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what you guys think okay cool all right got it oh where shall we start maybe I could introduce uh what I
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think we have as common ground so Roy Mike is a biologist he does very technical work on bioelectricity and how cells intelligently communicate and self-organized into complex systems and
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Mike Roy is social Psych olist one of the world's most famous social psychologists so he's written on basically everything but most notably in my mind he's got a book on self control
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or a book on what is the nature of the self and recently another book on Free Will which you and I have talked a lot about and I see myself somewhere in the middle between you two doing
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developmental cognitive neuroscience and I think we all have in common these shared philosophical interests in the self and self-control
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self-organization and what are the biological evolutionary mechanisms behind all that cool well self-organization I think
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is is one of the the Deep Mysteries of the universe or one of the most important things by which we get from uh electrons floating around in The Ether to uh the global economy
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yeah and and and people actually so this is this is great I'd love to hear your take on a few things because uh people ask me all the time so I study kind of the journey that we take you know we start Life as a single single cell you
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know this this unfertilized oosy and then you get to be an embryonic blastoderm which is this like flat disc of I don't know 50,000 cells and we look at that and we say that's one embryo well what are we counting when that's
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one embryo right what's going on in so I study this this slow process of this this emergent uh self where all the cells are committed to the same goal in anatomical space and and the collective intelligence of these cells and uh
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dealing with novel problems they haven't seen before and things like that and people often ask me you know they they see this stuff and they ask well what are the implications for social structures right can we scale that up because I often talk about scale-free
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dynamics that you get in molecular Network cells organs and so on and people naturally will say like what's the what what's what are the implications for for social structure so yeah I'd love to I'd love to hear your
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take on um the self the social self how much you think uh of how much of this collective intelligence stuff you think is in fact multiscale that you can talk about these things meaningfully at a higher level um yeah I'd love to love to
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hear that well there's the common process of again self-organization of things lending themselves or taking on parts of larger
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systems uh um I don't know that the one by which cells become em single cells become embryos and embryos become babies I
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guess uh would be the same as by which people merge into groups and groups merge into Nations and like I said Nations merge into the global
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economy um it's just that I guess with the global economy they discover vantages uh um why globalization is coming whether we like it or not because
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it makes the system work better and ultimately creates more resources which filters down to uh individuals benefiting if it filters all the way down to the embryos I I don't know that
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embryos work any better because of multinational corporations or international trade but maybe they do um but still there is the common
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practice of moving up toward toward greater systems yeah I mean what we see is that by uh there are certain um basic principles by which these
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things connect that allow them to do two two interesting things that allows them to scale up the goals that they're able to pursue so single cells pursue little tiny local goals but cell groups can
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pursue very large goals like making limbs when I say pursue goals I don't mean emergent complexity I don't mean kind of this open loop process where there are a bunch of simple rules they they all follow these rules and you know
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complex things come out I don't mean that I mean beyond that there's a there's a second order situation where what you get is actually a uh A system that uh is able to specifically pursue certain goal States and if you try to
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deviate it we'll find ways to actually quite clever ways to get there and the scale of those goals gets bigger and bigger but also in other problem spaces so cells start off solving problems in
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uh physiological State space in gene expression space and so on but embryos groups of embryos solve problems in anatomical space and then of course animals with nervous systems will also solve problems in threedimensional space
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and move around and then eventually linguistic space and so on so yeah so so what I mean I I what what what are some of the principles that um that you think underly the scaling in you know in your
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in your area when you go from Individual people up upwards what are the kind of what are the policies that that underly all that all right I was going to ask you what are the principles at the cell
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level uh but uh okay I mean there the obvious point if any of us was plunked down in the jungle alone we' have a hard time surviving let alone reproducing or
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making a comfortable life uh so there advantages to the individual person to being part of a group uh there's um safety in numbers I
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guess uh basic communication in the the simple herds uh humans do a lot more with shared information
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uh and division of labor and things like that division of labor is uh you know improves what the economists call the efficiency of a system uh so that the same amount of
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work by the same amount of people can produce more resources um let me say like if I had to yeah I'm a professor if I had to catch
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my own food from nature and build my own shelter be in sorry condition I don't have those skills but uh but with division of labor everything is done by an expert a
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specialist and so things get done better um and then their economies of scale uh which is why the large
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corporations can basically out compete the small ones uh so again the same amount of effort work
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the same amount of energy expenditure produces more more resources um in the larger more complex system now is that true at the more
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basic level also yeah so far so far that all that all tracks pretty pretty exactly you know I I also wonder uh so there's this there's this other
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phenomenon um that uh you can call something like a cognitive glue where imagine you've got this rat and you train it to push a lever and get a reward right well so it forms this associative memory that pushing the
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lever is associated with with getting a reward but uh there's no there's no individual cell in that rat had both experiences so the the cells at the bottom of the foot touch the lever the cells in the gut get the reward but no
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individual cell had that had that experience of both right yeah right and so the memory that that associative memory is owned by the rat well what's this rat this rat mean it's a bag of cells but it has a mechanism for doing
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credit assignment and memory of things that belong to the collective and not to any of the individual cells right that's one of the cool things about being an emergent individual is that you get to have memories that none of your parts have so I'm curious as to okay and so
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what that means is that you become trainable as a collective so you can train the collective on things that no individual in that Collective actually knows but the collective knows so I'm curious if you think that uh societies
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corporations whatever you you pick the level uh whether those are trainable you know we did we did a project once trying to train an ant colony not the individual ants The Colony right the the collective intelligence of the colony
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and we we didn't get to finish it it's sort of inconclusive but but I wonder like I wonder if anybody's done those experiments and I wonder what you think the prediction would be whether whether colle of humans not the individuals but
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but the group is actually trainable I wonder if this connects to Roy's idea of ego depletion where he's shown that across a wide variety of tasks it's almost like people have this
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finite pool of cognitive resources or of effort and if like if there could be some sort of computational mechanism underlying that where say any of your individual neurons it's not like they
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get tired but collectively regardless of what problem you're working on there's some uh generalized pool of cognitive resources that you're pulling from and then over time it can
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drain well we we're starting when we talk about the rad and so on that there there is a central nervous system uh you're right that no one cell participates in both the pressing the
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button and the receiving the food reward um but the brain manages both yeah but but you've got the same
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problem when you say the brain there really isn't any brain right there's a there's a huge collection of cells and so for sure the cells are connected via policies and so this is the electrical communication and the same thing happens
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in the rest of the body that allow the collective to act as though it was in possession of this um associative memory but you know there is n one of anything right the whole the whole thing is is
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very much a collective and you need that you you need you need those policies to make sure that the collective can know things that the individual Parts don't know the brain is particularly good at it but there are also creatures that are brainless that can do it uh there are
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examples like this in other body parts I mean it's not just but but yes of course the brain is part of the mechanism of of this uh Collective uh yeah I had a book on the self last
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year and then it struck me it's the creation of unity um usually the brain uses to Pro learns to process systems and use that to direct the actions of the body and
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walking would be an obvious one uh that an animal with four legs the the brain has to kind of understand left and right front and back and coordinate them to move in in alternating
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fashion uh to move forward versus to plant H um so it gets so the brain gets the whole body to operate as an integrated
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system by sending out separate commands to the separate limbs based on this integrative system that organizes the whole thing so so that is the uh emergent
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organization of course it's very adaptive too yeah I I I mean mean uh the well a couple of things one is so we study a lot of things that don't have
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brains and so slime molds and the the Single Cell organisms and right and tissues and everything else I mean they all do this stuff uh but but but again and again they're all made of Parts as as is as is the brain where you know
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it's it's made of I mean they're really it it's it's very on once you start thinking about what a truly centralized controller even means it's really hard because everything's made of parts right and it's I've got I've got this slide
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where that I sometimes show in my talks you know decart was really into the pineal gland because it was it's the only unitary thing in the in the in the head right and he felt that you know our our unified experience as humans should
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have a single you know should have a single Locus in the brain but if you had if he had had a microscope he would have looked in there and said my God there's not one of anything this thing's full of cells right and still still right the
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heart problem remains is uh you know understanding how uh how how you're going to bind all these things into a a coherent self and so yeah so so I've got this model what part because we deal
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with cells and tissues and synthetic organisms I mean we make synthetic life forms and so on and uh we deal with all this kind of stuff I've been trying for a framework that is kind of agnostic about the medium so what do all
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decision-making agents have in common that need to act in physiological space right in anatomical space space and physical space and financial space linguistic space whatever um yeah and and so so we've been working on this on
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this notion of a cognitive light cone which is just the size of the goals that you're able to work towards and then the different then of course there's different competencies in in in reaching those those goals but so yeah I'm really interested in that that the social
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question because um oftentimes uh one one of the one of the tricks that we we we use is we try to take things from behavioral side tools from Behavioral Science and apply them to things that aren't animals with
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brains so we've shown for example that you can do uh you know sensitization associative learning habituation all anticipation all these things you can do them in G the gene
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regulatory networks already do this right so molecular Pathways already do this stuff and so I wonder and so then people will say um like uh well that's you know since since you're stretching the C
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cognitive Spectrum all the way down you know next next you're going to say that the weather is intelligent and they say well I don't know have we tried training it like I have no idea but it's an imper to me it's an empirical question you can't just sort of sit back and make assumptions right you have to so I just
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I just wonder I wonder if these social structures uh if they if they're amenable to some of the same techniques that we use in behavior science to to to probe collectives because that's what it is right when you ask if something can
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do habituation or or Association or planning or whatever you're you're probing the competencies of a collective and I think we could I assume we could probably test that but I don't know right I you wouldn't maybe you know if
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anybody's tried that in social social circumstances I don't I don't um I've been talking to Roy a bit about active inference and these uh entropy
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based predictive processing theories of Consciousness we've been talking about it in the context of uh drive for explor atory play sensation seeking reward sensitivity and boredom but I'm
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wondering if that generalizes more as this uh underlying say computational mechanism you're talking about that connects between whether it's human cognition or more basic animal cognition or even these higher order
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organizational systems social systems yeah yeah I mean I mean we we study a variety of um connection policies and one of the let's see if let's see let's see if this rings a bell at all um one of the policies is a kind
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of uh memory wipe so if I have two cells sitting next to each other uh there's a there's a very par so so if this cell sends a signal you know some chemical signal and goes out and it hits the cell that that way of
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communicating it's very easy for this cell to know that that signal came from outside that's not my information that's somebody else's information and so you can choose to believe it or ignore it or you know whatever but there's this magical thing in in uh in
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bi electricity which is there there are these electrical synapses called Gap Junctions and what they do is they connect directly the internal MERS from one cell to the next and so what happens then is that's very different because what happens then is if if something
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happens to cell a and there's a memory trace of it let's say a calcium Spike or something that's a memory trace of that event prop it propagates directly into cell b and it doesn't have any metadata on it that says hey I'm coming from from
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someplace else cell b sees this calcium Spike and says oh we've been poked right and so now when you're sharing memories if you and I are sharing most of our memories it's really hard to keep independent identities uh we start to
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sort of have this mind meld where and and now we're bigger so we have some bigger computational capacity we're you know physically bigger but also we have a joint memory and we also are bound to cooperate because we can't even
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physically entertain the thought of defecting against each other because we're sharing the same thought and we are the same informationally we're the same being to some extent so so that's that that memory wiping property is uh
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is is one one thing that I think really facilitates this joining into collectives uh you know another one is shared stress this idea that if if if uh if if one cell is under
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stress what it might do is export some stress molecules to its neighbors which then also feel stressed they don't know that this is somebody else's stress and so my problem becomes their problem and so now if I need to get somewhere and
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they're in my way now everything's gets a little plastic because they're jiggling around because they're not happy either whereas otherwise they would have sat there and not let me pass so like this sharing of you know this globalization of of stress um and
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there's some other there's some other stuff too but um I don't know does any of that does any of that sound relevant it starts to look like pheromones and then you get into my world of hormones and development yeah yeah yeah somebody
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said recently it's a funny somebody said to me recently boy it's really hard to change uh your you know your mind and your priorities and your and they said I don't know look at what happens at puberty right like few hormones and
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Everything Changes all your priorities are upside down and things that seemed great are now stupid and things that seemed disgusting are now great and uh right you know it kind of turns everything out so it's it's not that
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hard actually know but it's interesting this this Collective approach this is giving me a different perspective on thinking I I kind of start from part one of my philosophy professors made which is that sort of part of the
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essence of life is a boundary between inside and outside and that every living thing maintains a boundary and of course stuff moves across the boundary uh as we
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eat for example but uh but it's still you we know the difference between the the hamburger we ate and the one we didn't that remains outside and uh you know that's long
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before the self but there is there is that boundary and then the the brain presumably evolved within organisms to to take care of the the whole
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self um within that boundary sorry not only in space but in time as well space and time yeah well most animals live pretty much in the
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here and now the uh integrating across time where there there are brief expectancies for a few seconds into the future and so on but uh
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um but only humans really have a full narrative sense of self psychologist say that a lot that that only humans really think about the future does that check from your perspective Mike that other animals are
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are only really focused on the here and now um no I don't agree with that I mean I think that well it is true that that we are the only ones that have a kind of um a metacognitive like like we know
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when we are thinking about the future and so on but even bacteria and yeast can anticipate future events so so memory and anticipation does not require a brain uh Mo most Critters do it we've
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shown a kind of um anticipate events how far in the future though next year no no not next year so so that's right so so humans have a much bigger cognitive light comb so that's part of it is that we have we have a huge and in fact ours
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is is is special in another way because because ours is bigger than our lifespan so so probably uniquely uh as far as I know we are capable of pursuing goals that are for sure longer than our
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lifespan in in other words not personally attainable goals right most of these most of these other creatures have much shorter much shorter term you know for bacteria and yeast it might be 20 minutes or or or or something like
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that um okay that's good yeah you know but but it's but but it's there and I also think you know your point about the boundary is really critical uh yeah establishing the boundary between self and outside world is absolutely critical
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uh I think it happens long before we have a brain both evolutionarily and developmentally right absolutely yes yeah plants clearly I mean you can uh you can dig up a plant and wash off the dirt and move just the plant and nothing
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else yeah so there there is the unity there but the the the burning improves your ability to to operate that way so if we look at the collection of cells as
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a collective they are somehow learning to act or evolving to act as if they are a Unity uh long before before there's a
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brain yeah and and even and even in h you know at the very beginning of human life you can actually see and this is I've done these experiments in Duck and so on uh when you you have this blastoderm and you look and you say ah
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there's a there's an embryo that's going to develop into a human individual well what you can do is you can take a little needle and and and make some scratches in that blastoderm and for about four or five hours before they heal up again
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every island is going to basically decide that it's on its own and is going to start making an embryo when they do heal you have conjoin twins triplets whatever you you know from so so the number of individuals in a blastoderm is not fixed it's not one it's it's
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anywhere from zero to probably half a dozen right and then and then you get this so so this like um excitable medium just sort of generates individuals right and then you get this interesting question because when you got two
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embryos sitting next to each other the cells every cell is some other cell's neighbor and so now the question is am I part of this embryo or am I part of that embryo right and sometimes they get confused and this is why conjoin twins often have laterality defects because
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left and right they can't quite tell which side they're on but but but this issue of of of deciding right where do I end and the outside world begins is like very
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fundamental yes it is uh I'm reminded had a baby girl who didn't cry very much but one day my wife heard her crying and uh she walked in
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and she was lying there her finger was poking herself in the eye right she didn't know who was her own arm yet yeah yeah yeah that that's so that's that's funny too because um the
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plasticity of the body you know if you've ever seen the the rubber hand illusion uh you know you see these videos on YouTube right where uh they put a rubber hand next to you and they sort of they you you you watch them uh Pat it with a little with a little brush
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and stuff and then somebody takes a hammer and goes to hit it and the people freak out because because now you think that it only takes 10 minutes to override I don't know how many millions of years as a tetr pod like your brain knows exactly how many limbs you've had
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but you can override that in just 10 minutes of of of watching somebody you know pass this rubber hand Suddenly It's your hand it doesn't take very long at all and that's great that plasticity it's
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why people can do can have um people do sensory and motor augmentation so crazy Prosthetics right you know this monkey with a third arm that uses it to eat um marshmallows uh you know in humans they
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get prosthetic arms where the wrist goes you know all the way around like your normal wrist doesn't they'll do that when they pick up a coffee cup they'll they'll go the way that a normal hand would never go and so like that
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plasticity you know I think we have to embryos have to figure it out from scratch what do I have what do I you know what what sensors do I have what effectors do I have where's the where where what what I have control over
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where is the where is the boundary ah so they all learn that or figure that out huh yeah and and we can do we can do stuff like in the in the lab we can do stuff like um we can make uh we can make
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a tple where the eyes are on his tail and uh no problem they can see we can we can do visual learning tasks it all you know uh it all gets it all gets sorted out I think it's we have we have many
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examples like this of just really oh we make we make these xenobots which are frog skin that's given a new life and it makes this little motile Proto organism that runs around on its own and does all kinds of things it's just skin uh yeah I
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think I think it's because all of these questions of what am I what is my structure what space do I live in all of this gets solved from scratch when every time it's not hardwired
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mostly there's some type of built-in error correction right like if you put the Eyes on the tail they slowly begin to migrate towards the head even if they don't make it where to where they're supposed to no the eyes on the tail
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don't move what what happens is uh the eyes stay there there are things that definitely correct so so if you make we make these uh so-called Picasso frogs which are um all the all the crano facial organs are scrambled they they do
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correct by the time they get to a frog they they do correct correct but you can also teach them new patterns so for example when you cut a zenbot it heals back to the Zen to its new zenbot shape
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and if you have a salamander and you keep chopping off the the one limb after about five or six trials it gives up and it's not going to do it anymore it's done it Lear it learns that it's just not going to work thinking about that type of
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self-correction plus this uh computational marov blanket idea of identity and something like whatever the the confidence intervals or error bounds are so on one hand when we're talking about identity you have
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this kind of almost postmodern it could be anything right the the boundaries are kind of arbitrary only to the extent they're functionally useful across time are they going to be stable so the simplest version of this would be think
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about what's a marov blanket that can Define uh the scope of the sun it can just be a sphere of arbitrary size and for the most part we agree on the boundaries but you could keep it extending it and you're going to capture
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some residual solar flares like you could extend it and Define a sphere that goes all the way out to Mars and you're going to collect even more of that solar mass but it's kind of like a diminishing
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returns type thing so there must be this some Optimum point if you define a function that say on one hand you want to maximize the amount of sun you're capturing but on the other hand you want
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to minimize the amount of like false positive or empty space so you're trying to optimize across those two variables and then I'm wondering at at the level of the boundaries of an organism if you
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have something like that too where you can have all these philosophical questions of am I still me if I take away one skin cell yes or even a hair like but you keep removing cell by cell
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eventually there will be no more of you left so it must be something like you do have boundar Aries but they're fuzzy boundaries and there's something like these confidence interval bands of how much can you remove before you actually
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no longer have the thing yeah yeah I think that's that's super interesting and and I think there's a couple of things that uh feed into this one is that uh people so so I was just reading
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about this cool example where um you know blindsight where someone doesn't think they can see but in fact if you ask them to guess what's in front of them they guess correctly and so they they in fact can see they just don't know can see uh there's the the original
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patient that was studied for this would say that that's not part of him it's uh that that Vision it's something else it's something something extra you know he didn't think that was part of him because he didn't have a direct um perception of even though it was part of
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a successful part of his behavioral repertoire it wasn't something that he had conscious access to and he didn't feel that was part of the self so that's that's asking but but we also have to keep in mind that's asking his left hemisphere presumably the one with
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speech right because there's actually another hemisphere in there that you don't normally hear from and there are a whole bunch of other stuff in there that we don't know how to talk to yet right other other organs and and so on that uh might have their own boundaries in
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different spaces and that's also uh on a practical level that's also what we deal with when we work on cancer so when we work on cancer what you see is that when when
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individual cells electrically disconnect from the rest of the body they their cognitive light cone shrinks they're back to their amoeba tiny little e gos and as far as they're concerned the rest of the body is just environment to them
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right um and similarly when we when we make these xenobots you know you start with a frog embryo you dissociate it into individual cells the cells are all alive and you take some of them and you make the Cabot but the but but the the
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embryo is gone right the TPO is gone and so where did it go and right because the cells are all alive and it's exactly what you just said you know you could sort of take one after the other and then and then eventually you have something else you have a colle you have a bunch of loose cells or you have a you
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can make a zabot or or something but the individual is gone so yeah these boundaries are are fuzzy indeed and then and then in fact I mean that's the other the the um the end the
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end point of the story then is that you can actually go backwards and you can force these and this is a this is a cancer uh approach that we work on which is to not to kill those cells but to force them to re reconnect to their neighbors and when they reconnect to the
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neighbors they once again become part of the collective that's working on making nice skin nice muscle they stop being metastatic and they they go back to wow yeah and and yeah we've done it in frog it works great in frog we're now
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moving into um you know human cells but but but it's a different right it's a different way of of thinking about it because you you you take advantage of that memory wipe you know they forget about their little local goals and they start working on whatever the collective
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goal was you know by the way I yeah go ahead how far does the cognitive light cone extend because when when you talk about say humans are the Pinnacle of that like our subjective experience of
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being one and then you can go narrower in all of the Su levels you know down to the cellular level within humans and all of those are narrower versions of that light cone but when you expand across
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humans it seems like there's not only a jump to me and to you into different selves but there's not the same like connecting Continuum that so because on
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one hand I'm tempted to say you can look at uh broadscale social organization uh or like Network Dynamics as an even larger portion of that light
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cone but it doesn't seem to have the same continuity well I don't you mean uh it doesn't uh like first person continuity like it doesn't like you think it doesn't it isn't like anything to be
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that social AG agent right and and we we both are I think sympathetic to pan psychism so saying even if we only have conscious access to what it's like to be
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us at this higher level like it's there's it's possible that there's something that it's like to be a cell but I'm not sure it's possible that there's something that there's something it's like to be say a country uh there's actually a really
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good paper about that um which I I will uh I'll I'll look up in a minute and I'll try to put it on the chat that actually talks about um the kind of the the philosophy of that so I I sorry
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sorry what is it like to be a bat no no there's another one that's um I'll I'll I'll that's there's a different one I'll find it momentarily but um uh I you know I I I don't know I think that uh I think
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that if if we didn't know any uh bi cell biology or neuroscience and somebody said to us did you know that uh here's what I think I think I could take three and a half pounds of uh these these little electrically excitable things and
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Smosh them together in this process where the whole thing kind of folds on itself for for nine months and whatnot did you know that that that's going to give rise to an internal perspective of of you know a human I would say hell no
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that that doesn't sound that doesn't sound plausible at all um I I think we have we have no idea what what kinds of things give rise to uh those kind of first-person perspectives um I I I I
00:34:26
don't think that necessarily just because you're bigger in scale I don't think that necessarily your light cone is bigger so I I wouldn't make the claim that necessarily groups of people have a bigger cognitive capacity than individual people in fact I don't know
00:34:39
Roy you could you could say what you think about the intelligence of groups versus versus versus single individuals but I don't think there's any reason why it has to be bigger but I also don't see uh yeah we don't our intuitions I think
00:34:52
for for what uh is sufficient to have that that that that inner perspective I think are really badly calibrated I don't think we have a clue I'd be inced to think you'd need a brain and central nervous system to have
00:35:08
a to have conscious experience I mean that's fine except that the brain and nervous system show up very slowly so that both both evolutionarily and developmentally so
00:35:20
that means that we need some sort of a story about when does it kick in and I have never heard a good story about that yeah I've long speculated that the first conscious experience would be
00:35:33
pain just that would be adaptive and it was a signal that the tissue is being damaged that's perfectly reasonable and that would be the disruption of a cell membrane in a microb because that
00:35:47
depolarization that neurons have when you when you trigger them which presumably they don't like and and so on uh that is as old as the hills that's that's that's pre multicellularity never
00:35:58
mind neurons um and but but I agree with you yeah that that kind of basic uh that kind of basic basic damage and that physiological that that Delta from from physiological homeostasis is the origin
00:36:13
of it but it's really old you know yeah good well to get things this is sort of the other side of your example of the Rat uh no no cell experiencing both the B press and the food reward
00:36:27
but with pain you uh step on step on I don't know fire ants and the Brain says ouch and uh you know grab onto something and pull yourself
00:36:39
away uh that would be the same thing it's a whole body response and you perhaps we could find example of which no no one cell is involved in both the input and the output the input being the
00:36:53
signal of pain and the output being the the motor movements to uh to escape it yeah want to see something fun uh I'll show you a uh show you a quick
00:37:05
quick video um hang on a second let me yeah this is cool um all right can you guys see this thing yeah so this is this is this is the work of postto
00:37:18
narosa mugan in my lab and um what this is this yellow thing here is a piece of slime mold uh the slime mold you're going to see it grow but the whole thing is one cell it it really just has one one it's one big cell this is is a glass
00:37:32
a a very thin glass disc it's about five milligrams there's no food there's no it's just glass iner glass this is three glass discs okay so here's the time lapse and so what happens is for the
00:37:45
first few hours what the slime mold is is is grow it's growing in all directions right but what it's also doing this during this time what you can't see is it's gently tugging on the med medium and reading back the
00:37:58
vibrations that it gets from pulling it's sitting on a on a soft AAR and it's pulling on the soft agar and uh by this by right around by this time it's made up its mind about where the bigger mass
00:38:10
is and how do we know because boom whoa yeah and this is reliable uh it it what it will always do is uh not not quite always but most of the time what it'll do is it'll go to the bigger Mass we
00:38:23
don't know why it likes a bigger Mass who knows but what it able to do and the coolest part to me the coolest part is is right here because at this point it's already integrated the information about its environment it it already knows
00:38:35
where the bigger mass is but hasn't done anything yet right up until now this is all from here the the first you know 600 minutes or so this is all this is all pondering time right here this is where it's collecting that information and and
00:38:47
the whole thing is one cell and it's collecting this biophysical sort of feedback from its environment and then bang at this point it's you know right right like here 795 it's still sort of it could go in any direction but boom it
00:39:00
that that's it at this point it's made it ch right very nice yeah the whole thing the whole thing is one you know one cell and uh we have tons of we have tons of experiments uh looking just you
00:39:12
can test it oh and and other people like Audrey dour has done uh uh training you can train them it has memory you can train it you can take a a trained one and a naive one and fuse them they
00:39:24
they'll fuse together and then the memory sort of propagates and the naive one will now remember you know have the memory that that the other one had um no nerves no no brain um single cell
00:39:40
W Mike we've talked a lot about zooming in down and back on the evolutionary ladder like there's no obvious point at which intelligence emerges and there's a nice Elegance to pan psychism like it's
00:39:53
all always there and it's just on a continuum and maybe there's some bare minimum unit of Consciousness but if you scale it upwards again past humans even past social
00:40:06
networks at the at the most extreme level you would have okay treat the entire universe as a single system you get this kind of pantheist Cosmos psyche mind of God in Spinoza's terms what do
00:40:19
you think of that yeah I mean I well well first of all I I think though I I think all of this is an empirical question in other words I I don't think we can assume in either direction I think you have to do experiment so when you when you when you
00:40:32
have some sort of weird Collective and you want to know if it in fact you want to know what kind of cognitive system it is you can do experiments like we do with everything else in Behavioral Science you can give it stimuli you can
00:40:44
see if it has memory you can see what what the kind of attention keeping properties it has I don't know how you do experiments on the whole universe but but for but you could for example you know I've had I've had uh I've talked to um physicists to try try to like design
00:40:57
a planetary scale synapse so you could do it you could have a system where uh you know there there there's a gravitational a gravitational system and you can send objects through a stimuli and it will sort of permanently change the way that would react to new objects
00:41:11
in the future so you know basically synapses you could imagine building a you know a gigantic nervous system out of something like like this I have no idea if we live in one or not but uh but I think you know I think I think it's
00:41:22
not impossible and I think that we probably are not going to be able to I don't know I'm sure there's some kind of girdle thing here about not knowing for sure if that's what we live in uh I had
00:41:34
a I had a um I work with this with this amazing graphic artist Jeremy gay and I've asked him to make a little cartoon uh and it's and it's a little it's a it's a cartoon of uh two neurons in a brain and they're talking to each other
00:41:47
and one neuron says the we live in a in a in a cold mindless Universe no nobody cares what we do we you know there's nothing out there and the other one and the other neuron says I don't know you know every once in a while I get this
00:42:00
idea that there's something there's there's more here the universe is sort of you know it it it wants something from us it's you know there's kind some kind of order to it and the first neuron is like ah you're crazy that's that there's nothing there's no mind out
00:42:12
there and you know they're both part of this big big brain right and so in that case the second one is is is right of course because they are in fact part of you know a larger scale individual so are we part of it I I don't know I think
00:42:25
maybe it's Poss and again this is maybe right maybe Roy can say something about this is is it possible for us to gain evidence that we are part of a collective that has Collective Dynamics like learning like preferences like
00:42:37
attention um I don't know I I was contacted by um some guys who work on the um uh the market uh what do they call it the market mind hypothesis or something um but it's yeah it's some
00:42:49
kind of it's some kind of attempt to uh understand economics using some tools of of Behavioral Science I mean I don't know maybe maybe maybe some of these Concepts like like training like attention like uh uh perceptual
00:43:03
Illusions you know uh maybe maybe they'll they would work on these larger structures you know that ant ant colonies fall for the same visual illusions that um mamia nervous systems do not not not the individual ants The
00:43:16
Colony so so the you can you can do experiments they make the same perceptual mistakes as as we do you can use like say many of the same Illusions I don't know maybe maybe in economics
00:43:27
that thing holds too right still intrigued by the the question I think it was Adam brought it up is is there something that it's like to be a country yeah let me find it
00:43:45
yeah I don't Mike is the paper you're referring to there does it have the line in it what if we all held hands I you know I don't recall uh but uh but I will there's something I
00:43:58
think it was Ned block and it it it might have been in what it's like to be a b or a paper in that same space but you know it was it was addressing arguments against the possibility of something like that and one argument is
00:44:12
just like it has to be physically connected so so that was just like a a joke what if we all held hands but the oh yeah I think the more serious take on that is something like there needs to be
00:44:24
some physical medium for information exchange and you know back to this like Cosmic neuron idea I think it's dangerous getting psychologist to comment on quantum physics but I'll take
00:44:38
that leap there I mean when you hear about things like entanglement where you have what seems to be like genuine information exchange across large physical distances
00:44:50
where there's there's no actual contact I don't know what to make of that but then if I start thinking about it in more of these like treat the universe or just some highl system as some computer
00:45:06
essentially that can transmit information almost like there's again this this planetary synapse going on I wonder if there's anything there yeah maybe my I mean my understanding and I'm
00:45:18
I'm no physicist but my understanding is that uh you actually can't use entanglement to pass information faster than light uh it's that that's my understanding that that you're not
00:45:31
actually passing a signal back and forth you're not violating relativity but NE nevertheless um there is an interesting notion of synchronicity here so so Po and Yung right you might have seen that
00:45:43
wrote this book on on the together on on synchronicity and it's this idea that uh patterns that look like anomalous information transfer at lower scales are in fact perfectly reasonable cognitive
00:45:56
uh kinds of things at a larger scale that you're not aware of and that's something that um I'm I'm working through right now Richard Watson and are working through some of this stuff right now so I don't know but um check out um so I put a link on the on the chat so
00:46:09
this is this is a paper by um Eric schwitz Gable and it's called if materialism is true the United States is probably conscious and it and IT addresses exactly uh the the issue that you're talking about it's sort of basic
00:46:22
basic philosophy I like schwitz he's sympathetic to psychism as well oh yeah I don't I don't know him at all but I thought I thought this was a pretty good it was a pretty good paper but um I I don't I don't know anything here really but but the one thing I I really feel
00:46:35
strongly is that our intuitions for uh what kind of systems are going to have an inner perspective are not calibrated well we have an N of one example I I mean ourselves like we
00:46:49
we really just have no clue and and I don't know yeah I don't know about you but if somebody if I didn't know what was between my ears and somebody showed me a brains look this is this this this this thing is going to have an inner perspective why why would you ever think
00:47:00
that right um I don't know I I don't think I mean people have tried right so there's you know I IIT and and some other things that try to uh uh put down some um some constraints around the kind
00:47:13
of architectures that are going to have that metric but yeah I think I think we're we're very brain focused and and I think that blinds us to to a lot of things that um H yeah I don't
00:47:28
know I may be blind brain focused but it's hard to imagine the United States being conscious as a as a as a thing hard to imagine but but
00:47:41
look uh you know uh we are we good at imagining a lot of things that are true I I don't I don't know and and I also think right without without getting you know too too uh uh out there but I I find it very difficult to imagine that
00:47:55
in the whole whole universe the only way to be conscious is to have this kind of thing here right like that strikes me as a priori very improbable I I would I sort of have this background maybe it's
00:48:07
too much Star Trek when I was a kid but I have this background expectation that the universe is a very weird place and that there are going to be Minds out there that don't look anything like us and if we're expecting to see a frontal
00:48:18
cortex with this and that uh we're g to be you know badly disappointed I just I I just can't imagine that this is the only way to do you know so you can imagine right I mean this is the Sci-Fi has had this for for for over a hundred
00:48:31
years like you know you're you're you're sitting there at home and and this thing lands on your front lawn and some kind of some kind of thing on Wheels trundles out and hands you this poem of like you know how happy it is to to to to you know to meet you so what are you going
00:48:43
to do are you going to assume that uh who knows what's in it you're going to assume that that it's that it's somehow faking because you can't find a single neuron in there that that can't be right I just yeah that I don't know
00:49:01
um the idea that the corporation is like a person that was a a deliberate invention a cultural invention as a fiction which facilitated trade it was a
00:49:14
big advance and it's it's one of the reasons the the Arab Islamic World fell behind even though it was historically ahead um for a number of
00:49:26
centuries but it uh um but it's understood as a fiction you don't think the uh the the
00:49:38
partnership itself is conscious as a Unity but it's a uh you know the the key was to protect the individuals involved from liability
00:49:52
so if three Arabs want to get together to you know make an investment and and send out a ship for and profit by trade if it goes bad their whole fortunes their house and everything is is forfeit
00:50:05
and so it made trade very risky uh but the Europeans invented the corporation uh and so if it fails then the assets belong to the corporation can
00:50:17
be accessed by the creditors but the homes and the personal savings of the individuals are not at risk H but it's it's a it's a legal
00:50:29
Fiction it's understood as such to say that the the corporation becomes conscious as a as a Unity seems a stretch to me but do you know that uh actually I mean that's very interesting
00:50:42
what you just said that that this kind of um the that the adoption of a uh of a of an agential perspective makes makes certain relationships easier I think that's very interesting but but you know
00:50:54
there are a lot of of philosophers of Mind who think that the human uh Consciousness is fiction too right and and basically I think they would tell exactly the same story that you just told around uh primates you know sitting
00:51:09
around a fire at some point where where it just basically this idea that we're gonna we're going to assume that each of us has an internal perspective that's like me is is just a lubricating fiction for being a band of uh cooperating
00:51:21
individuals that there actually is no such thing I mean that that's a pretty common problem the the majority I guess view nowadays in in in in philosophy of mind and and that that that's EXA that
00:51:34
in fact exactly that kind of fiction it's a fiction that makes it easier to be successful and to do things and then eventually it's a fiction that we we turn on ourselves right that that basically after you tell stories about
00:51:46
other agents doing things then you say wait a minute I'm an agent too I do things I have free will and I'm a you know I'm a person and that that that basically is just a user illusion you know there are plenty of plenty of people who write books on human
00:51:59
consciousness where that's the conclusion um that you're basically a user illusion that provides for social lubrication I'm not familiar with that perspective I guess I mean I I you know
00:52:12
I don't want like uh yeah um I I could I could name a number of books that would that it's it's a very mainstream it's a very mainstream thing I mean it's it's you know I I I I yeah yes it's it's very hard to sort internalized that view
00:52:26
because it basically says that you are a walking illusion in many ways but but that is I believe the kind of the the mainstream um perspective I read a bunch of things about the self being an illusion and so
00:52:39
on and it's a none of them seems very convincing that uh I noticed they all put their names on their books yeah well that's that's true and that and that's sort you know that gets
00:52:52
back to the uh to the issue I I think I think Adam mentioned Free Will at the beginning right that's that's that's it I had I had lunch with um with a philosopher once who did you know didn't believe in in Free Will and uh the the
00:53:05
the waitress came by and uh and said well what do you have and they and they said well let me see and they said are you gonna choose a sandwich what like how come how come you don't sit back and see what the what the big bang ordained
00:53:18
you know for like it's impossible for us right it's not I've never met anybody who can actually you know so people say that believe in free will but I think it's a uh I think it's a false introspective report they don't act as
00:53:30
though they don't and so you would never would you agree with that I mean you would never conclude actually from observing them that that in fact they don't believe it yeah yeah I think uh he was talking about metzinger the German philosopher
00:53:44
who wrote wrote some book or one of them about there's no free will and no moral responsibility someone ask him okay is this how you raise your sons no no no of course they have to learn to behave by
00:53:56
the rules in these mainstream reductionist views arguing against Free Will I mean I don't disagree with their logic but they seem to frame it as all or nothing so if
00:54:08
you don't have say independence from this entire causal chain of the universe then there's none as opposed to taking more of this degrees of freedom approach like Kevin Mitchell or Roy do or this
00:54:20
cognitive light cone approach that can be narrow or Broad and give you more freedom why would that even evolve what would be the advantage of being able to act completely independent of the environment everything else that serves
00:54:32
no purpose what you want to do is spot multiple possibilities in the environment and make advantageous decisions on those Bas on that basis well that's that's that's right I I
00:54:45
think a lot of these accounts are very backwards looking so they're it's all about explanations and pointing out that well look you know there's this whole chain of chemistry going backwards that's uh you know resp responsible of everything that happens and that's fine
00:54:58
if you want to take the micro reductionist perspective and you're content with looking backwards at what's already happened but that isn't what we're trying to do here what what right
00:55:10
I'm I'm not interested in in h pre you know in explanation I'm interested in invention I want to know what next what are you going to do next and and that kind of framing where you're just looking back and thinking which Adam zigs and zag to get you here are
00:55:22
completely useless for as a for invention you're not going to do anything new if that's in fact I I just just just a couple days ago I I I wrote this um uh I I had this blog post where
00:55:34
I asked gp4 to uh write a um a dialogue between uh a hiring manager at a software company and a young applicant who just read one of these books saying there's no free will so he goes in there
00:55:47
and and they say so uh are you a good coder he says code the computer is a physical system the electrons go where they go what what do you mean code there's no there's no room for this magical code that's going to make the electrons dance they just you know the
00:56:00
computer does what it does and and and so and that's exactly right if if if if if if your perspective is that uh everything is going to happen according to the Maxwells equations where the electrons go you're not going to code a
00:56:12
damn thing and and and and you know and then you're a terrible candidate for a job that requires forward-looking creativity you know backwards is easy forward forwards is is where it's at yeah
00:56:29
well I see we're in the final couple minutes thank you Michael for doing this and thank you Adam for setting it up this has been very stimulating giving me a bunch to think about yeah thank you both if you have time I I wanted to ask
00:56:41
one more question Mike you brought up yion synchronicity and we haven't talked about any of this Roy so I'm I'm curious to hear your thoughts but I'll add one more piece where some some of what he says is very compelling to me and then
00:56:54
on the other hand I have Steve Pinker as one of my advisers so he looks at that in like very cognitive rationalist terms of okay this is just one of many biases that we have where chance events occur
00:57:06
all the time and most of the things that have no meaning you just completely dismiss and then every now and then it's it's like type one error right now now and then you're going to get a false
00:57:19
positive end I go back and forth between thinking yeah when these chance encounters happen that uh that hint at something connected is that just me imposing like my predictive processing
00:57:33
onto the world and it's really just things happen all the time so there's bound to be coincidences yeah I I really liked Yung when I was young I read a whole bunch of his books I even had
00:57:45
plans to go to the Yung Institute and uh uh and and learn that and uh somebody kindly talked me out of that uh he was certainly brilliant and uh
00:57:57
operating in the outside the normal range and that's part of the appeal uh to try these things but the the synchronicity you have to postulate there's some
00:58:10
higher higher power integrating or organizing uh things it's it's a variation of the everything happens for a reason argument
00:58:22
and in terms of Evolution a lot of things happen for a reason and that's how we learn to relate to each other instead of just looking at each other as like oh there's a an animal doing
00:58:34
something how does this affect me but uh I start to infer well the person is doing that for a reason which we can infer and so we learn to think in terms of invisible
00:58:46
causes behind things but uh the synchronicity uh to take random coincidences and see a deeper meaning that's that's that's seductive but I I guess I I believe there's a lot
00:59:01
of Randomness in the universe so I uh I'm not really a believer in synchronicity as a thing now now some things do happen for a reason and there are you know you can explore
00:59:14
coincidences and some of them will not be coincidences but a lot of them are right when it gets all mystical it seems to fall on its heels but when I think about Mike's example of the comic strip
00:59:27
neurons talking to each other firing really in accordance with a whole plan of a higher intelligence that they can't perceive and then thinking about how narrow our perception is and just
00:59:39
thinking is it possible that there's some like large scale computation that we're all part of and thinking about I don't know this evolutionary Game Theory or these these sort of um natural laws of selection that are guiding in a
00:59:53
certain way and then other people say you know it's it's not selecting for some end goal it's just selection just is and what survives just is yeah I think uh you know I I think
01:00:06
the question of whether there's a larger pattern is an empirical question so I I not going to claim an answer to that but I do think that the concept of synchronicity and and I I've only recently started working on this I don't
01:00:18
have a mature version of this idea but but I'll just spit this out that uh I think the concept of synchronicity goes way beyond our human tendency to notice patterns I
01:00:30
think that a proper version of the concept of synchronicity would talk about multiscale patterns so that when you're looking at electrons in the computer you would say isn't it amazing that these electrons went over here and
01:00:42
those went over there but together that's an endgate and by the way that's part of this other calculation like amazing down below all they're doing is following Maxwell's equations but looked at at another level wow they just just
01:00:54
computed the weather in you know in in Chicago so I I I think what you know I it's not about well I was going to say it's not about us and uh and our human tendency to to to to pick out patterns
01:01:07
and things like but actually I I do think it's that too because if synchronicity is is simply how things look at other scales of course we're going to get good at it and of course we're also going to make mistakes right we're not going to be perfect at it
01:01:20
we're going to be looking for these kinds of things and sometimes we're going to overdo it but that's not to say that there are mundane explanation right things that look random and and
01:01:31
um physical and deterministic at one scale you you're missing a lot if if if you don't know if there is a a different scale of and of observation and it's like uh yeah you you know you could
01:01:44
study your computer using Maxwell's Maxwell's equations but you're really better off if you know what a high LEL programming language is and and that is to Total mysticism from the perspective of the electrons this idea that there's this giant algorithm that's you know go
01:01:58
dep determining where we go it's it's it's mystical nonsense except that except that if you don't buy into that you're not going to code much we we would still be you know we would still be in the 50s as far as Information Technology if we didn't buy into that
01:02:09
particular brand of of mysticism so I feel like I feel like there's there's definitely a revolution uh along those lines coming for biomedicine and this our our obsession with the biological hardware and with the molecules instead
01:02:23
of the um the the expectations the memories the preferences of our Collective cells and so on that that there's a that's you know I'm I'm betting a lot of our lab work on on that that that's all got to change but but
01:02:35
maybe it goes higher than that you know I don't know but but anyway yeah again same thank you so much for putting us together re real pleasure uh for me too please yeah
01:02:48
please send send over if you don't mind if you if you have anything uh that's relevant to this from your work that I should read definitely send it over i' love to all right okay well thanks again uh yeah
01:03:02
thanks Adam this was super interesting thank you both thanks guys appreciate it thanks guys bye see you later
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