and and so so i'm just i'm just incredibly interested in this in this process of of emerging of
00:51:12
individualization so to speak out of this like ocean of of potentiality these cells you know 50 000 cells and some number of individuals at the um at the embryo level will be formed and each of them will have specific goals in
00:51:25
morphospace each of them will try to achieve very specific morphologies uh and uh and they've and then you don't know ahead of time how many there were going to be you know carl what occurs to you when you hear
00:51:37
that um ambiguity um again sort of um just thinking about the imperatives for self-organization so
00:51:52
when i hear that was a fascinating story um and don't let me forget we ought to explain to the viewers what babbling means just in this context as well because that's quite illuminating perhaps we can i'm not sure that the cells do do motor babbling um but they
00:52:06
certainly resolve um the same kind of problem um so my um chris correct me if i'm wrong but by babbling all we mean is that when you're first born into any universe you've got
00:52:18
to um work out or test the hypothesis that i cause that or the world caused that and so you don't know you don't have a self model you don't you know whether this is sort of
00:52:31
a declarative model completely so personal just hardwired into the um the synaptic efficacy and connectivity of your brain so the first thing you have to do is just to work out what you can control
00:52:45
and what you can't control and the idea is that you you engage in what i would call epistemic or respond to epistemic affordances or epistemic
00:52:57
plans that reveal knowledge they resolve uncertainty and in this instance it's the uncertainty about whether i was the cause of this rattle rattling
00:53:09
so if you imagine um motor babbling as manifest in a little baby rattling its rattle generating both the sensations
00:53:22
from the muscles and the skin but also the visual and the auditory sensations all co-occur providing definitive evidence that there's something special about
00:53:34
this process and this event that um that provides the basis for the hypothesis there's a unitary cause there's a unitary cause which is me shaking the rattle but of course it may
00:53:48
take several months if not years to actually get there to actually realize that causes me so what can you imagine sort of you know robots learning about the uh the manipulator that they can
00:54:00
articulate all the the way in which they can move around and you know um for ambulate um but i think the idea bring it back to sort of where the self had come from um
00:54:14
it would um rest upon the testing the hypothesis which has to be physically represented with a deep more complex genetic model and sense making that in fact it's me that's actually
00:54:28
caused this single cause of all these proprioceptive motor sensations visual sensations auditory sensations um and that would be especially prescient when you're starting to realize that some of these
00:54:42
causes which you thought were you of the sort associated with nurturing and suckling um were actually due to mum and we come back to this argument to to actually have a good hypothesis which
00:54:54
explains why i am not in charge of mum because she is now not always responding to me when i cry yeah to have to explain that i have to now develop a hypothesis yes it was me causing all of this
00:55:07
um but sometimes there's something else else out there that's not me but very much like me and that's mum and then you can see how there would be a pressure in terms of you know finding the best
00:55:18
explanations for your sensations to to have that so if you take that notion now think of the same problem uh from the point of view of a cell um you know what are the impaired or a bunch of cells that have to work
00:55:31
together or will ultimately form a uh an embryo via this process of symmetry breaking you you know you have to ask what are the underlying imperatives how how could it be any other way um and of course it
00:55:45
could be more like i said it could be lots of ways but the ways the ways in which it goes wrong um which would be another way of saying um those rare occasions or the the ways
00:55:57
that it doesn't happen in consequence of their rarity um involve this ambiguity again literally in this in the context of some cells not knowing whether they're
00:56:10
belonging to one twin or or another twin from the from the cell's perspective um so um i was just thinking about the nature of ambiguity and of course you know it is exactly the same um
00:56:22
one can account for the simple observation that self-organization does not tolerate ambiguity does not
00:56:33
tolerate uncertainty it's only um manifest in the context of accurate and well-evidenced definitive uh exchanges so come back to chris's notion of your
00:56:47
sense making projecting onto my markov blanket or my holographic screen from the point of view of the quantum formulation that i need to resolve all the uncertainty uh
00:56:59
as much uncertainty as i can but put that another way um as in a more slightly more deflationary way stuff which we see the way the universe seems to work is um
00:57:10
can be described as um realizing processes that minimize this this kind of uncertainty and ambiguity and simply maximize the mutual predictability of what's being projected
00:57:24
or impressed upon my surface on my holographic screen or my markov blanket uh so i you know that's what i was that was going through my mind i thought it was a beautiful example of of you know
00:57:36
when it goes wrong the the the the the the uncertainty in ambiguity you're in the game and uh and that tells you something quite fundamental about when it goes right and when it goes right it's just
00:57:50
basically um a statement of what exists and what you know what what perseveres over time chris did you have anything to say to add to that well i would be interested to uh to see how actually
00:58:04
how mike responds to that uh discourse with respect to the example of this embryonic sheet where
00:58:16
the cells are each trying to figure out what they're supposed to do uh and there's they're still uh
00:58:30
they still certainly believe that they should be reproducing so they they definitely do that and they signal to each other but somehow their the collective effect of all of that signaling to each other
00:58:43
is to organize different roles for them for each for themselves so how does the symmetry breaking occur yeah so so that's that's really interesting so as i was hearing um carl
00:58:55
talk about this i realized a couple of things that um first of all uh as we were saying before feedback loops are absolutely central to this process because the easiest way to prevent any of this from happening and to end up
00:59:07
with a uh uh um kind of a mono um you know sort of uh i you know a very a featureless sheet where there are no embryos is to block that is to block the positive feedback loop that yeah so so that long that that short range
00:59:20
inhibition long range activation that says to one cell i'm going to now be the organizer i'm going to make this axis everybody else don't do it you those are both feedback loops and so if you break those feedback loops you get nothing so so the feedback loops are right at the
00:59:33
beginning of this process and and the other thing that that i thought was really interesting that carl just said is about the cells babbling so what i think it's a really good name for what we see when you take a cell and you put it out
00:59:45
into a dish what you'll see you'll and in fact in any in any new environment you will see two things that i think are probably babbling in different spaces one is that in physical space you will see that it's incredibly active it's constantly
00:59:57
putting out and pulling back these these um kind of extensions so these cytoplasmic extensions that have all kinds of sensors on them they're not just sitting the cell is never just sitting there waiting for something to happen it's constantly probing its environment it's
01:00:09
incredibly active i'm sure it's taking all kinds of energy costs to do all this um there are videos of it that are just remarkable on online and you know we see them every day the other the other babbling takes place in transcriptional
01:00:20
space so gene expression is also never just sort of still and this is you know these are the genes that are expressed and i'm just gonna sit here and do that all the genes are constantly going up and down within specific ranges as it sort of wiggles in this transcriptional
01:00:33
space and i think both and probably physiologically metabolically i bet this is going on in all these other spaces and i think babbling is an excellent uh framework for for understanding what it's actually doing it's actually taking
01:00:46
these little actions looking for evidence of specific things that it can then make use of to start to draw you know to draw boundaries and and as chris as chris was saying i think what happens is that
01:00:57
in this blastoderm you get uh what what what will happen is that once once that that individuation starts where there's a specific cell that starts to go down this road of uh being
01:01:09
the organizer of this new larger collective it immediately begins to distort the action space for all the nearby cells it starts putting out all kinds of signals you know reward signals and and physical forces and all these
01:01:22
other things that now are going to bend the uh the option for all the other cells and the best example of that we have are these xenobots where these things are just made of embryonic skin cells and if you look at a standard
01:01:35
old embryo you get this idea that well what do skin cells want to do they want to be a passive two-dimensional layer on the outside of the animal they do nothing except sit there keep out the bacteria you know nice and a boring two-dimensional life but what you find
01:01:47
out is that that's only true because the other cells are basically bullying them into it left to their own devices with the in the absence of these instructive interactions with the rest of the embryo what they what the skin cells actually want to do is get together into a
01:01:59
three-dimensional uh kind of ball like architecture they are self-motile that you know they'll run around and move and do very have various behaviors including make copies of themselves if provided with materials and so that is completely
01:02:11
um kind of obscured by standard development where what you're seeing actually is is cells in a space that was really deformed by by all their neighbors right and that's you know that kind of process that that that starts to devel you know
01:02:24
make them make those distinctions where the embryo the embryo can tell what part uh what parts are inside and what parts are supposedly outside of itself and that that gets reinforced by all these early activities
01:02:37
carl or chris do you want to jump in on that i think i think we've been describing cyclists that says basically that it's curiosity all the way down every system is trying to figure out
01:02:50
what's going on i was struck with that with this image of the little cells putting out fingers you know this is expiration your sort of true blue exploration and mathematically it's simply as it says it's um
01:03:03
what what artificial intelligence um research aspires to which is artificial curiosity you know going out there getting the right kind of data
01:03:16
that's going to maximally resolve your uncertainty and paint the way the way forward and of course it's intimately related to planning in the sense you have to um
01:03:28
realize that palpation you know whether it's a little cell palpating whether it's failure or podia or um whether it's me palpating my visual world i move my eyes around or whether it's the
01:03:41
little baby babbling and palpating it's cot this this this this palpation has to be planned it could be planned in the sense of the gazelle sorry because it's not the
01:03:52
gazelle the cheetah chasing the gazelle so it doesn't have to be very sophisticated cognitive conscious planning but certainly has to has to be planned it has to have this sort of curious behavior um i mean it you know
01:04:05
it strikes me that that is such a fundamental um aspect that i think would qualify behaviors that have that aspect as cognitive in
01:04:17
some sense and it's so fundamental because of course it's it's just an expression of dynamics that apply to um action upon the world um
01:04:30
that underwrite everything that we do as certainly as scientists and one could imagine as as human beings but certainly as scientists you know that the maths of curiosity was
01:04:42
was actually worked out um by dennis lindley in the 1950s um in terms of expected information gain and then reintroduced by people like david mckay in the context of active learning so bringing this active notion
01:04:56
that you can learn by actively acquiring the right kind of data that optimizes that kind of learning and it became known as the principles of optimum bayesian experimental design
01:05:11
so it's exactly the same kind of curiosity that we as scientists use all the time whenever we design an experiment it's basically configuring actively configuring some process to generate
01:05:23
something that can be sensed or measured that that maximally resolves our uncertainty or affords the greatest amount of information so you know the three of us as scientists uh have
01:05:36
become um experts at this kind of formal curiosity simply you know just by acquiring uh knowledge about in the in the particular paradigms or
01:05:47
setups and the fields that we find ourselves in the right way to do experiments but you could argue that that's life you know in a sense that is the the infant bubbling uh it is you know
01:06:00
that kind of sense making getting actively getting the right kind of data to work out your place in the world uh to work out what you know what you should do next
01:06:11
is one of the most existentially important imperatives um and you know i was struck out you know but the mechanics that mike was talking about in terms of the you know
01:06:23
the little skin cells left their own devices have it having a party and forming balls and wandering around i mean you know one could apply that kind of mechanics to people couldn't you or even even
01:06:34
cultures and countries we're all trying to find our place and we're all trying to work out how to respond to those constraints people around us at many different scales put on our behavior and try and infer
01:06:50
well how am i meant to behave in this situation so even if we all start off with the same genetic code and the same sort of model of you know how people behave the context in which we find ourselves
01:07:03
now needs to be inferred in order to have to know how to behave in this context either with a child or as a mother as a politician or as an aid worker or a first responder whatever you want you have to make that inference and
01:07:16
of course that inference inferring that context requires the curious behavior that that chris had picked up on in mike's example
01:07:29
wow could could you know what i'd love to hear is each of you talk about um what is the simplest most basic uh thing so you know hopefully going down to like
01:07:41
physics prior to life but but whatever you like what is the most basic thing that is able to do that because that's what i find in in talking about this stuff to other communities the thing that people are the most resistant to is this idea that these kind of dynamics
01:07:54
this this kind of uh exploration curiosity prediction all of these things that we're talking about that you know people people think it's it's brains first and then you can do all these these these great things i i would love to hear um you know what you think is
01:08:07
the simplest physical system that can do that kind of thing so that we can talk about how far down it actually goes while chris is thinking about that with a profound answer not a trivial answer but a formal um
01:08:25
answer uh i i think it's um you'd have to identify the um the depth of planning um that underwrote the the dynamics of the behavior of the
01:08:38
system um in question um and that would be basically if you were putting this in a sort of path integral formulation it would be the sort of the the amount of time over
01:08:50
which you are integrating your paths and you're evaluating the best way forward um once you move once you move from uh very short time scales
01:09:02
um then the depth of that planning i think eludes um physical realizations that could be written down in terms of um representations in terms of
01:09:15
concentrations and um depolarizations and the like um and one has to move to a quantum discrete time representation so you know
01:09:28
i guess i'm basically making the difference between the sort of um the the the kind of dynamics you'd find in a uh in chemotaxis or a thermostat um
01:09:41
that could be written down as differential equations in fact the kind of differential equations we used in one of those early pattern formation papers and knowing your place uh approaches um where
01:09:53
everything could be articulated in terms of differential equations so that there is a kind of planning but it's not of the curious kind that we talked about it's just following the most likely paths of at least action so i would say
01:10:07
that they're not cognitive in the sense that they have planning um so i put chemotaxis and thermostats and possibly most viruses probably at a precognitive
01:10:18
or proto-cognitive level but as soon as you get to um generator models that can roll out deep into the future and i i repeat just when you try to implement this in silico
01:10:32
you know using computer simulations you really have to move to a discrete time representation um which i think is a non-trivial thing i mean just for example remember the sort of the eye movement example yeah we sense make
01:10:45
by getting little snapshots of the world every 250 milliseconds uh it's not like i've got i am a thermostat and i'm taking a continuous record of the temperature that is a continuous i'm actually getting
01:10:57
quantal observations um and i think once you move to that kind of generative model or biophysics that entails um the gradient flows under that genitive model
01:11:11
then i think you're in a position to talk about sort of planning and cognition and curiosity of the kind that would we're talking about uh so i you know i'd literally put time constants on this i'd say about you know 300
01:11:23
milliseconds if you've got the ability to represent the future 300 milliseconds you know sorry represent the consequences of your actions more than 300 milliseconds in the future then i put you in
01:11:35
having crossed that one of those cuts um and moved from from being a sort of um yeah a virus to you know to to i don't know perhaps an insect i'm not sure
01:11:49
perhaps you had to go are you seriously putting the 300 ml seconds forward or like or is that facetious um it's it's facetious but but not as facetious as it might as you
01:12:02
might think i do think that they're yeah i think there's a there's one way of celebrating the um the escapes from pan psychism that we
01:12:15
started off with when you know when mike was saying what he spends his time talking about one of the ways is to commit to vagueness and you know how many um how many grains of sand do i need before
01:12:25
this is all becomes a pile um and try and work out what the uh what the quantity is uh that defines that spectrum that we were talking about before uh along the switch there is vagueness at some point consciousness of
01:12:39
a certain kind um arises um but i also think there are natural kinds that actually have bright lines between them and you know what i'm saying here and i i don't think
01:12:52
i said it before and i probably wouldn't say it again um but unless i've simulated it but certainly in my experience qualitatively different kinds of generative models that represent time in
01:13:06
very very different ways you can get so mathematically things like kalman filters that can be cast or linear quadratic control robotics and the like that can be cast purely in
01:13:17
terms of futures that are represented in terms of velocities and accelerations and higher order motions that are just in the dynamics and the equations of motion uh and you can realize and build these things you can simulate them and they
01:13:30
behave in a very plausible way you can get them to do handwriting you can get them to self-organize and do all sorts of interesting things our thermostat but that's um
01:13:42
that's as far as it goes these things don't show curious behavior to do curious behavior you're really gonna roll out much further into the future and in running out further into the future it's very difficult to represent the future just using differential
01:13:55
equations unless you move to very very high orders of motion and at which point you start to sort of you know to minimize that complexity start to articulate things in discrete time and then the maths and so the mass
01:14:08
the new the um numerics become much simpler and doable and then you've got a qualitatively different kind of genitive model you move from a continuous to a discrete
01:14:20
time a quant a quantized generative model um so that for me is not does not allow a vagueness you know there is actually a natural kind that will represent things in the moment in terms
01:14:33
of flows and dynamics and other natural kinds that will represent things um in terms of discrete not universal clock time but discrete iterations um and i'm saying that the you know for for
01:14:46
certainly our scale of interactions and the way that we sense make i would have thought 300 milliseconds was not a controversial um i say that because that's the cognitive moment it's also the time interval between the way that
01:14:58
we sample the world not just with our eyes but when we sniff we sniff at a frequency which means that each new sampling of that well that palpation with our chemo acceptors and olfactory
01:15:10
receptors is again every couple you know every 200 milliseconds so suggest to me there's a sort of discrete belief updating um and it is a discrete belief updating that is underwritten by
01:15:22
the way we act the plans have to be in these discrete chunks of time so that's where the 300 second milliseconds come from you see it everywhere mice whisking they whisk at that frequency so they touch the palpate
01:15:35
every 300 milliseconds the way i'm speaking now every phoneme is reaching your ears every 300 milliseconds or so or or possibly less so wherever you look in
01:15:47
our biological scale that's they does seem to be this uncharacteristic uh timestamp that's purely empirical so you know the facetious aspect inherits from the
01:16:02
fact that that's that's very egocentric it's just for things like me i don't know if it's the things like cells or quantum physics well it's interesting because in physics the number three has an interesting role in fundamental
01:16:15
physics because there's three generations of of matter and there's that number three crops up and it's a mystery as to why so it sounds like the number 300 or 300 milliseconds a unit attached to it or
01:16:26
neuroscience maybe a a fundamental constant so chris what are some of the deep thoughts that you were having well i i was just having a visual impression actually when mike was
01:16:38
talking and um of babbling and the visual impression was of our our sort of model of the quantum vacuum
01:16:52
and when we think of when we think of the vacuum or at least i think of it visually as little things popping in and out of existence all the time
01:17:05
and so one can think of that as a as a kind of babbling right the the field itself is exploring what's going on outside of itself
01:17:18
that's extremely interesting by uh forming a little entity to go off and explore and then report back so this is a this is a very different picture from the one that that
01:17:33
carl gave in that um but i suppose it also has a similarity or two that when we write down
01:17:44
uh a model of that activity it is discrete it is operating in a discrete kind by generating discrete events even though it's it's modeled in a
01:17:57
continuous space time which uh once when digs a little bit deeply the continuous space time itself becomes discrete but
01:18:11
this raises a question for me which is another of the things that i think about a lot um which is the question of
01:18:24
what we mean by randomness and certainly to take a bayesian point of view where probabilities are all subjective uh it becomes very difficult to say what
01:18:41
randomness might mean if if used in a way that's meant to be objective or to refer to something objective and we model things like fluctuations in the vacuum as
01:18:54
random which from a bayesian point of view just means it's uncertain to us it represents information that we don't have and quite possibly can't get
01:19:09
even in principle but if we think of that system as an agent then of course you're expected to be exploring its world whatever it is whatever
01:19:25
uh exists that's not it and maybe we can really think of babbling all the way down as a model of of what's happening in
01:19:40
these phenomena that we persist in thinking of as random but we also don't typically think of these sorts of systems as agents this is this is this is incredibly
01:19:54
interesting um what i heard what i heard carl saying among other things is that there is a there is a qualitative transition when things go from analog to digital in
01:20:05
a certain sense right from from from continuous to to phase and based on what chris just said it would just remind us to to think about the kind of the quantum world where at least to my understanding a lot of
01:20:17
things are in fact uh you know sort of discrete does that mean that really could it be that that that is the sort of base state as chris just outlined with with with that kind of uh
01:20:30
proto-cognitive exploration all the way down and that these continuous models that we put on top of it by by by course graining um you know tiny events into the kind of macroscopic things that we see here that's that's an abstraction
01:20:44
that sort of loses the essential uh mindfulness of it and then we have to try to rebuild it again by the time we get to brains but actually all we've done is obscure the the fact that all the way from the beginning it was already digital to start with and we
01:20:57
just sort of put some put some vaseline on our lens here you know to make everything look um you know sort of continuous which then which then made it look like there was nothing going on at the lower levels and then somehow we're we're shocked that we have to recover it
01:21:09
from from somewhere later on that that's that's what i just heard from the combination of those two explanations it's a very interesting idea and it connects nicely to the history of mathematics
01:21:21
or at least the history of mathematics post descartes and leibniz which was all built around the idea of continuous functions and analysis and calculus and
01:21:34
so on very very nice convenient mathematics to use but uh obscure it to the surface
01:21:49
carl did you have any thoughts to add to that um [Music] yeah i i'd probably um this is why i wanted to hang out with with mike and chris to learn about quantum theory because i do think
01:22:01
there's something fundamental about this sort of the way that we carve up the world or the world the way the world can only be defined in a carved way into tiles or quantum discrete things um
01:22:13
so um i i think that the the the those observations that we just heard i think are quite fundamental um and it would be great to understand um everything from the sort of cultural
01:22:26
perspective a discretized perspective and how continuous constructs rights you know space and time emerge from that um you know if necessary um having said that um i have to say that
01:22:40
um as a physicist i would bring something else to the table so i'm quite comfortable dealing with random fluctuations so for me random fluctuations are just variables that change very very quickly
01:22:54
so if i want to write down um as a physicist so now i don't talk about a physicist that doesn't know anything about quantum mechanics um so i just want to write down a launchvan equation to describe my universe um i
01:23:06
write it as a mixture of states and random fluctuations and somebody asked me what licenses i just saw the manufacturations are very very quick and the uh the states are very very slow um and this is just a natural consequence
01:23:19
of some kind of renormalization group you know i i could make them even slower by going to the next stage scale and throw each and even more fast stuff so there's nothing
01:23:31
really if you like problematic uh from the point of view of that kind of physicist um in in the random fluctuations um uh it just means that all the
01:23:42
stuff that determines flows and dynamics of the kind that we can that we engage with and we can plan um has a particular form that particular form um
01:23:54
does actually bring a quantal aspect um to the table or a discretization aspect of the table that may or may not be if you like explained away or absorbed into a
01:24:07
quantum information theoretical treatment but what i'm talking about here are the mathematical image of light life cycles and biorhythms and oscillations and i mean that right from the other the
01:24:20
perspective of a dendrite in my hippocampus oscillating away at a fast gamma frequency you know sort of say 80 hertz through to the the motion of the heavenly bodies
01:24:32
wherever you look you get the this solenoidal flow um that is characteristic of things that hang around and don't dissipate almost immediately um and these are not part of
01:24:45
the random flute version but they become more evident as you go away from the fast random stuff into the slow um the slow uh dynamics um in the sense that
01:24:55
you know clearly uh the orbit of the moon around well the orbit of the earth around the sun for example this deals with very very massive large things where all the random fluctuations are effectively
01:25:08
averaged to zero um whereas if you go down to the quantum scale um then you know you're not licensed to do that and these solenoidal flows um become much less um much less apparent
01:25:20
but our scale if we uh if life is um on this reading of physics um sufficiently classical to have um
01:25:33
oscillations biorhythms um things that would you need for feedback that didn't go off to plus or minus infinity for example just saying that you're keeping you're circulating in some states or phase space
01:25:46
in a way that you keep yourself to some attracting set and as you move through this you are naturally going to be oscillating in a highly non-linear possibly chaotic way but still the essence is life cycles
01:26:00
if that's the case then the poncharis section does indeed permit a description that is necessarily discretized in the sense you're going to pass through the neighborhood of various states and discrete points in time
01:26:14
recurrently so that's what i was thinking from the point of view of a physicist who does not have the fluency of quantum mechanics to get back to a discrete thing but it also i think um
01:26:26
highlights the um the deep connection between things recurring discretely or occurring discretely being one way of defining another
01:26:42
characteristic of biological self-organization which is basically the repeat biorhythms and life cycles that have this sort of self-contained itinerancy because in that
01:26:55
self-containment you've got this natural resolution of ambiguity and uncertainty because you always know you're you're on the same arterial path repeatedly visiting the states that you once occupied so that that's what i would say
01:27:08
from the point of view of physicist i may say something very different in a few years time when i've learned more about quantum theory so let me ask chris could you ever describe that kind of mathematic physicist's treatment of
01:27:21
dynamics in pure quantum information theory and that at that kind of scale well i i think if we if we try to think of scaling up from from um
01:27:37
descriptions of things like quantum fields then this looks impossible but if we think of it informationally maybe it doesn't look
01:27:50
impossible now i'll go back to john wheeler's notion that a bit is fundamentally the answer to a yes or no question and
01:28:02
information the information theory is about bits and systems that exchange bits but question do you mind repeating that last part but what
01:28:19
what wheeler's aphorism doesn't specify is the complexity of the question that has a yes or no answer so in in your case carl you have an
01:28:32
oscillatory system that passes after a discrete time a particular boundary so the the system may well be asking the
01:28:43
question have i passed this boundary and the answer is yes or no or am i passing the boundary right now well that's one bit uh that's a yes or no question but it's
01:28:57
an extremely complicated question so it may be that we can develop a theory that leaves the complexity of
01:29:10
the generative model unspecified and concentrates just on the bit flow across the boundary
01:29:22
that counts as evidence in one direction and perturbative action in the other direction and and then i think the two pictures fit together rather nicely because one can imagine that
01:29:37
generative model operating it that the general model being the model that generates the questions operating in many different scales where one could think of the scales as computational complexity
01:29:58
and this gets back in a sense to your question about language how language is a way of posing questions it's a way of babbling in the world now this
01:30:10
process of babbling it seems to me as far as i understand it's like poking and prodding to test your own self model to see what's the difference between me and the world it sounds like that never stops even though we
01:30:22
call it babbling as if infants do it does it ever stop are we not engaging in this right now and i like this phrase babbling all the way down i'm gonna put that on a t-shirt by the way chris or and it also by the way
01:30:34
seems like babbling all the way up too because we're constantly engaging in this so firstly is that true does babbling have an end and and also does it not presume a self
01:30:47
in order to test the self what i mean is carl when you were speaking about the process of babbling it's the infant doing something on the world in order to make a model
01:30:59
but that first part was it's it is doing something to the world to me already presumes the external world whereas the way that i'm understanding it is that the self is a model but it's also in your point of view it's something
01:31:12
objective and i believe from my readings of chris i don't i believe chris is more on the non-dual end where it's it's it's that's less the case so i'm unsure anyway i just said a slew so please
01:31:25
respond to it as you as you wish right well i mean just to um dispel the notion that the self is um objective no i i didn't mean that i i meant it in exactly the same way that um
01:31:38
i think both chris and mike have been intimating that you know from the inside of a cell or a person or the baby's skull um your self um is
01:31:51
quite a a sophisticated um construct fantasy hypothesis that is physically realized possibly neuronally in some lucky creatures and some lucky children uh you may actually find some children never get that far
01:32:06
you know i'm thinking here of people with severe autism for example who don't have a theory of mind simply because they never developed the notion that um i am a person um and you know what comes
01:32:20
along with that is that you know if you've got very very severe autism or you know if he likes other theoretically idealized autism and that means that personhood doesn't exist so you would be i would regard you as an
01:32:33
animate french or you know some um interesting autonomous vehicle but you would never be a person because i don't i don't have the hypothesis that you know there are people out there and that
01:32:45
people share certain sort of phenotypic characteristics and um have intentions in the same sense that i have intentions so i just i'm not aware of that because i just don't don't have that hypothesis so it's a long-winded way of saying that
01:32:58
i didn't mean to imply any objectivity here i was more going the other way really i'm just saying that selfhood um that would be one part of consciousness and if you
01:33:11
want to associate cognition and consciousness then perhaps possibly um that kind of minimal selfhood would you know would be necessarily part of of cognition
01:33:23
this is a gift that you have to get by crossing one of those bright lines and it's just a fantasy that you bring to the table to make sense of all the impressions on your sort of
01:33:37
sensory surface or your holographic screen or your or your cell surface or also the receptors you are equipped with um to sense what's going on out there does that make sense yeah i know that
01:33:49
mike and and chris you may have a response to that but i just want to quickly respond to what professor first was saying is so and this is to both of you how do you then prevent an existential crisis as
01:34:01
you start to study this so for example carl before you and i were speaking and i told you about some experiences i had where i've deeply felt what you're saying as being true that the self is a fantasy and this oneness with all this
01:34:14
world being generated in one's mind and i felt like that was akin to a psychotic episode and it was extremely destabilizing and to be quite frank i'm still recovering from that and so i'm unsure how any of you all
01:34:27
do this work without constantly being in a debilitating state of of existence well existence is the question here that it's an existential crisis which i'm inquiring about so how is it
01:34:40
that you prevent yourself from getting into that how could you say these words of well the self is is not objective the self may be a a fantasy quote unquote but not then be able to to not speak and
01:34:52
look around you in awe and and horror at the same time okay so that's a psychological uh philosophical question anyone who wants to take that up i think i think there is a good deal of existential um
01:35:06
what uncertainty involved in uh in doing what we're doing so it's just par for the course right
01:35:17
how do you get over it i'm not sure when gets over it i i think it's more um [Music] being comfortable with it
01:35:38
you know i i i think you raise a really a really important point and it's i think this is in a class of uh a number of really destabilizing um
01:35:50
uh ideas that one picks up as one gets older and studies things and there are many of these i remember as a child being completely freaked out by the fact that i realized that you know we grow up and we become these adults and these
01:36:02
adults bear some resemblance to the children but they're definitely not the same thing and so in some sense you could sort of see it coming it's almost even even before you realize that you're gonna you know you're gonna you're gonna die biologically someday before long before
01:36:16
that you realize that you're going to undergo some transition that's going to you know turn you into a completely different sort of creature which really you know has some continuity but maybe not you know it's certainly not you
01:36:28
persisting in the same way as you are now right so some kind of weird butter you know caterpillar butterfly effect where you're just not going to be around in that same way as as you are now right so that's kind of the first thing you you
01:36:40
realize as a child and then there's many others that sort of you know you learn about boltzmann brains and all the different you know human arguments so but you know all the stuff that you know i had to i i did um i did a philosophy class with my son
01:36:52
when he was little uh uh we were doing um homeschooling and so i kind of did this and i realized very quickly that i have to be very careful with this stuff because if right somebody who has the capacity to understand it it's extremely
01:37:03
destabilizing and i think that uh for at this point for myself uh what you know i sort of go with with descartes a little bit in the following sense i i i'm not depressed by it in the sense
01:37:15
that whatever we discover is is a truer model of the self than we may have had it doesn't it i don't i don't think there's any way in which it makes it less um it makes us less less less
01:37:28
valuable less interesting less engaging all of that is still true it's just that now we've realized that a different set of mechanisms can now implement that magic than we thought right so you may have had so you know
01:37:41
some sort of um idea that well there has to be some sort of um different kind of unique process that makes this permanent self and therefore i'm this individual and i have i have uh you know i have true true beliefs and
01:37:53
preferences and i exist in some way i i don't think you can ever convince yourself that you that that that isn't true and that you don't exist it's just that now you find out that actually the way you get to be that is by these sets of mechanisms and they're very
01:38:06
interesting it's the sort of thing that carl and chris have been talking about so that's what gets you to be this individual this kind of individual and it's kind of amazing that that works but that doesn't to me that doesn't um diminish all of the things all of the
01:38:18
things that i thought were true about what the individual actually is right your reality the reality of it the impermanent impermanence is there but we knew that from the time you were a kid you knew that it wasn't going to be permanent so that that part you know you
01:38:30
sort of have to deal with from the start after that it's all you're learning after that is just that you were really mistaken about what it takes to be that sort of creature you thought maybe it had to be some magical whatever now you think that wow it's a set of you know
01:38:42
feedback loops and whatever else so that's surprising but that's okay we we learn about you know we learn about uh different underpinnings to things all the time so that's okay but i don't i don't think any of it diminishes the the the sort of
01:38:53
um uh just the incredible awe of of being a sentient being i can think about these things yeah just to reiterate that sorry i didn't in any way mean to demean um our selfhood
01:39:07
or yourself in particular um by calling it a fantasy i actually meant it and indeed have written about it um in terms of something quite fantastic so we've written papers called the
01:39:19
fantastic organ the brain is a fantastic organ just because it can produce these fantasies it's absolutely fantastic and of course they you know in relation to our early
01:39:30
conversation the capacity to have these fantasies which have incredible explanatory power if you can attain them and you can maintain them um is the part of the complexity which allows us to cross
01:39:44
these bright lines or these gaps uh and become our cuts and become um closer to you know to the kind of creatures that can can even entertain the notion of the heart problem
01:39:57
just to so mike i just love that better answer we don't know what the answer will look like i'm going to tell andy clark about that he'll tell david chalmers but to come back to the point so i didn't mean to demean that um
01:40:10
and you know phrases that i remember coming across and having to learn uh when i was a student of things like existential angst and ontological security all of these things
01:40:22
um you know rear their face if you are worried about these things but the very fact that you are able to entertain the notion that you are not real is quite remarkable um and
01:40:34
i repeat is it is a gift of a fantastic sort it is a kind of fantasy that very few um creatures haven't and sometimes even few people have so there are people who actually will go out there to try
01:40:48
and um experience that and to become and treasure the uh the gift of being able to make sense of the world as me and by taking drugs or doing mindfulness
01:41:00
therapy in order to actually get to a state where um so almost a freudian oceanic state where selfhood is dissolved so they can experience it and certainly if you've
01:41:10
taken um sort of psychedelic drugs in sufficient quantity um you may have that kind of experience that's a derealization or dissociative experience which is the realization that
01:41:23
your your construct your fantasy of selfhood that is engaged and engaging continuously and for as long as you live um then um you know if you want to appreciate that then you
01:41:36
have to experience the you know the alternative hypothesis uh so you know experiencing derealization or this is depersonalization
01:41:48
is actually i think one really important step to self-understanding so i don't see it as at all threatening nor diminishing it's it's just part of self-understanding which not
01:42:00
everybody gets the opportunity to indulge i mean i mean in some you know in some sense the most destabilizing thing of all ought to be just the bare facts of developmental biology when you learn that you are in
01:42:12
fact not some sort of uh un indivisible monadic whatever which i don't even i'm not even sure what that would entail if you were but but the fact that we are all like all intelligence is our collective intelligences we are all made of parts and the idea that you used to
01:42:26
be this quiescent oocyte this little bag of chemical reactions that did very little and then very slowly sort of step by step you turned into whatever you are now if that's not destabilizing i don't
01:42:38
know what is because just knowing nothing knowing nothing else about evolution or i mean to me developmental biology is sort of like the the you know the queen of of all the sciences because just that fact that you go from from
01:42:49
from chemistry and physics to mind in in nine months plus to however many years it takes uh and that and that you are literally a collection of cells that you could see in pond water more or less is just if you know you're you're a bunch
01:43:02
of cells in the trench coat you know like the in the cartoons like if if that's not destabilizing i don't know what i don't know what else is so quickly just i know we have to get going and i'd like to wrap with a set of
01:43:15
brief questions but quickly carl and perhaps well anyone who would like to answer what is it that separates those who are depersonalized or go through certain psychotic episodes from
01:43:27
what is it that separates those who are fortunately like myself where it's abating and i'm able to function and i'm able to have friends and so on versus those who go into a ward because obviously those issues can like
01:43:40
you mentioned it's a gift for some it's not a gift i felt like for myself would i don't want that gift to go i'll return that gift i wish there was a receipt with it but and i still actually feel like that but for some
01:43:52
obviously it's it's it's a horrible and persistent feeling so what is it that separates them well i'll answer from the point of view of a psychiatrist with a with with a
01:44:06
commitment to sort of a mechanistic or theoretical uh understanding i i think it's um the inability to resolve the um the uncertainty that is attends
01:44:18
entertaining the dual hypothesis that i may exist or i may not exist as me but as soon as you increase your hypothesis space you naturally induced uncertainty an ambivalence and a kind of ambiguity
01:44:31
so it is exactly the same if you like um we're talking about the same imperatives that we've been talking about all along which is to resolve uncertainty resolve ambiguity to make the most sense of things so if you've entertained this
01:44:46
hypothesis that you know you are not you and you are you and you can't fully resolve that then you will find yourself in a state of chronic uncertainty that unfortunately does have pathological consequences um i'm not
01:45:00
sure that being in a psych ward is necessarily too pathological i mean you know there are ways to live very nicely and constructively and fantastically in psych wars and i've done i spent two years in the therapeutic community um
01:45:12
but there will be other sequelae of an inability to resolve uncertainty they're expressed clinically and physiologically in terms of anaesthetic load and the like and chronic stress and
01:45:24
the like which can be very unpleasant uh and ultimately can have physical consequences from the point of view you know the effects on your body so the question now is why can't some people resolve that uncertainty i think it's
01:45:36
then a question of the the biophysical processes that enable you to update your beliefs and build good models of of your
01:45:49
world and that again this is a very pragmatic answer from the point of view of you know of of clinical of a clinician um probably the answers lie in the way that
01:46:02
your brain has assembled itself to coordinate and attend to various sources of evidence um and the it looks at the mechanisms that underwrite that ability to deploy attention
01:46:14
rest very much upon neuromodulating neurotransmitters and the kind you you know you'll have heard about in the popular media and will have read about things like dopamine serotonin um and indeed um
01:46:26
oxytocin uh all the drugs that are either used or the targets of um psycholytics or psychedelics or psychometics or drugs that are used to try and control some of these feelings
01:46:39
and some of these signs and symptoms specifically that attend um anxiety disorders and depression so you know understanding the and this is the not the feedback loops that do
01:46:55
self-organization in a developing embryo but the same kinds of mechanisms that do the feedback loops and self-organization of different um structures within the brain um that can be construed as blankets
01:47:08
within blankets or holographic screens within holographic screens or cells within cells um or um complying the same principles but in the particular instance of the brain doing this and
01:47:19
understanding the neurochemistry and the biophysics of this fundamental sense-making self-organization um it turns out that these are certain
01:47:30
these neurochemical messages um are particularly important in resolving that kind of uncertainty and it may be that you are have either taken drugs or you have just grown up to not be able to
01:47:43
deploy these neurotransmitters possibly properly um again leading us to well how would you gain control of it well you might want to do mindfulness training meditation and the like that just internal attention state training
01:47:56
basically to mentalize how you deploy your attention mike i know that you had a set of questions that you're eager to ask both carl and chris did you already get to all of them
01:48:10
uh well that would be impossible but i got to uh i get to men i get too many of them most of the important ones i learned i learned a massive amount today this has been just amazing um but i will be um pestering both of them with
01:48:22
additional questions in uh you know years to come great to end i actually i have a question that i didn't email you that just occurred to me as you all were speaking it's something that professor levin that you
01:48:33
said what are some aspects of your field maybe their theories or concepts that your peers are extremely resistant to but you are not wow um
01:48:45
i don't know if we got uh time for all that but that's a lot that's a that's a lot of stuff um i mean the most basic there are many i mean the most basic thing is this notion of uh profound symmetries between these fields uh you
01:48:58
know this idea that you can um that you can you can basically import uh concepts and strategies from cognitive neuroscience or behavioral science and deploy them in other spaces
01:49:10
developmental biology and metabolism that you can that it even makes sense to talk about um you know goals memories uh planning navigation uh all of these kinds of things outside of what we're used to which is some you know rat in
01:49:23
the maze or something like this so so that continuum this idea that it goes that that something important goes all the way down or maybe a long way down even if not all the way down that that that is uh in in in a few circles that's
01:49:36
okay in most circles that that i would deal with that's just that's just complete you know complete heresy um yeah there are many others but that's uh that's kind of a basic one chris
01:49:49
well i i think that mike really nailed it with that answer and um i would say yes it's it's not
01:50:04
a popular idea that physics and biology and psychology are actually all more or less the same science but uh i think that they are
01:50:18
[Music] professor fristen yeah well that would be my favorite heresy i'm just going to agree with with mike and chris you know the physics biology psychology they're all the same
01:50:30
thing and i just wanted to end by saying uh you know heresy i'm not so sure anymore i i you know the number of times for example i see mike levin cited in high-end philosophy journals and
01:50:44
treatments um suggests to me that in fact it's going to be the minority um in at least in a few years time that that don't subscribe to this more holistic um um
01:50:58
encompassing um and i think um correct way of viewing um you know cellular life sciences but you're more generally sort of the natural sciences so you know who is going to be the heretic
01:51:13
in a few years time i i suspect it won't be any of us and i'll end with one that i see from particularly chris and michael is it sounds like without using the word it sounds like
01:51:27
what you all are doing or trying to understand god or trying to come up with the model of god and the reason why i say that is because with looking at a neuron and saying okay how can a neuron look around and have some model and know
01:51:39
that it's embedded in something higher that sounds to me like well if we apply that to ourselves and continually do so we would reach something akin to god and then chris with the quantum babbling if one can think of it like that well what
01:51:51
is babbling i know that maybe you all don't want to use the word god but for me what i i have that many of my peers are extremely against would be to philosophize about god or to explicate
01:52:04
god or to take god seriously as not an old man in the sky with a beard and so i i see you all as doing something similar in him i'm happy to be in your company i'm extremely lucky
01:52:17
all science um starts with an act of faith with a very important act of faith which is that the world is in some way understandable that we are not just a bubble in this um you know random universe that just happens
01:52:30
to you know as a as a total random string of of of coincidence looks like it's got laws and then in a tomorrow somewhere you know while you sleep the whole thing falls apart and we go back to a random you know sort of random distribution of
01:52:42
events so we all there's no proof of any of it of any of that right we take we have to take that on faith and that may be for a scientist that may be the most destabilizing thing if you can't get yourself to believe that that that the
01:52:54
world isn't for some weird reason understandable and amenable at least to some extent to our logic and probing then then you can't do science you can't do any of the things that that we do so so being uh useful and and hopefully
01:53:07
productive in in what we do starts with that act of faith that is just completely to my knowledge it's it's it's it's it's an axiom it's not based on any evidence that you could possibly have so so i do think that sort of underlies everything that we do just
01:53:20
this idea that we can in fact squeeze some understanding out of what's going on around us i'd also think you'd be surprised i know that you said that it doesn't comport with the traditional definition of god but it depends on what tradition and how
01:53:33
far back one goes because there are mystics of let's say christian mystics and his muslim mystics or islamic mystics and so on yeah and obviously then the eastern end is much more mystical
01:53:44
so okay well thank you all so much for for thank you so much for coming out to this and thank you i i've learned a tremendous amount and i hope you all have too i i i'm blessed and thank you
01:53:57
so much well thank you very much this was this was a very interesting conversation and thank you very much for putting it together yeah absolutely this is this is great great great idea thanks for having us on
01:54:09
yeah i'm just super pleased super pleased to have been part of it yeah it went in directions that i didn't expect i didn't i don't even think i looked at my notes my my notepad here and i wrote some notes but they occurred to me in the moment okay thank you all mike i
01:54:22
know you got to get going and and so well thank you all all right thank you cheers cheers thanks so much bye everyone bye bye the podcast is now finished if you'd
01:54:36
like to support conversations like this then do consider going to patreon.com c-u-r-t j-a-i-m-u-n-g-a-l that is kurt jaimungle it's support from
01:54:47
the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time every dollar helps tremendously thank you
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