Video: Michael Levin: What Is The Field Of Diverse Intelligence? (DocDrop)

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[Music] thank you Mike it's so good to see you again it's very good to see you yeah pleasure but look Mike since the last time we

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spoke I've noticed that your work has just grown it's tremendously evolving becoming so much more complex your body of knowledge has increased so much something I've noticed I'm not sure if you've picked up on this but

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you've become a lot better at articulating these concepts with so much Clarity have you picked up on this no no I have no idea so that's great that's that's good to hear I hope I mean I work on it all the time but actually it's

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hard for me to know what's what you know what's coming across and what's not so I'm glad I'm glad to hear that yeah that's important to me so that's great I think in that regard it's very similar to intelligence in general I mean it's it's been such a spectrum

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for you that you haven't really noticed picked up on this yeah tell me Mike when you there was a time when you did this paper I think you wrote an article on um with Daniel Dennett on cognition all

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the way down I remember something I wanted to start this podcast with this concept because I remember you guys discussing the prisoner dilemma and how this illuminates the idea of the computational boundary of the self I was hoping we could perhaps start with that

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and then explore these Concepts because I find when you ground something with an analogy that people are accustomed to it becomes a lot easier to understand these complex phenomena yeah yeah well uh let's see um

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I don't remember exactly what I said but uh but I can I can I guess I'll just talk about it um when people do this um these simulations these prisoners dilemma simulations you know for for um uh economics or Game

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Theory or conflict theory or things like that what typically happens is that let's say let's say we imagine what they call a a spatialized prisoners dilemma where you have multiple agents and they all sort of play against their neighbors

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and and so on yeah the typical way you do this is that there's a constant number of players so you have some constant number of Agents they all play against each other they all have individual

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um goals and then you see which strategies are the best over over time and the thing about biology is that uh there's a there's an interesting and oh and and of course the moves there's two

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there's two moves they can make so they can they can at every at every stage of the game they can cooperate or they can defect and it's very clear in this in this Paradigm um each agent is quite distinct from

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from the next and so I can cooperate with with you or I can defect and not cooperate and so on because I know who I am you know who you are and so on in biology things are not so simple and it's actually much more interesting because

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uh cells and as a subcellular component cells tissues organs and so on can all um merge in an important way they can connect to each other and form higher

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level units that have distinct goals memories competencies preferences and so on from the different parts and so I'll just give you a simple example in

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faizaram this is Sly mold this is actually a it's an experiment that uh my son and I did as part of his uh you know kind of a home science uh unit um so so

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so so so uh so you have this uh you have the slime mold and you put a piece of oat which the Slime wants to eat and it starts to crawl towards that road and then what you can do is you can take a razor blade and and just cut off that Leading Edge you know the little piece

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of it that's moving towards the out now as soon as you've done that that little piece is a new individual and he has uh uh um a decision to make because he can go in and get the oat and exploit that

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resource and not have to share it with this giant mass of faizaram that's back here or he can first merge back and uh and and connect back to the to the original Mass

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because they can reconnect quite easily and then and then they go get the oat now the thing is that the the payoff Matrix looks quite different because when it's by itself it can sort of it can it can do this calculus of Wale it's

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better for me to go get the food instead of and not share it with this other thing but as soon as you connect you that that payoff Matrix changes because there is no me and you there's just we and at that point it doesn't make any sense to the fact that you

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can't defect against yourself uh you know then so that payoff table of of um actions and consequences looks quite different because some of the actions change the number of players and that's

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really weird right and so that's the thing that normally doesn't happen in typical uh prisoners dilemma types of simulations because all they have is cooperate and defect there's no way to change the number of players but we are actually and I have a student working on

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this is not published yet so I can't you know tell you what what the answers are or anything because we're still we're still working on it but but we have a we have a a version of spatialized prisoners dilemma where you have cooperate defect but also split and

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merge so two cells can decide that so and and when you do that the the outcome of Your Action changes the number of players which radically changes the payoff Table after that so the whole thing is much more complex much more sort of

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um this you know uh recurrent and all of that and so and so the question so so what happens then right what what strategies look good under those conditions so um stay tuned for that it'll be some months before we know do you have a

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hypothesis regarding that yeah I think that uh I think that there will be strategies that uh take advantage of see when you merge with

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another unit you get whatever metabolics they you know whatever metabolic resources they had at that time but more importantly you gain information because that that other individual that you merged with has been sitting there

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playing against his neighbors for quite some time so so it has lots of information and if you have a good way of merging your information with their information in fact it's it's inevitable

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because once you dissolve that boundary you can't tell whose memories or who's anymore that's kind of the big thing about um that that kind of memory wiping the the wiping the identity on these

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memories is a big part of multicellularity I I think um and be and and so I think there will be strategies that under specific conditions take advantage of this merging and you'll end up with these larger scale individuals that do very

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well because they now have the computational capacity they have the knowledge of of lots of different pieces and they can and and and you immediately you know it it sort of forces cooperation there's no

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way for you to defect against yourself really and so once you're connected that tightly um you're a larger Cooperative unit I think and so and so that's what that's what I'm interested into seeing under

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what conditions uh and what policies are optimal for for that kind of thing I think it's a fascinating concept because when you take the president's delivery you think about the two-page the two prisoners sorry um I mean they're given an ultimatum I

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mean what the options are one is you you either tell the judge I would say or the police officer that you did commit the crime and then you take the blame the other guy goes scot-free or vice versa and the

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other two options are obviously one if both of them just don't say anything and they get a much shorter sentence or both of them rat out to one of one of the others and then they get no sentence um and then when you take that and incorporate it into cells and people

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human beings it's easy for us to look at us and think okay we're 30 trillion human cells give or take we're about 39 trillion bacterial cells at what point do we consider ourselves bacteria or at what point do we consider ourselves

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human perhaps these questions are incorrect and you do a great job at explaining this with your computational boundary of self you want to explore that a bit yeah um well uh so so the my

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computational boundary of the self notion is simply a way to try to be able to think about very diverse kinds of uh beings diverse kinds

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of intelligences all all on one scale so to speak so so often people are interested in the brain structure or very specific behaviors in specific environments which makes it very hard to

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then compare and contrast these kinds of agents to ones that either don't have a brain or work in a completely different space and so I wanted I wanted some kind of a framework that enables you to think

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about what do all intelligent agents have in common and so we're talking about uh agents that are either very large or very tiny so so molecular scale or perhaps uh planetary or larger scale

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very short-lived things very long-lived um uh kind of uh kinds of uh the agents that are very hard for for humans to typically recognize as intelligent ones that work in weird spaces so not just

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behavior in three-dimensional space but behavior in physiological space gene expression space uh anatomical more for space you know we're talking about things that are evolved designed uh things that are some

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combination a hybrid of uh of of those things so and and so and so the framework that I came up with and this was um we were we were challenged to do this by uh pranabdas at the uh uh at a

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Templeton meeting back in I think 2018 or something like that uh the the framework that I wanted to use was was this idea that what all of these agents have in common is the ability to pursue

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goals and some of them have very sophisticated ability to pursue goals some of them have very simple ones but and and this this is not a new idea this goes all the way back uh well it goes even further but but William James said

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it very well when he said uh you know intelligence is the ability to reach the same goal by different means and and he talked about the spectrum of you know two magnets trying to get together versus Romeo and Julia trying to get

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together and everything in between and and what does it mean to have competencies to get around various obstacles and and things that are preventing you from reaching your goals so the so so so my framework is simply

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that you can draw um on a two-dimensional uh sort of uh grid you can map out the scale of the largest goal that an individual agent can pursue so you we sort of a it's

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almost like a minkowski diagram where you collapse all of space onto one axis time is is the other axis and you can you can draw the radius of the goals not not the radius at which something has

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sensory capacity or can take actions but the size of the goal states that they can pursue so if you're if if if um all of your goal states are about

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local uh local sugar concentration right now you're probably a bacterium or something similar if your goal States uh if if you have um you know a dog might have uh some memory going back or some

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predictive capacity going forward but they're never going to care about what happens a month from now three Towns over it's just impossible the right as far as we know um and so all of this of course is these are empirical questions we don't know

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ahead of time until we tested What creatures can and can't uh pursue as goals but you know we it's likely that something like a dog has a has a radius that uh has a a well-defined kind of

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time Horizon and and space spatial uh boundary and beyond that it's it's not going to care right um and and and you know and if and if you care about what happens to the Earth uh uh thousands of years from now what

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happens to the human race well you know what the world peace and the financial markets in The Next Century you're probably a human because these are these are gigantic kind of cognitive light cones um and then and then you know if if

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you're some some alien species that has the ability to literally care about every other being on your planet right in the linear range I mean humans I don't think can do that but but if there is a creature somewhere that is that

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level of Advance where they can actually have care and compassion for for every being and they work towards it they would have a much larger cognitively cone than we do you know more more advanced in that way so so so that's the

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idea right and and that idea leads you to develop um uh practical uh experimental tools to to to look for the the size of the boundary for any given agent and so you can ask

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for cells for tissues for organs for swarms what problem space are they working in in that problem space What are the goals that they're trying to reach what are the size of those goals and what are the competencies how good

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are they at getting those goals met when things change yeah when the novel per novel perturbations novel environments and so on and then you can do experiments and that's really key yeah that all of this this is not philosophy this is this is meant to advance

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Empirical research by by focusing the questions on uh uh people will specify hypotheses about what goals a particular system can reach and then we've made do experiments and then we find out that

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yes it can get around certain kinds of perturbations but not others and and then and then we know who's right and who's wrong something like a very common theme regarding your work I mean there's a lot

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of people who on the one hand don't like this idea of of scientists delving into this or diving into this philosophy realm and and trying to take over this this issue of thinking or thought processes but then on the other side

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you've got many philosophers people like Dennis in general who love this idea of of of scientists coming into their field and teaching them so many new Concepts I mean your goal you make it very clear is it's not I think I wrote it down here

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it's it's not to anthropomorphize morphogenesis the point is to naturalize cognition and I think that's pretty cool it's a great way to sort of frame this process how do you feel this has been received

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from the scientific Community from a philosophical perspective perhaps yeah well and and I I can't speak for for everybody and you know in all these communities I you know I have no idea I don't I don't uh I don't generally

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monitor too much what uh what you know how people react to stuff so so I I don't know exactly but but I'll tell you what I think um from from The Limited the kind of data sample that I have um I think that

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I think that some of these ideas really catch a lot of flack from both sides which is interesting so so people who are very is sort of they have a very uh molecular based reductionist or

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bottom-up kind of perspective you know very very you know physical oriented they tend to not like this because they don't want aspects of of um uh kind of mental talk uh getting back into you

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know they they they they feel that we should we should do we get as far as possible away from agential kinds of uh kinds of vocabulary that this is sort of a pre-scientific magical thinking and that and that uh you know the promise

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that they that they sort of make to us is that um don't worry at some point we can we can everything will be nicely explained at the level of molecules um you know it's kind of it's it's not real reductionism in that they typically

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don't want to go below a molecules so nobody feels like they should be talking about quantum foam they just kind of want to they like chemistry and and and they want to talk about molecules but um but but they've picked their level and they think that's it and that we shouldn't we shouldn't be talking about

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things that uh uh or what do things want and uh you know what do agents remember and do the agents have and and and so and so they don't they don't like the stuff for that reason

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um funny enough the opposite Camp which is the organicists so I've been fighting this for for hundreds of years and arguing about the fact that no in fact some some things in the world in fact biology and living things and maybe

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ecosystems and cells and whatnot uh you know they they do have uh these kind of uh agential properties and we need to we absolutely need to not um uh uh explain that away or pretend it doesn't exist

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those people really often tend to get upset with me too because uh what they don't like is the fact that I have what they call machines on the same spec and so they feel that if we put machines and

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defining what a machine is is really non-trivial but but they feel that if we put some of these simpler mechanisms like like what currently we recognize as machines on the same spectrum that it's a slippery slope to uh losing whatever

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magic whatever um uh respect we're supposed to have for for these uh for these incredible living living beings and that and that they feel very strongly that we need to keep a sharp binary distinction between

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machines and living organisms um yeah I I think that's profoundly wrong and I think um you know the the the the challenge and the opportunity here is precisely to develop a

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um a a principled science of of a Continuum that tells us what in what cases are you better off using the tools of simple machines and in what cases are you

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better off using the tools of complex cognitive beings and everything in between we have lots of tools all across that spectrum and uh and and I think it is the same spectrum and anytime you ask somebody to Define what they mean by

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Machine they either typically you know from in this in the context of this kind of debate they typically either have no definition or they have one that would have been good maybe in the 1950s but certainly not after that and so I I

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think that binary distinction and Josh bongard and I have ever written on this very specifically the I I think this binary distinction uh is just is just completely uh you know it

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leads all sorts of pseudo problems it doesn't help uh researchers you know it's a non-starter so we really do need to naturalize all this and and show that that uh that there is a single Continuum and that we need to develop tools across

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all across that consume and have an Empirical research program of when do you deploy each particular tool and when does it work for you and so on you know I think I completely agree with you regarding almost everything you you just said because

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often when people ask specific questions specifically regarding Consciousness I mean this podcast is called Mind Body Solution obviously paying homage to the Mind Body problem what is consciousness becomes a very fundamental question but I often think about it that Consciousness is is more like a verb

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it's not really something that's an on off switch um it's very difficult to put that switch on um in general when we talk about anything so so when you're talking about cognition intelligence the self do you

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think it's becoming harder to explain these Concepts because of this lack of a definition or do you think it becomes more and more exciting to discuss these Concepts because of this Continuum of of exploration

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well I I certainly think it's we're in a better place now than we were I think uh I think I think it's it is it is exciting and it's getting better but um you know specifically with the issue of Consciousness so so I so I've been

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pretty careful up until now to say very little about Consciousness per se right I mostly talk about very very functional publicly observable Behavior so so intelligent behavior is problem solving and

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um you know these these cognitive capacities that are kind of like um uh uh experimentally observable uh third-person kind of Science and so so that was on purpose not not but but not

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because I you know it's not that I don't think Consciousness is an important problem I think it's it's an extremely important problem I don't think it doesn't exist uh I don't think that the mind-body kind of uh issues are not important they are but I do think it's

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important to make as much progress as we can uh on quote-unquote easy problems without immediately uh sort of um uh combining them with with extremely

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difficult problems right and so and so I you know once once you start talking about Consciousness if things get off the rails very quickly and so so I've wanted to for most of my stuff which up until now has not really needed to talk

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about Consciousness per se I wanted to kind of let that stuff cook in its own area that doesn't that doesn't get into all of those issues about Consciousness um but I do think it's an important problem I am writing some stuff about it now that should hopefully be out I don't

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know probably over 24 um and I think I guess I guess the only thing I'll say about it now is that typically uh you know when people talk

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about Consciousness they typically not everybody but but often people think about the sort of input side of things meaning what the what you know the standard the standard definition is what

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does it feel like to be a whatever you know a bat or or a human robot or whatever you know what's it like to what's it like to be so they focus on the experience which is the kind of sensory side if you will

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um and and and and what I think what I think is is probably more I mean they're both important but but the thing that's that needs more emphasis is the actuation side it's the action site what is it like to do to be a to be an agent

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that has the ability to do things and and and and the reason the reason I think I think this isn't getting any attention is this and there is a there is a theory of Mind called epiphenomenalism and an

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epiphenomenalism you sort of assume that okay uh you know you can say that yes these um these uh uh conscious sensory states that I have are real but they don't do anything so so the input side

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is real but there is no output side it's a view I'm not saying I support it but but it's it's a view what doesn't exist to my knowledge is the opposite side I've never seen I've never heard anybody have a view that says well the action part is real the Free Will is real but

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the sensory stuff is isn't is an illusion right I've never heard of that that view so the fact that there's only one you know it's not symmetric there's only one one version of this tells you that people are very much into the

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um kind of perception side and not so much into the action side and and I mean I mean some obviously are people who work on active inference and things like that of course pay attention to both sides of the equation but but I think I

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think that that is really the mark of the agent is sure what does it feel like but more even more importantly what do I do next that's really what what drives all of this is that is that uh I need to know

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what to do next what's what's my next move as an agent and that that I think is is really fundamental to being and and I think it's going to be fundamental to the Consciousness problem too it's going to be it's it's much of it is all

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of the decisions about where is the boundary between you and the outside world and all these kinds of things that are that are fundamental to defining yourself and what are you you know and all of those are driven by the need to

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act to choose a next action and so so that's that's kind of where I look at well I'm looking forward to your work in Consciousness I mean I'm obviously excited for it are you able to give a precise definition of what you say

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Consciousness is at this point uh no um and I think that uh it was against I mean what we just spoke about giving a precise definition in that way much

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impossible I mean definitions are good uh there's kind of a trade-off between I mean you definitely don't want to talk about things without having some definition I I this happens all the time I hear a lot of people talking about

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um sentience you know whether it be plants Essentials or robot sentences and that thing can't be sentient I'm like yeah have you got a definition of what you mean because that's a really hard thing to Define really um so so definitions are important at

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the same time I think that too early in the game trying to come up with us with a with a very you know strict definition early in the game and I do think we're still early in that game even though people have been thinking about this for thousands of years

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um nevertheless um what what I what I will say about it is is this I think that well I I think that uh we need to be clear and and I think Dana talks about

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this in in one of his papers this idea of a bait and switch you know you say you're going to talk about consciences but what you really end up doing is telling a story about physiology and behavior right and so and so I really think we need to um keep clear if you

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think there there's all the science that we can do in third person and the mark of science that you do in third person is that you don't change much if at all doing the experiment so you do a certain

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experiment and maybe you learn something which in the which does change you a little bit but but but you're still the same you're you're standing away from the experiment at some distance so to speak um you're still whoever you are you made you you know you've done the experiment

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and you've learned something uh if you're going to work on Consciousness there's no way to do third per I don't believe there's any good way to do third person research on Consciousness it's very hard most people who do that are

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really studying physiology and behavior if you're going to do actual experiments unconsciousness you're part of the experiment you you are going to be changed by that experiment so for example if you want to know what it's

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like to be something the only the only actual way that you're going to get that level of information is to in some important way merge with that agent so maybe we connect brains in some way

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right you know some now now now if you and I connect our brains I don't find out what it's like to be you and you don't find out what it's like to be me instead we find out what it's like to be us so it's not quite the same but

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nevertheless that's as close as you're going to get and otherwise you know I can uh it I I think I described this at the end of the of my team paper where um uh you know you can sort of Imagine like

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doing pure third person Neuroscience we've got some electrodes stuck in somebody's brain and you're sort of reading on the screen and then you decide that you know what this the screen and all this stuff it's a low low bandwidth I really need to get in there and so you have you know some kind of a

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brain interface on your own that's that's uh delivering the data right into your brain and then eventually you say yeah that that's not good enough either I'm just going to fuse my brain directly to to this other brain and you can do that you know but with it by engineering

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um and then uh then then now now you're into first person science right and so you you sort of smoothly and and and that's experiments with uh I don't know what people talk about experiments with

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psychedelics and and meditation and uh personal development whatever studying Consciousness you're not going to be the same coming out of it as you win and that's I think the the only way that you can really study Consciousness per se

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well I think that with it in that regard you are one step close I mean Chalmers often said the best way to sort of approach a problem is defining it is defining the problem within the problem in itself so like understanding that there is a problem which in your case

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seems to be this action dilemma I mean it seems to be no one seems to be incorporating that sort of agential action nature behind it it reminds me of something Kevin Mitchell says in one of his books free agents he talks about I

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move therefore I am is that yeah yeah no that's that's that's that's exactly right and all the work on um uh uh active inference uh you know I didn't mean to say nobody's paying attention to

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I just meant that it's uh you know in the general you know kind of uh uh the the the the the the field of people who think about this stuff there's a lot more emphasis on the on the internal perceptions and and so on than on the

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actions but yeah I think I think that's right I think it's movement and and I would um I would extend that to uh say that it's movement not just in

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three-dimensional space which is weird but it's movement in other problem spaces so changes of gene expression figuring out well what Gene do I turn on next uh changes in morphogenesis um you know how many fingers should should this

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arm have and should we be an arm at all or should we be a leg or a foot uh and uh um movement in in metabolic space movement and physiological space who knows you know linguistic space so there's all kinds of other spaces

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um yeah the necessity to act in all these spaces defines who or what you are based on what you have what you have control over and what the you know what you also of course the recursive self model of of what what you think you have

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control over and so on you you just reminded me of another one because I said Kevin says I am I move therefore I am call for instance is I am therefore I think and and it sort of sort of interplays with it when I spoke to Cole

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he he was telling me about your work your upcoming work and the work that Chris feels while Psalms all you guys are doing some amazing work in these fields um what excites you about this at the moment and what what are you guys

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currently what's this main goal at the moment yeah um yeah well I mean I'm just I'm just excited I mean what a group of people to be part of right like I'm just thrilled to death to be able to work with Chris and Carl and Mark

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um but yeah amazing amazing Minds um uh we've spoken before we're both from Cape Town so I mean um you guys are doing some incredible stuff all separately very different work but when it comes together it seems like such a culmination of of Joy from my

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perspective yeah yeah no I'm I'm super excited about it because I think that um uh we have a chance to say something quite rigorous about what minds are and where they come

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from the the thing is that for you know for how many thousands of years various pre-scientific human societies have had this idea that uh you know there's a spirit in each Rock and every tree has a you know you can you know the

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environment is a being and all the trees and all the rocks and everything so it's one thing to say that but it's something else to have a rigorous quantitative model that tells you

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how much right what kind and how much so here's a here's a here's a system and it might be a rocket it might be a computer and it might be some sort of robot or a synthetic uh you know synthetic bio about or whatever but to really have the

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tools to be able to say okay uh what what kind of cognition and how much is here and how do I how do I best relate to this agent what's the most effective way of relating to them what's the most ethical way of relating to them

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um to finally start to develop some tools that allow you to do that in a really a principled way I think is a huge Advance over the old Insight that you know mind is everywhere like that's that's a good first you know zero order

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pass at this but but now but now we're actually um able to to to to to make that much more specific much more defensible um actually integrated into the rest of science because this is I feel very

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strongly about this that these ideas are not just things that you can have philosophical arguments about and then some people say some people you know I've heard this too uh I'll give a talk and then some people say uh wow we we love the new data and the new

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capabilities but we wish you'd stop talking about all this philosophical stuff like it's it's it's like we you know we don't like it it's just stop talking about a lab just do the experiment and and my point is yeah no there's a reason why nobody did these experiments before and that's because

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the philosophy is actually really critical to being being able to have these kinds of ideas right and so um making all this testable and uh connected to the rest of the scientific

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Enterprise where you know for example my my you know unusual views on uh cellular agency and all that they actually have specific implications for regenerative medicine and if you're into regenerative

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medicine you can't really ignore all this stuff it's part of you know and and hopefully it'll it'll it'll be you know even more um uh uh kind of uh impactful if once once we you know once we get

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closer to actual uh clinical applications so so so I'm just super excited I think I think each of these people that you mentioned has a really uh amazing grasp on multiple Fields you

00:32:07

know so so physics and uh um in the case of Mark you know psychoanalysis and and stuff like that which I think is very important you know computation and and biology uh this is the most exciting

00:32:20

area I think there is in science right now is this this weaving together of these these different areas to to find out what is uh common to to different kinds of minds and how do we recognize them and how do

00:32:32

we build them and how do we relate is there a name for this project I mean it seems like such like almost like superheroes coming together this is like an Avengers assembly to the mind that's what it feels like to someone like me who's been watching this

00:32:46

part of it somehow but also watching it from the outside I mean what what are you guys really doing what's what's the end goal here at least um I I love that idea maybe maybe I can get a mid-journey to to make a to make

00:32:58

an Avenger style poster with these guys um let's see uh well is there a name for it um is there a name and who's part of the team and what's really happening

00:33:09

yeah well uh I mean so so so I think I think one way to name this field is uh it's a field of diverse intelligence now the field of diverse intelligence has lots of I mean I'm certainly it's not my

00:33:23

job to uh to say who's in and who's out of what team are they there are many people uh that that work on diverse intelligence right so you got you got people who work on decoding whale songs and and and and various philosophers and

00:33:36

you've got people doing uh minimal matters so you know these droplets that run mazes and the you know minimal active matter and stuff like that um molecular chemo taxes I don't know if you've seen some of these papers just amazing you know you got these

00:33:49

individual molecules that can do chemotaxes instead of bacteria I'm doing doing it uh so so this field is this field is huge and and highly diverse as it should be um and so I I like if I

00:34:01

have to boil it down sometimes when people ask I'll say it's a feel of diverse intelligence research uh yeah and many people are doing you know many different things I think that each of the people that you named has

00:34:13

their own research agenda in addition to the stuff that we're doing together uh all I can really talk about is what I think uh the the goal here isn't to me

00:34:24

the goal is to establish a firm uh rigorous foundation for understanding the spectrum between what we call matter and what we call mind I think it's a

00:34:36

Continuum I think that then the the biggest question for all of all is this idea of of how Minds come to be and how and how do they scale in our physical universe and for me it's it's to take

00:34:49

insights on that question and use them to drive applications that improve people's embodied experience in the world so that means that means regenerative medicine that means bioengineering that means uh

00:35:02

you know environmental remediation all of the all of the things that uh will improve the lived experience for all all living living beings and so so practical applications of these really fundamental questions

00:35:14

um I think we're all sort of working uh towards that in some in some ways I mean when Carl mentioned this my first thought was I mean I know how complicated the academic system is in general getting grants getting research

00:35:26

done um you guys are all working on such different and diverse Topics in general how is this accumulation going to occur I mean is there some sort of linkage between all of this or are you guys going separate parts doing separate work and bringing it all together somehow

00:35:39

afterwards or is this sort of a cumulative Journey as well um well it's it's everything so it's it's both so all of them and everybody else in this field has their own uh

00:35:51

research programs that they're pushing forward um but we all collaborate and um there are uh many different collaborations going on uh I mean I'm part of some of them but obviously there

00:36:04

are many others that I don't know about uh and yeah and we work together so so so Mark and Carla and Chris and I we we work together and we write papers together um and so so yeah I think I think this stuff is pulling together and there are

00:36:16

many other many many other people I'm I I'm super excited how many young people are coming into this field so this is this is the sort of thing where you can very clearly see that uh a lot of the resistance that some of the big names in

00:36:29

this field in this you know some of the traditional people is matched by the excitement of some extremely bright young people coming into this field that are not um constrained in the same way and uh as

00:36:42

as as as previous uh you know kind of previous folks and uh and I think and I think that's very exciting I think this is gonna this is a very rapidly growing field and people are getting into it and and so many I I received so many um uh

00:36:55

emails and uh from people that have come across this work and and they've sort of you know changed their their their educational trajectory to kind of enable them to to go in this in this area it's very exciting I also I'm sorry I'm

00:37:09

looking forward to so many new thinkers coming into the field because I'm speaking to someone about this not too long ago and when you think about the average student today I mean these guys know how to program they know how to write code they they speak so many

00:37:20

diverse languages already so they're coming into this these topics with far more than the average let's say philosopher neuroscientist today in their Peak has so it must be super

00:37:33

exciting to also look down and some of these guys presentations knowing what they want to come up with um do you often get that in a day-to-day basis when your students come to you with these phenomenal ideas yeah yeah yeah I mean not only my own students but

00:37:45

others I mean I get a lot of emails from from people all over the you know students all over the world ones who are attached to some lab and many who are not attached and so on some of them are you know it was so far ahead of me in

00:37:57

terms of uh their mathematical understanding and things like that and and and so on which is which is fantastic um yeah yeah I think I think very exciting and uh you know part of the

00:38:09

challenges and I I spend a lot of time actually with with these people who contact me for this who who need this kind of thing uh the challenge is to maintain that level of creativity while

00:38:21

through the traditional the academic educational system because it it it has a way of uh uh with um sanding down the you know the interesting bits uh kind of

00:38:33

so to speak and and grinding people down in an important way you know some some you know some very impractical Ways by making them spend time on on specific things and some uh in some ways just uh you know intellectually because of

00:38:46

feedback they get from from traditional you know traditional thinkers and so on um it's it's it's it's a challenge you know it's a challenge and some of these people are so incredibly bright it's actually difficult for them to navigate

00:38:58

the system with with us average you know sort of Joe's uh and some of whom and and and and you know many people um can be quite uh in this in this field you know you need a thick skin right this is

00:39:12

a lot of people can be can be pretty pretty hostile you know and mean and and when you're young you have to you have to learn pretty quickly to uh you know kind of let let that roll off you know I

00:39:24

mean I can only imagine the difficulty they're faced with because I mean just even as as a medical doctor if I talk to people within the medical field about differences in Consciousness I mean they only think about it from a quantifiable perspective level of Consciousness

00:39:36

that's it the attention they paid to the contents of Consciousness or experience in general it's not as was I mean life or death it's it's it's the binary exclusion living versus non-living cell versus no cell uh it's a very clear pattern the

00:39:51

way they sort of train get trained and how you're forced to think at that point it's very much ingrained into you from the very beginning do you feel that this is a big hindrance with us in general and then and your work's clearly trying

00:40:03

to push towards a more diverse view of this yeah yeah I mean I don't I don't have much to say about um specifically medical education because I'm not an MD and I haven't been through med school and so on but um uh

00:40:17

although I did my PhD at a medical school uh so so I kind of know a little bit about it but but the thing is that there are there are a lot of incentives uh not to think in new ways and a lot of

00:40:31

very strong personalities uh who will give young people advice on how to think and what to think about and and what I tell my students leaving the lab is there there's basically two kinds of

00:40:43

advice there's specific advice on specific experiments and and approaches and and those crew those kind of criticisms that's gold right so you need to pay a lot of attention to that

00:40:56

because because it helps you um hone your craft and get better at what you're doing and so so Indie critiques of very specific um experiments or lines of reasoning or whatever like that's great then then there's the other stuff which is kind of the meta advice but and by

00:41:09

the way everything I'm saying now is an example of that so you know people should maybe feel free to ignore that too but but the meta advice is uh do this don't do that think of it this way don't think of it that way

00:41:21

don't talk about this don't talk about that that kind of stuff I feel uh hardly anybody is um well first of all no one has a crystal ball okay and we are all

00:41:33

calibrated on the things we are interested in and we you know successful successful people are very well calibrated on whatever it is that they care about and they're successful in that field that doesn't mean anything about whether they're calibrated on your

00:41:46

ideas right and and it's and in fact I I've found that a lot of um Pioneers who have had brilliant ideas and have fought through and you know sort of um uh spent a lot of energy in their life pushing

00:42:00

some someone with some new idea those people are often the most resistant to other new ideas it's amazing I I didn't know that when I was young but I really you know I kind of thought that somebody somebody who was such an avant-garde thinker in this way would surely they're

00:42:13

like my new idea no they often don't they like their new idea but but they've spent all their energy fighting for that idea and they want everything else to be kind of you know uh uh consensus and

00:42:24

standard and that's just you know what I what I tell my students just be very careful with people who are very smart and very successful they know their stuff they're not necessarily calibrated on your stuff they don't know what you

00:42:37

know what good and shouldn't do so so it's so um you know and and so and a lot of people are are well-meaning and and uh generous with um with with knowledge and so on and that's

00:42:49

great and and some people aren't and so you just need to you need to have a thick skin and you need to keep you know sort of your goal in mind and just uh you know um get better I've written so many notes and uh We've

00:43:02

stayed away from the conversation at this point but it's too fascinating to not just delve a little bit deeper when you think about okay when you were doing this you had a lot of mentors you had lots of people you were looking up to while in this field were there anyone

00:43:14

people in anyone in specific like particular that you can think of who really got you here from a mental perspective really influenced you and motivated you to to do this work yeah well I suppose let's stick with the

00:43:28

uh living people because I have you know there's a whole I actually when you come into my lab up on the wall I've got pictures of I don't know probably about a dozen uh people who I consider my heroes um I'll actually um I'll send you a link

00:43:44

later there's a there's a I I tweeted at some point actually the pictures and some text about each one so I'll put up I'll put up a link later but um uh but but but uh if we if we talk about uh you

00:43:56

know so so my first um undergraduate uh Mentor who uh I was a computer science student and she she took me into her lab and allowed me to do by the the first um real Biology experiment I'd done

00:44:08

stuff at home but this was like you know real real biology her name was Susan Ernst um and she was a biology she was here at Tufts um uh developmental biologist and uh my PhD Mentor cliff tabin and my

00:44:20

postdoc Mentor um Mark Mercola you know they were they were amazing mentors all of them the thing is that at by by then I had sort

00:44:32

of already gotten the idea that it's it's often better not to say too much and so I went through those stages uh not really talking about any of the things that I'm you know these these

00:44:45

kinds of things right I kind of kept my mouth shut so um the people the the other people that uh that really have had an influence on me um one was Don ingber who's uh he's um

00:44:57

you know kind of a huge figure in in biomechanics and and the uh the the director of the Visa Institute at Harvard he was one of the few people uh very few people um early on when I was a grad student

00:45:09

there at Harvard Medical School who was supportive of me and having new ideas he was he was pretty much the only person I'd ever talked to about some of this you know crazy stuff um and he was he was one of the few

00:45:22

people that was actually positive about yeah you you should not give this up you should keep you know you should keep thinking about it it's fine that everybody else thinks it's nuts like that's okay um you know own your craft and and and and so on

00:45:34

um you know another person is lens on so lens on works on cancer and zebrafish also at Harvard Med School um uh just just the most amazingly supportive uh you know top of the line researcher but

00:45:46

just really really supportive really kind um yeah that's that's very important you know having having people like that is is really important yeah I'm just making notes of their names because I want to check their workout as well

00:45:59

mentioned a couple things um uh you mentioned tame technological approach to mind every which at some point I want to touch on but in keeping with Mark I remember once you and him having a conversation about homeostasis in general and I mean this seems to be a

00:46:11

very important asset or facet sorry of of what we're trying to achieve these goal-oriented behaviors it's clearly a way to get us um homeostatic in a sense and at some point you and Mark you don't necessarily

00:46:24

disagree but I remember him mentioning the fact that okay he does consider this to be a very ancient process it's been happening back in time for Millennia and it still happens from birth to to adulthood I would say but he's concerned

00:46:37

that at some point your approach becomes a little bit more pan cyclist with this technological approach of Mind everywhere uh how do you how do you see it do you see it becoming that way at any point or or how do you really began

00:46:50

to frame the frame this philosophically um I I don't I don't disagree that it's that it's Pan psychist um except that there's there's two different ways to do pan psychism the the traditional way is

00:47:04

to say here's all of traditional physics and all of standard normal physics and also I'm going to paint some stuff onto these electrons and things that are like you know sort of little tiny hopes and

00:47:15

dreams that the electrons have right so that's one that's one way of doing it that's I I don't I don't like that way and that's that's the thing that most people I think have in mind when they object to p and psychism um because having a perfectly good

00:47:28

physics that works and then saying okay now I'm gonna add a bunch of stuff to it that doesn't do anything but you know it's sort of there uh yes that's that I think is is problematic but there's another way and I think um I mean I

00:47:40

don't know but I think that uh at this point mark probably I would think that doesn't disagree with this but but maybe you know we can we can ask them I'll be seeing them next week so we can ask them so hopefully you guys it's either you

00:47:52

chat before him and then I'll ask him afterwards yeah yeah yeah we can we can talk about this um the the the other uh the other type of pansexism is what Chris and and um and Carl friston are doing which is

00:48:04

to reformulate basic physics as fundamentally first a uh a proto-cognitive process see that's a completely different different kettle of fish because what you're saying there is it's not that the traditional physics is

00:48:18

A-Okay and I wanna I wanna add some stuff to it that we don't really need what you're saying is no actually traditional physics is a um uh a a an edge case of two systems that

00:48:32

have uh a certain level of cognition but actually those systems and and also all the very complex stuff eventually leading up to humans and Beyond uh are actually features of a much of a deeper

00:48:46

underlying reality and and that one I like much better I think that's the kind of pan psychism that I that I uh would support and the other key thing is in my mind uh

00:48:59

the the useful thing about pan psychism is that it needs to be uh it needs to have an empirical component so when somebody says you know well how about this rock does this rock have have a

00:49:11

mind yes well how about this one oh definitely well what's the difference I don't know so right so so that that doesn't work but but but but having a um an empirical set of tools that tell you

00:49:23

under what conditions do you ascribe different kinds of Minds to specific uh the systems right and what what how why you know what what's a what's a principled way to ascribe mine too and

00:49:36

what kind of mind and so on that's that's really key so so you need a pansychism that isn't a philosophical position and that's why that's why tame um has the word Engineering in it because I really think and and by the way I don't think engineering is the

00:49:49

end-all and be all of human existence for sure but but I think we can get very far with an engineering perspective which says you need to have a practical you know whatever whatever Concepts you're pushing have to have a practical

00:50:02

implication and they need to help you do better in the real world right that's it that's the beauty of engineering is that we get to find out who's right and who's wrong by by doing experiments and by seeing what these various views allow

00:50:15

you to do what what do they facilitate for research and so on when it comes to penzochism I mean flipkov's often spoken about in this realm of pansychism is there any point with his philosophy where you completely

00:50:27

disagree or do you feel like his philosophy will sort of fit into your scientific worldview somewhere uh uh I must say I I don't know everything that he says so I think I need to uh in fact I I have it uh you

00:50:40

know on my calendar to us and try and get a conversation with him and really sort of drill down to see where where we agree and disagree so I don't know um the reason why I'm asking is because I asked call this and I found it very fascinating because there is that

00:50:53

blackest element behind the philosophical process behind the science science behind this but when I when I put forward this idea we're doing you think about these prior information that you take in and you make out these posterior conclusions if you take

00:51:06

illusionism as a theory of Consciousness which I'm starting to see and empathize with what Philip was once saying he once mentioned that if not for pan psychism he feels that illusionism is a theory of Consciousness or this introspective

00:51:18

illusion on how we perceive this is the most coherent argument it when he does not consider his own pan psychism I've been thinking how can you go jump from Consciousness everywhere to nothing at all but when I asked Carl about this I

00:51:30

said if the prior information concerns consistently tells us we're conscious um we're not conscious sorry so if if the prior information tells us that we are conscious um but yet we don't technically have

00:51:43

this definition for what Consciousness is and if we're slowly blurring this line at some point wouldn't it be okay to then say that we there is an illusion Happening Here There is no definite

00:51:54

essence of Consciousness per se but there is this definitive Continuum of experience that we don't really have an answer to with in that case would it then be considered a version of illusionism basically said yes but I

00:52:06

don't think I'm really explaining it as well as I should well uh the thing the thing about Illusions is uh let's let's try to Define it and and in order to Define it we need to think

00:52:19

about what the alternative would be and it's it's similar to sometimes people ask me uh is it possible that we're living in a simulation that all this is you know that reality isn't what we and and if you think about it it's not just

00:52:31

possible it's guaranteed there's no other way it could possibly be because because if you think about you know what what is the opposite of that the opposite of that is that um you somehow have a a physically embodied

00:52:45

cognitive structure that is able to is not limited in its sensory perceptions it's not limited in the amount of memory and the amount of computations I mean all of us are limited beings all of us evolved under constraints of time and

00:52:58

energy and everything else we see a tiny little narrow slid in the electromagnetic spectrum we have a few other things like chemical senses of things that are right there on your you know on your tongue and on your fingers and so on

00:53:11

uh and we have a little bit of memory and you know we have this wet squishy substrate that's very error prone and needs to be constantly maintained and all our memories have to be the actively you know sort of re Rewritten and all

00:53:24

that uh under those and and we were evolved under specific pressures under those conditions who could possibly think that that we are not living in some sort of very specific

00:53:35

representation of reality that uh is is limited in many ways now that's not to say it isn't adaptive and that's not to say that it's um you know sort of well I mean okay so so Don Hoffman would say that in many

00:53:49

ways it is completely wrong I you know I I think there's probably some truth to that but but in other ways I think the the big uh kind of lesson from all this is that

00:54:01

we are all a brain and a vat of course we are we are we are a brain sitting inside uh you know this this we think this thing that gives us various stimuli we try to make the best sense of it that we can

00:54:14

um and creatures will adapt to this is why you can do sensory substitution and sensory augmentation and why you can have neurons in the dish that play Pong uh but these systems will try to make

00:54:25

sense of whatever world they're given in whatever configuration they have and we do the same so yeah absolutely it's an illusion but it's not an illusion in the sense that uh there is some other way to

00:54:40

you know sort of have perfect direct uh not not for us anyway uh perfect direct um uh perception of some underlying reality it just to me when we say it's an illusion or a simulation it just acknowledges the fact that we are finite

00:54:53

limited beings whose job it is to make the best sense we can using the hardware that we have of what's been going on up until now and what we predict is going to be going on I don't know of another

00:55:05

story that could possibly make sense so so I so I think it's I think it's both I think I think yeah I think I think there there's an illusion going on of course there is and at the same time I think we are conscious of that

00:55:18

um yeah and and I think you know I think we can we can do well by by learning how that that mapping works you'll the science behind everything you you

00:55:29

guys are doing at 11 lab and everywhere else within this team now I would say this diverse intelligence team uh aligns with Julia tenoni and and Eric Hall's that they work on integrated information Theory at what

00:55:42

point do you think those collide yeah I mean we we use quite a bit of that so so Eric worked in our Allen Center for some years and uh we uh we worked together on a bunch of stuff and

00:55:54

using um I I think these these metrics of of integrated information whether Julio's or somebody else's uh are yeah they're they're a very useful mathematical tool

00:56:05

to begin to understand uh one aspect of that integration I think it's it's really foundational I think I think their work just I I can't say enough about how um

00:56:19

you know and I'm not saying it's correct in all the details necessarily but but I'm just saying this idea that that they were able to move what used to be a philosophical question that is you know our our higher levels in systems real or

00:56:32

can everything be reduced to the lower level the fact that that's been argued about for I don't know how many hundreds of years the fact that they were able to move that from a philosophical question to a practical question that there's now a downloadable toolkit that you can

00:56:44

install and run and get an answer for your system as to which level does the most causal work it's it's one of the most profound things you know how often do you see a philosophical question like that reduced in in the right way uh to

00:56:58

to software that you can actually get a an answer out of it right I think that's I think that's just incredibly profound and we're using some of those tools so we're analyzing uh you know calcium signaling in our

00:57:10

xenobots and and bioelectrical signaling in in cells trying to decide uh how many of them belong to a single embryo and all that kind of stuff so yeah it's it's already it's already collided yeah I think it's just beautiful the way you

00:57:22

guys are taking philosophy so seriously and applying it into the science it it's it opens up the door to so much more and and so much more creative thinking in general it doesn't just box you into this General scientific mindset I mean

00:57:34

even though I am someone very much in the field of science I mean it's always great to to explore these ideas differently now you mentioned that you're trying to go beyond this and you you sort of spoke about it as it's a slightly primitive idea at this point

00:57:47

but your tame idea you said you want to move Beyond this at this point and when you first came up with it it was sort of slightly more basic what did you mean by that um well let's see uh I I mean well there's a there's there's okay on the

00:58:03

one sense in one sense it needs much more development so so that was just the first paper I have you know team 2.0 is is on my calendar for you know to do sometime this fall and uh there's a lot there's a lot more coming so so fleshing

00:58:16

out the details making the cognitive like cone more quantitative there's there's a lot of there's a there's a lot of development that needs to happen this is just the first step I in no way am I claiming that any of this is is a definitive treatment these are these is the first steps

00:58:28

um but there's also another sense which is which is interesting which is that um and it's funny a lot of people actually catch on to this without my having talked about it you know publicly which is I get a lot of emails from therapists

00:58:42

and psychoanalysts and people who do counseling and things like that and it's and I'm you know I'm always interested like how did you like what you know I don't work in those fields I don't have anything to say about that specifically how did you find me and they all read

00:58:55

this same stuff and the boundary of this stuff and it can sort of feel they can they feel the connections and and what I can say about it is is this the the tame framework is fleshed out in terms of in terms of an

00:59:08

engine it's it's focused as a from an engineering perspective the thing about the engineering perspective is control so what I'm going to do is I'm going to predict and control the system and now I mean that's very useful because now I can ask questions you know do I treat it

00:59:21

like a bowling ball and then I can use certain set of tools or is it more like a mouse and then I use a different set of tools or is it something in between like cells or an autonomous vehicle they use different set of tools and so on but

00:59:33

all of that is uh framed in terms of control now in an uncharitable view of this would be uh and and some people who are you know in the humanities could could see this they would look at this

00:59:45

and say Well Control is great for the kind of left side of that Spectrum but when you get towards the you know other humans and and and you know other animals and so on control isn't the

00:59:58

right way to think about it because because you know you can't just be thinking about how I'm gonna how am I going to control all the all the people you know around me right that like that's yeah and and so and so the thing is that I think of the next version of

01:00:10

this which which I'm working on but the early one had to come out first to kind of nail this part down is it's not just about control control is again this this slider that go there's a there's a uh a

01:00:24

spectrum of agency and the more you go to the right the more control is in terms of in in terms of this one directional or you know relationship with the system becomes a bi-directional

01:00:36

relationship where I get something back from the from the agency of the system I'm working with not so much you know you're not going to hear much for about the hopes and dreams of the Bowling Ball but by the time you get to the right side you're really having relationships

01:00:50

that are very bi-directional it's not about control it's about it's but but it but again everything starts out with this with this more general question of what's the right way to relate to that system and and another

01:01:02

way to think about it a very simplistic sort of uh way to think about it is you know you're going to Mars you're going to spend some amount of time there maybe the rest of your life what kind of system do you want with you do you want

01:01:15

a Roomba do you want a dog do you want a human do you want some sort of superhuman whose goals just imagine uh you know uh if there was some other creature who had these Galactic level goals that you can even begin to

01:01:28

understand like with the happy fun um you know and so and so you can think about having a kind of impedance match in relationships right where you're if your cognitive like ones are completely out of whack with each other it it

01:01:40

doesn't tend to work too well and you can think about you can think about marriage and you know sort of what what is the kind of system that and and then you can think about uh interesting things like uh for for

01:01:52

example uh people are now working on uh proof of humanity certificates this is because of AI right and so you want to when you're dealing with you know something or someone or a work product or whatever you you know some people want to know

01:02:05

that it was made by by a human or that it is a human or whatever and so you can ask yourself I think that's a very interesting question you can ask yourself what is it that you want this proof of humanity certificate to actually guarantee right what what do

01:02:17

you want and so you can say and so some people are some people will say um oh it's terrible that humans are uh changing themselves and you know in the future we'll have uh I don't know chips implanted and you know wheels and

01:02:30

tentacles I don't know what the hell will happen you know what and and so some people say that's terrible so so one question is Humanity does that mean I have a standard human anatomy I I don't really care about that right that doesn't you know maybe other people do I

01:02:43

don't care about that at all uh or some people say well what's important about being human is the is the genome you know the human genome I I don't care about the genome at all and so and so now and so now do you care about when

01:02:56

you know if you're going to marry someone or you're going to spend some time on Mars with someone what is it that you really want you know what what is the What is the and and I think what you really want is um

01:03:07

you want to make sure that your uh cognitive like one and specifically the The Compassion part of the cone matches you want to know that this being has the capacity to care about the same amount

01:03:20

of stuff that you care about so if it's you know if it's a if it's a Roomba or it's a or it's a you know it's a cat or a snake or something like that's better than nothing but it's really not sufficient and you want at least that so

01:03:34

so when I see proof of humanity here's what I want I want at least a standard modern humans level of possible compassion I want somebody that is capable of caring about this roughly the same amount or or more and more is

01:03:46

always good uh you know about the same amount of stuff and so and so that's what to me that's what this is about it isn't just about the engineering control it's about having the right impedance

01:03:59

match for a relationship you know and you want something that uh has the same existent this is what I think this is just you know it's just my my own thinking is that you want

01:04:11

something that has the same existential problems that you do you if a system like uh you know if you had some sort of um uh robotic system that didn't have to put itself together during embryogenesis

01:04:23

never had to decide where do I end in the outside world begins it doesn't have any issues of of um needing to keep itself up with metabolism or it'll die you know things like that the systems that didn't go that that don't go

01:04:37

through the same existential uh questions and concerns that that we go through are not ideal for that kind of relationship this is this I think is what people are really I don't think they really mean the genome I don't

01:04:50

think they mean the anatomy you know I said to um other people who who do talk about you know anatomy and and things like that I'll say look your spouse comes home one day and they say

01:05:04

um you know what I've had I've had some toes swapped out you know I went to the doctor they had to have some my toes are bionic all right like who cares and then they say well actually you know what I also had a bunch of other internal organs swapped out like yeah all right

01:05:17

uh you know at what point at what at what point do you say okay now now this is no longer like you know we're no longer married you know this is not gonna work and and I don't think it has anything to do with your genome or or what the anatomical structures you have

01:05:30

but once you get to the point where uh it's it's it's that amount of um care you know the the cone of caring and compassion that you can generate if that if if that isn't there and if this like these fundamental being able to have the

01:05:44

same existential you know concerns and and preferences and all that that that's that's where it's at that that's where you want to have a match so so I think it's about relationships not just control I mean I love that but do you ever get concerned with with the

01:05:57

possibility that perhaps let's say a just trying to think of the most random example let's say you've got a communist and a and someone who's completely on the other side of the fence at what point would you say social by or

01:06:10

psychosocial aspects would play a big role in differentiating a human at that regard uh sorry I'm not sure I understand the question say again so let's say two people who've got fundamentally different

01:06:23

um social views in terms of trying to live together show compassion show love the diversity that's their values how would it implicate how what what philosophical or scientific implications would this have on the on your framework

01:06:37

I see uh so so my framework isn't a sufficient Condition it's a necessary condition so so it still might be that your cognitive licones are similar in size but you're not a good match because

01:06:51

you have diver you know radically Divergent political views or something I mean that's possible I'm not I'm not saying that it's sufficient to have uh you know but but on the other hand if you think about it uh and I don't know I guess different people will answer this

01:07:04

differently but if you were going to Mars and you had a choice between going with something that had no political views a toaster and that's it and you would never you couldn't agree on anything but you also wouldn't disagree on anything right you you know it's a

01:07:17

toaster oven uh or you're going with someone who has your level of uh the off cognitive light cone but they they have a different perspective on things and you know is that better or worse you

01:07:30

know after how much time do you want to spend with a person who disagrees with you versus with something that has zero opinions at all I don't know some people might prefer the toaster I suppose I I don't know but but the point is um I

01:07:42

think it's a I think it's a necessary condition not a sufficient one to get along but but but it's so and and of course I mean I what do I know about you yeah I'm not telling anybody how to get along with anybody but I'm just saying that that uh the idea of how do you

01:07:56

optimally and ethically relate to another system requires you to ask what level of cognition it has and that will determine what types of interactions

01:08:07

you're likely to have you know I think of that the William James definition plays a huge role I mean that goal directedness of trying to accomplish something together plays a fundamental role in this it'll obviously bring the bring the

01:08:20

units together when we're thinking when we talk talk about Mars and this this potential when you look at Mars as a place for us to go I mean just off topic a little uh from a from a developmental biology background for someone so well

01:08:32

versed in in biology what are your thoughts on that foreign about that stuff um I suppose I suppose the only kind of generic thing I can say

01:08:49

is that my gut feeling is that biology is incredibly adaptable and that with some help uh I you know I I guess I guess all I'm saying is I you know there are some people that say that

01:09:02

fundamentally we are never going to be able to live in these environments for various reasons and just my my gut feeling is that that's wrong I I think we will but but but I have no expertise in this whatsoever so there's you know

01:09:14

take that with every grain of salt uh Mike when when we try our best to Define cells uh religions cognition we're obviously faced with these barriers and and it becomes clear that

01:09:27

there's no the sort of phase transitions that are occurring I mean this is clearly a Continuum when you look at certain Euro certain computational theories and and mathematical Concepts they they often when it comes to

01:09:40

Computing and artificial intelligence they seem to claim that there are certain base transitions that occur that make certain systems more complex than others within the mathematics what are your thoughts on that do you have any opinion on that because I know certain

01:09:54

mathematicians who often say this that there is a certain phase transition that occurs here does it apply to biology or life yeah yeah no well there's there certainly seem to be phase transitions in

01:10:05

mathematics and logic I mean one of the few definitive kinds of uh phase transitions that I know of are some is something like a logical proof right if

01:10:18

like you know let's say it's got three you know three three parts to the proof as soon as you have all three parts that thing is locked solid and if you don't have the three parts you have nothing and there is no in between right I mean

01:10:30

this fuzzy logic and stuff like that but but but under under standard uh logic uh you know you either have you either have the argument or you don't and and that's that so so so I think there are things

01:10:42

like that and and I'm not even you know I'm not even against face transitions in biology I mean I do think the fact that there's a Continuum doesn't mean that you know we don't have kind of cognitive capacities that uh

01:10:55

that a c slug is just not going to have right I mean that's you know we we we do but uh but the question is I'm not even sure what I mean what what

01:11:07

is a what is a good description of a phase transition so so imagine uh you know you have some sort of parameter and as you change the parameter eventually boom something happens right so so you can ask yourself

01:11:21

what's a good description of that because if if I can say in detail exactly why it is that at a certain level of that parameter something happened then it's not really an

01:11:34

emergent phase transition because you have the smooth story you can say well it was here here and at this point now it's here and so on okay but if you don't do that then you really don't have any explanation at all so so what is you

01:11:47

know what what is an ideal you should show you know it it's one of those things that once you have a detailed explanation but it seems to kind of go away in some important sense and so from that

01:12:00

perspective it's almost like if it's almost like a statement of um I don't want to say statement of ignorance but but it's a it's it's a statement that works well on one level and then like many things disappears when you sort of

01:12:13

look at look much closely much more closely and the other thing is for for a lot of these things the scale is very relative so so for example um somebody will say you know the human

01:12:26

brain does this and that and I'll say okay so so in embryonic development you know you used to be one cell when when did this human brain you know show up and they'll say Well when the four you know what I don't know what I'm making

01:12:38

this up but like when the frontal cortex develop okay but that takes months so like when exactly and you say well it's all right so so so on so you step back and you see and and it certainly looks sharp but when you zoom in a little bit

01:12:52

you find out that yeah every second of developments some cells are dividing and some other stuff is happening like it's a you know if you zoom in it's a nicely smooth process and there's nowhere that you can just draw a sharp line so so that's another thing I think that these

01:13:04

um these phase transitions are kind of uh they're in the eye of the beholder they they appear depending on what formalism you're using to understand

01:13:16

them right if you're using binary logic then you'll get some and if you're using fuzzy logic you may not uh and they depend on what the time scale that you're using at one time scale it looks super sharp at another time scale it's like this long tedious gradual process

01:13:30

so yeah it's like like many things I think it's in the eye of the beholder do you think one of those one of the concepts that we often talk about within and understanding the concept of

01:13:41

self-consciousness Etc that might also benefit from this Continuum Viewpoint would be language do you think that because because a lot of people often say that look there'd be no way for them to sort of articulate any of these

01:13:54

thoughts without this this phenomenal uh this phenomenon of language what does your work have anything to do with this at any point do you feel like it addresses that yeah yeah interesting question um yeah I

01:14:08

don't have enough expertise in language specifically to to say much with certainty um put it this way uh I I in as much as I like uh you know non-neural cognition

01:14:20

and and the wisdom of the body and all those things uh I don't have any reason and I've never claimed that the other organs in the body use language in the way I mean I do think they solve problems I think they have memories I

01:14:33

think they have preferences and so on but I don't have any reason to think they use language in the way that the brain does um I'm not saying it's impossible I'm just saying there's no uh I don't know of any evidence for it so it's entirely

01:14:44

possible that one of the nice things about brains and maybe you know uh human brains in particular is is this capacity for a formal for formal language in the way that people who study you know the

01:14:57

um the the logic of language and so on uh it can generate and I'm not sure that other organs can do it so um but but again that's nothing you know not really my species so your work as we know it

01:15:10

touches on so many different fields at some point it goes into limb regeneration I mean your understanding of biology and regenerative regenerative medicine at this point is becoming so spectacular

01:15:22

um anything within that sphere that you particularly excited about at this point well uh wow I'm excited about a lot of a lot of the empirical work that we're doing I mean my goal among among other

01:15:35

goals one of my fundamental goals is to impact human medicine so at some point I would love it if if some of this stuff got into the clinic while while I'm still around I mean I think I think it will get there no matter what but but

01:15:49

it'd be nice to be nice to see it um we are working on uh bioelectric approaches to limb regeneration where uh you know I never give timelines so I can't I can't know ahead of time what's going to happen but we're we're in mice

01:16:02

now um we're working in uh uh we've got some work on bioelectrics of cancer in human cells now so you know kind of moving moving from frog on

01:16:13

onwards uh yeah very excited about that stuff I'm very excited about the work on um synthetic organisms we'll have some really cool uh work on this coming out in the next probably a month or two I'm following up on elizen about uh stuff

01:16:27

that we've done um yeah I feel like there's a huge sorry uh so I was just saying I'm looking forward to that continue I was listening yeah yeah there yeah there's going to be there there's some there's some amazing

01:16:40

stuff in review now and and lots of other things uh that are in the pipeline that are gonna kind of uh come come out after I'm yeah I'm pretty excited about it it's pretty you know it's uh the the last uh 10 of any paper is always the

01:16:54

hardest you know so so you you know you make a fundamental uh finding and then you you know sort of Flesh it out and you kind of already see where what the story is but then getting into the point where all the sort of the eyes are dotted and T's across and you can

01:17:06

actually get it out that takes forever and you know that always that always feels like a long time but yeah it it'll get there when you got into this did you ever feel at any point that you'd be because moving from this physiological

01:17:18

perspective has not taken you into the psychological era like domain when you get these emails from people asking about these the implications of computational boundaries of self and how it can affect it psychologically did you ever think this would happen did you

01:17:30

well were you planning on that or is it just something that's occurred over time well uh so there's two pieces today the piece so so from from day one and I'm talking about when I was very very young

01:17:42

uh these were the issues that I was interested in so I I was always interested in issues of mind and matter and and and and machines and and programming and living organisms and relationships between the alien beings

01:17:56

and all this kind of stuff um was always interested in that so I'm not at all surprised although incredibly pleased that the empirical work has actually sort of dovetailed with that that that doesn't always happen and then

01:18:09

you know that that's that's kind of a um the the thing that the thing that surprises me still to this day is that any of this uh is actually working to the level that

01:18:21

um people are interested in it so I kind of assumed when I was younger that what would happen is I would pursue these things on my own I would be sort of interested in it but that fundamentally no one would ever pay attention none of

01:18:33

it would would develop to the point where anybody would care and I would code is where I would write code for a living which I used to do and you know and that that worked fine um that I would just kind of write code for a living and think about these things in my spare time and and you know

01:18:45

maybe write some some stuff that nobody would ever read so uh and you know and I was told uh many times in in grad school that I'd soon be you know kicked out and and that would be that and then I and then I would go back to coding and so so

01:18:58

I don't know to this day I find it I sometimes I sometimes just kind of stop and think I'm an actual scientist like that's crazy to think about like and we've done some things that are that are kind of cool and some people care about it's amazing I'm I'm still amazed by it

01:19:11

every day I mean some of the work you're doing is it's it's so incredible I mean the last time we spoke I remember saying so many people have had a Nobel Prize already and and it's and you're just the tip of the iceberg of all the work

01:19:24

you're currently doing so it's there's so much more to discover there's so much more to see it must be super exciting to see it from your perspective because you're watching this happen moment from moment we're just seeing glimpses of of

01:19:36

the spectacular rise of wonderful new signs it must be completely mind-boggling towards it from your perspective yeah it's absolutely mind-boggling and I think this this is also maybe a good time to mention that and this is this is really key is that it's not just me right so so so my group

01:19:50

I mean I I write some of the crazy stuff but but the rest of uh there's there's 30 people here and so they do a huge amount of the work uh they're they're they're brilliant and and very hard

01:20:02

working um and it would absolutely not happen without them so so it's not just me I'm sort of the the the tip of the Spear of of an amazing group that uh I'm I'm super fortunate to work with um

01:20:15

yeah and and it is mind-boggling you know I see stuff on an almost daily basis that you know people show me data and I see things I'm like you know uh just just amazing um yeah it's I mean what can I say it's the it's the best

01:20:27

job in the world that is zero complaints I mean there are a lot of hard parts and you know people criticize Academia uh yeah there's a lot of difficult parts and a lot of things that are um that

01:20:38

require uh lots of effort and uh are unfortunate in some cases and and probably should be fixed but in the end uh I I don't know what else would be a more fun thing to be doing it's truly spectacular Mike just keep it

01:20:54

up from my side I've got a couple questions yeah and they're just very like short phrases because I came across that video a few from the world the other day where can cells think I find it but it's a very wonderful video but just to answer that question can cells

01:21:05

think what are your thoughts well uh I mean uh you it depends on the definition of think but I I think in uh for any useful definition I think the answer is yes

01:21:17

uh you know we we can we can come up with definitions that exclude them in principle and we can stick to you know somebody somebody could say that that for them thinking has to be some sort of high order self-aware I know that I know

01:21:30

you know whatever um I I don't particularly think that's that's a you know that's a good definition I I would like a more expansive definition um and and under under those kind of definitions yeah I think I think

01:21:43

absolutely what is the self well um uh and and I'm not claiming to have uh the I'm not playing there's one one correct definition but but I'll sort of

01:21:58

try to try to work up a a useful one I I think I think a self is a model created by either some sort of third person uh Observer so that could be a scientist

01:22:11

that could be a con specific that could be a parasite that could be uh whatever so some some other some other Observer or by the system itself so a self is a is a is a model and it's a bundle that

01:22:24

that model is a bundle of a few things it's a guess as to where the boundary is between a system and the outside world it's a guess about the problem spaces in which that the agent operates it's a

01:22:38

guess about the size of the cognitive light cone that that system might have and it's a guess about the competencies that that system has to get its goals accomplished to the IQ level so to speak and so that that bundle of things is

01:22:52

what a self is and the system itself has that you know it may have even if it's not second order conscious meaning that it there may know the system may not have the capacity to think gee I'm a

01:23:06

self and I meet these criteria like humans can do that but but many systems can't but that's okay they still they still have uh internally they still have a model that allows them to get around

01:23:17

the world by uh by by being able to demarcate themselves from the rest of it and that's what it takes you know um I wrote this done it says man a machine because I know you quoted

01:23:31

um it was a paper publisher I Can't Remember by who man a machine do you remember oh yeah yeah let me treat yeah yes uh so I wrote man a machine expand

01:23:44

well um I mean okay uh a lot of people are really worried uh about machine-like analogies for humans

01:23:56

and and I get it uh it's it's one way to be mistaken if you if you use for a system like a human if you use techniques that are appropriate for the left side of that Spectrum where you're

01:24:10

dealing with um you know mechanical clocks and things like that yeah you're you're gonna make uh you're gonna have a very sub-optimal interaction you're not going to be able to predict and control much you're going to make many ethical

01:24:22

lapses as as we've done uh in the past um but at the same time if you know uh if if you believe that the human body and

01:24:34

mind don't obey various laws which is basically a definition of what the machine is right it's a I I think a reasonable definition of a machine is that it's a it's a system that is rationally understandable because it

01:24:48

obeys various laws and thus thus it can be put to various uses and interacted with and so on if you don't think that uh humans have machine-like aspects you are also going to not get very far in

01:25:00

understanding what we are and how to relate to each other that the difference is to understand what kind of machine we are we are amazing uh remarkable ethically important uh uh morally valuable spiritual machines that is what

01:25:12

we are and um we're trying to trying to say that we're not machines is is I think silly but the real question is what kind of machine not not the kind that that we've

01:25:23

been making since you know since uh the early days of mechanical clocks and things and I think that um you know sometimes uh uh when when I when we talk about this stuff in in uh if I give a talk to a philosophy group or something

01:25:37

one of my first slides is this this guy and it was he he was just a you know just a a a fan who sent me a picture uh and I and I use this now he had some surgery on his arm and what you see is

01:25:51

in this this kind of gross but don't worry like the picture is way way grosser but I like to use it to sort of shock people out of this thing uh imagine imagine a human arm and it's and it's cut down the middle and opened up

01:26:02

like this and there's a metallic sort of thing and it's got a bunch of screws in it and the surgeon is in there putting in you know he's literally using a socket wrench and he's screwing a bunch of screws in and he screwed it to the Bone and there's some electrodes and a

01:26:15

bunch of other stuff now none of this would be possible if we weren't to some degree a machine that that much is clear when by the time you're using a socket wrench on something it it's partly a

01:26:27

machine now now that's not the same now when that same person person goes to therapy afterwards and you know and and does psychoanalysis you're not using the socket wrench at that point it's a different set of tools so so that's the

01:26:40

time to to to to not act like a simple machine but you know you kind of see when you see that picture like you can you can sort of be philosophically outraged at being called the machine but if you fall off your bike and you need a metal thing put into your arm this is

01:26:52

what it's going to look like and it's going to be very machine-like so um and somebody else is going to get an implant in their brain that um secretes serotonin at the right time and helps you know overcome some sort of

01:27:05

um you know um neurotransmitter imbalance or something these machine aspects are really useful let's not pretend they don't exist I mean I completely agree

01:27:16

with you every time if if we're in an orthopedic surgery it's it's so it's so strange to see it all the time the way orthopedic surgeons literally look like mechanics it's it's uncanny it's strange

01:27:29

that with hammers drills it's it's very mechanistic yeah but but and yet though the the second part so that's the first part to this the second part to this which is

01:27:41

always interests me is you've done all this stuff and then often the next step is well now we let the body heal well right and so now now like like it's going to adjust all this stuff all these

01:27:53

different things gonna happen and like I'm not touching I'm there's nothing I can do about that you need six months for the body to heal and and during those six months you're you're literally relying on the agency of the cells and tissues to do what they need to do

01:28:06

they're sitting next to Titanium now and that's okay they'll figure it out and you know there's now some weird electrode that's pacing something yeah it's fine the cells will you know and and after six months the person's like oh I feel much but you know my it's been a tough six months but I feel much

01:28:18

better well what happened during that time right it's not it's not us sitting there micromanaging this thing it's it's you're counting on the body to uh to do what it knows how to do in fact a lot of things that we don't know how to do so

01:28:31

so it's it's both sides right it's it's a machine it has machine like aspects and it also has agency and it also has various competencies and and it's okay that it's both you know it's it's it it's okay I like that I like that second

01:28:44

part it does it is a good way to think about it um it really does help you to sort of think of that concept I wrote here um cognition all the way down what about metacognition all the way down

01:28:57

yeah um well uh so I'll give you a story uh Chris Fields so first put me on to this years ago um you got a bacterium and the bacterium is

01:29:10

measuring the local sugar concentration uh or you know some other nutrient or something and uh and and it goes up the gradient but if that bacterium

01:29:22

encounters some sugar that's actually poisoned it's it's screwed because because all it does is it has a first order imperative to to kind of increase that the sugar concentration now the version

01:29:35

of metacognition in that system would be this you need a system and this apparently does exist in bacteria already you need a system that doesn't just measure the sugar directly what it measures is the outcome or the output of your metabolism so that's metacognition

01:29:48

because what you're asking is how am I doing like how's my metabolism doing you and it's one level above because I can't tell you how much sugar there is I don't know how much sugar there is but I can tell you that your metabolism is going great or I can tell you that your

01:30:00

metabolism is going to be terrible and that's the sort of thing that being able to ask questions about yourself and your own statist State and how things are going is really critical and I would think that that is the beginning of

01:30:14

advanced metacognition is just having circuits that are not measuring aspects of the outside world they're measuring aspects of you and how you're doing and that might be you know in bacteria it might be the output of your metabolism

01:30:25

and in humans it might be the uh how you know how how you're doing in some sort of social standing or you know how am I doing in my in my tribe and what do people think of me and all

01:30:37

that stuff so so you know um or am I learning calculus fast enough or whatever right so so but but all of that is it all shares the same underlying concept is that the sensors are not pointing outwards they're pointing inwards

01:30:50

some of these comments are quite ridiculous for example I wrote um if you regenerate a brain of someone at some point if you let's say your technology reaches that point would regenerating a brain that's not

01:31:03

technically injured be akin to creating a clone of the breath I I mean it's an interesting question I think that uh our the reason all these

01:31:16

puzzles you know it's like the old um I mean in philosophy has had this for decades the the broken transporter experiment right so you get in the transporter and it normally just sort of um uh

01:31:28

to you know uh recreates a copy of you somewhere else and it destroys the original and that's fine but but one day it malfunctions and it forgets it just doesn't destroy the original and now my God who who is the real me you got clones right and there's a Star Trek

01:31:39

episode and everything else so um uh I mean all of these all of these issues uh strike us as problems because our vocabulary is bad you know we we don't have the right vocabulary for this we

01:31:53

can't even handle like what happened to you to to the to the you that was a child where'd he go like is he still here is he not here we don't you know these binary this binary terminology you know you don't have to get really weird

01:32:06

with with in cloning and Transporters and whatnot to already have this problem we already have this issue that uh we change and uh as a you know over time we change and I I don't know if I'm the

01:32:19

same person that I was it doesn't the question doesn't really doesn't really make any sense but on a practical level would you you know could you clone you know I I I I suspect I I don't know

01:32:32

but I suspect that cloning in the traditional sense where you go from the egg onwards I don't I don't think you would recover much mental uh you know content but there's a different version which is

01:32:45

what happens in planaria so in planaria if I train a flatworm on something and then I cut off its head and I keep the tail and the tail regrows a brand new brain that new brain will remember the

01:32:58

original information okay The McConnell discovered that in the 60s we demonstrated in 2013 I mean it does work so that means that uh at least in some species some of the information can be

01:33:11

stored elsewhere in the body and imprinted onto a brand new brain that forms because they have no behavior until the brain shows up the tail just sits there doing nothing until the brain shows up so could you know could you spread that

01:33:25

information to two brains sure in planaria you could cut a worm into 10 pieces they will all recover the information and now you've got 10 what clones kind of you know who's the

01:33:38

original worm I don't know what yeah I don't know what to do with that question I don't I don't think it's you know I don't think it's a particularly uh realistic anymore but um but but but that technology you know I don't know if

01:33:50

humans do this or not um the closest the closest to this the closest data to this in humans that I know of has to and this is very um I don't know if preliminary is the right

01:34:03

word but but it's you know there aren't good studies on this yet uh although I think at some point there will be but there have been anecdotal reports of um personality transfer during heart lung transplants and um and it's

01:34:15

interesting you don't hear it from liver transplants you don't hear it from kidney transplants but when you talk to doctors who do um heart lung and maybe you know more about the scenario but when you when you when you talk to to transplant surgeons that do heart lung

01:34:27

they will tell you that they often warn uh recipients that you can have personality changes and there have been some reviews of individual cases where they're not just personality changes

01:34:39

they're personality changes that look an awful lot like the donor and and so I think I don't know if this is real the ends on this stuff is quite small still I think and it's mostly anecdotal so this could all be not you know nonsense

01:34:51

but but but based on the plenary work I don't think it's impossible uh and I think uh yeah the the question of what happens to I mean is another version of your question which is when we figure

01:35:04

out brain brain regeneration and repair if you've got a 60 or 70 year old patient with uh you know Decades of specific memories and then you see their brain with new stem cells or something

01:35:17

or you trigger regeneration of new neurons what happens to their personality you know what happens to their memories I suspect it'll be fine based on planaria I actually think it'll be fine but but we don't know we don't know how that plays out in in mammals

01:35:29

yet uh here wrote teleonomy and teleology because I know there's you talk about that and I'd love for you to explore that because I think it's pretty cool when you because a lot

01:35:42

of scientists try and avoid this topic with a passion and and the fact that you're able to communicate this because I'm often fascinated by this thought process well yeah uh so so I call it teleophobia

01:35:52

uh and a lot of a lot of uh scientists really would like to get away from it um it that made sense prior to let's say the 1940s because prior to that the only

01:36:06

things with goals were humans and some some animals and uh before that it was only you know it's not to be just humans and angels and and nothing else so okay

01:36:19

um you as a scientist that if you weren't working on humans uh and and maybe some great apes you you really wanted to avoid any talk of goals because it you know you felt that it was taking you backwards into some sort of

01:36:32

pre-scientific you know kind of religious worldview but since the 40s and thereon we've had a a mature science of machines with goals it's called cybernetics we have

01:36:44

control theory it's not scary anymore it's okay now it doesn't have to be magic it doesn't have to be Angels it doesn't you know it doesn't have to be you know the the the Spirit uh it's okay we have machines with goals now your

01:36:55

thermostat has goals little tiny ones like very modest little tiny goals and and it's okay and and we now have a a principled quantitative way of dealing with all kinds of unusual things with

01:37:07

goals so I think teleology is completely fine now um I sometimes use the word teleonomy and the difference is so so teleology is supposed to be gold directiveness teleonomy is supposed to be apparent

01:37:21

goal directedness in I I recently wrote a chapter for a book on teleology and the editors of of the book uh who complained about the use of teleonomy

01:37:32

because many people use that as a as a way to um back out of the claim right so they say it's not really teleology just looks like teleology so we're going to call it helion I mean teleonomir is are things that look like they're goal

01:37:45

directed but they're not really um and that's and that's not my point at all my point isn't to soften it in the slightest I'm a hard-line teleologist uh but what I think is cool about teleonomy is that it reminds us that everything

01:37:59

including the teleology is a lens from the perspective of some Observer that's what I think the word a parent should be doing and I don't know that that's what I actually don't remember who coined elianomy but but um uh I don't think that's what they had

01:38:12

in mind but but I think that's what it should be I think I think what's cool about it is that it reminds us that when you see a system and you say oh that system is or isn't pursuing a specific

01:38:23

goal you are an observer who's making a hypothesis some other Observer may make some other hypothesis and and in some amount of time you will find out who was right and who is wrong based on who had the better Science and Technology come

01:38:37

out of it and and it's an empirical question but but but it's not a it's not an objective thing where you can say right away this does or doesn't have teleology you're an observer and you're making that claim from a particular

01:38:49

perspective so so I like that about teleon me but but my point isn't to try to soften it at all or try to pretend it's you know some sort of um as if uh you know thing I think I think it's real I think it's absolutely at some point when I read that uh I wrote a note

01:39:03

saying um what would be the telius you think is possible aside from the goal-directed nature of how we behave right now do you perceive a future where perhaps the goal

01:39:15

directed this is taking us somewhere because often think about perhaps maybe the artificial intelligence is the way forward in terms of how we design intelligence moving forward do you think that that's a big factor for our

01:39:27

teleological progression is the future um uh I'm not sure if I understood that correctly but what I what I hear you asking is if there's some sort of uh goal directedness in the large-scale patterns of evolution History Society or

01:39:41

whatever right is that roughly so basically what do you think is the end goal of this universe is there are we headed somewhere yeah that that's that's that's a that's a really deep question um

01:39:54

I I I don't know I think that it's an empirical question meaning that I think we should make some hypotheses and uh pursue some implications of those hypotheses and and test those and see

01:40:05

which ones uh improve our our ability to act in the world and maybe we'll um you know we can we can talk about um let's just talk about Evolution per se

01:40:17

so I do think uh I I I who Chris fields and I wrote a paper once about uh the the evolution the the target morphology of evolution the idea that the

01:40:29

evolutionary process can have goals in the sense of a dynamical system having attractors to which it tends to fall into and this is you know um uh uh this is again we're not the first person people to say that but

01:40:44

um uh but that's not to say it has some some long-range plan in the way in the in the way that humans have plans that's just to say that there are certain patterns that are likely to reinforce

01:40:56

themselves there's a deeper sense in which and Richard Watson and I and I still I still need to ask him this I have it on my list to discuss this with him at some point but um you know I I've made the

01:41:06

claim that I think that uh biological evolution by itself doesn't optimize for any of the things we care about you know happiness intelligence uh the meaning

01:41:20

um you know ethical whatever I I don't I don't and the re and the reason I emphasize that is because people will often say you know your work is scary because it it might lead to changes in

01:41:31

human structure human life and I try to point out to people that there's nothing magically great about where we are now Evolution just sort of dumped Us in this you know it's in and I and I try to I try to emphasize that it's sort of like

01:41:44

this random Meandering search it settles on things that are just good enough to survive and our short lifespan our susceptibility to weird diseases our propensity to to to you know have all

01:41:57

these ridiculous accidents befalls and you know these all these medical these crazy medical conditions that people you know email me with all the time uh none of that is optimal nobody sat there and optimized I said and said okay this is

01:42:09

great this is how it should be now you scientists don't screw it up okay I think that's completely the wrong way I think to think about this I think Evolution randomly sort of left us in this position and now we're the adults in the room and we need to improve

01:42:21

everybody's sort of experience um so so Richard Watson disagrees he thinks that uh Evolution isn't uh as random as I think and that it does in fact uh well I don't know I don't want

01:42:34

to speak from him so I'm not sure this is this is a discussion we need to have because I think what I see Evolution maximizing is biomass that's it like whatever survives as many units as we can have well anything that will will

01:42:47

eventually will sort of try to uh uh increase the frequency that it will with which it gets observed in the future so to and and to me if you if you start with a with a blank

01:43:00

planet you know sort of against sort of Star Trek scenario where you start with a blank planet but it's pretty awesome you know pretty hospitable to life and you drop off a Single Seed of some reproduce self-reproducing thing and you come back uh you know 100 million years

01:43:13

later can you say what you're gonna find I'm not aware of anything that you can say you're going to find other than the biomass will be huge this thing is going to proliferate it's going to find

01:43:25

adaptive ways to increase its representation in the environment and you're just going to find a lot of complicated living stuff around that that's it I don't know what else you can conclude other than that um yeah I think I think Richard disagrees and I'd love to I'd love to

01:43:38

know if he you know what the arrow is uh for for evolution from that perspective do you think then that technically certain microbes like bacteria are winning this evolutionary game um I I think you I think we get to

01:43:55

define the game right so so if the game is number of units per you know cubic foot or whatever they're definitely winning but I don't but but that's not

01:44:07

the game we should be playing I don't think um you know so you get to Define your own game and then I mean that that's the beautiful part about life is that uh it it tends to pick its own objective

01:44:19

function and if and if it's hard to win as a snake then then you might become a bird and you might become something else there are many ways to sort of you know and if you're a human do you really care

01:44:32

about the total number of copies of you or of your DNA or anything else I don't think that doesn't seem very exciting to me I think we should be playing a different game but no yeah it depends how you see the game these three

01:44:45

questions are pretty random but it's not necessarily a psychological dissection but it's it's more from your perspective as a scientist and from biology who is Mike what is Mike and why is Mike

01:45:00

oh my god wow uh well Hulu yeah yeah who I don't even I like I don't know what a a useful answer to that question would even look like so I don't know

01:45:13

um I do if we can skip no to the what is Mike yeah I don't I don't think of myself very much at all I sort of um I mostly it it started when um I I used to

01:45:26

be um uh when I was a kid I was I was very sort of shy and and I never you know I was the kid that never spoke up in high school at all and was just kind of invisible on you know by Design and uh

01:45:38

and then eventually I realized that as as the whole science thing kept going Italy like it was all like you have to give talks and whatever and it was very it was very painful I never wanted to get up in front of people and whatever was hard

01:45:49

um and then I finally realized that and this is this is kind of a simple visualization that I give some of my students that have a hard time talking to people is that uh you what you do is you've you you visualize yourself as glass you're not

01:46:03

there nobody's there to look at you nobody's interested in you what what they're interested in is whatever product you're bringing them and uh what it can do for them they're all fighting their own battle everybody in the audience has their own needs and goals

01:46:14

and whatever and and no one actually cares about you enough to criticize you you know they just they just want to see what you've brought them and your job is to be a pane of glass you're completely invisible and to show and to give them

01:46:27

the best product that you can give them it's a new idea it's something something for you know whatever and so that's that tends to be how I think about things um I they spend zero time thinking about

01:46:38

what I am or who I am I or or or what's going on with me I I mostly just think about um what's next and you know and this and this and this might be this might be why I like this idea of of the agent as as

01:46:51

you know action first is that I mostly just focus on what's the most interesting helpful exciting thing we can do next and how do we do it um so so I have no idea uh I don't know I don't know how to answer it I don't

01:47:03

know what the the what's and why part was more in line with in terms of asking you like what is a human innocent so so what is like from a biological or mechanical

01:47:15

perspective I would say um well yeah I mean I think I think any any uh uh any human is uh an agent with a a minimum you know

01:47:27

any modern human uh is an agent with a particular size cognitive light cone with us with a certain capacity for um intelligence and compassion and uh

01:47:40

you know how how they're deploying that there's a very wide variety obviously across the you know across the world but um yeah that's it that's it it's it's about it's about the scope of your goals

01:47:51

and uh and and the the the intelligence that you have to bring to bear on getting those goals met and and which ones are you pursuing at any given time um yeah I'm sorry I'm not sure if I when you spoke about tedious earlier just

01:48:05

quickly I'm not sure if you mentioned it did do you feel that at some point there's a cumulative teleological purpose here or or do you feel like each goal-directed activity is happening independent of each other but at some

01:48:17

point coalesc in various different ways um you know I I think that there is a way that uh goal-directed units um combine

01:48:30

and and scale up but overall overall I do think that uh it is entirely possible to have systems in in fact this is how biology works you

01:48:43

have systems that have subsystems and each of those subsystems have their own goals and their own agendas and they solve problems in their own space and all of that is coupled so um I I I sometimes give a talk called why

01:48:56

robots don't get cancer and it's because we tend to engineer at least for now with par with an architecture that's flat so you're you're you're you're your robot or your self-driving vehicle may have some intelligence and some goals

01:49:09

and whatnot but all the transistors and everything else that make it up are are flat they don't they don't have an agenda of their own but in biology that's not true so so we are made of parts that are solving problems and having preferences and memories and so

01:49:23

on in physiological space transcriptional space uh uh anatomical space and so on so there are goals within goals within goals and some of them uh compete and some of them cooperate and we know from from basic

01:49:36

psychology and therapy and so on that that humans can have multiple modules with different goals that uh absolutely do not get along with each other and try to sabotage each other and whatnot so yeah it's a complex society we are we

01:49:48

are a complex uh uh nested hierarchical multi-scale nested Society of goal directed agents one of you Infamous lines is at this point all

01:50:00

intelligence is collective intelligence um and I think that's a beautiful concept too as we close off do you want to touch on that briefly yeah I don't it doesn't seem controversial to me uh I I've never seen

01:50:14

and I don't think you could have any kind of intelligence that was some sort of um Diamond you know indivisible single thing because because if you were you

01:50:27

couldn't learn you couldn't just had change if you didn't have par you need parts in order to be able to change right to to learn from experience you need parts that are going to be doing something different than what they were doing before I just can't imagine you

01:50:40

know and and and people say you know the human brain I said well it's a bag of neurons right I mean yes there's a brain and there's a person there but but it's also a bag of neurons and and and you know um I have the slide that I show

01:50:54

sometimes that I'm like like uh Renee Descartes and I like Descartes More Than A lot of people do nowadays but but he had this um uh he really liked the pineal gland and he liked the pineal gland because it was

01:51:06

only one of them in the brain and he felt that the human you know we we have a singular uh integrated Consciousness and therefore it it doesn't do to you know to it you if you have multiple

01:51:18

copies of it in the brain let's say the left and right hemisphere like how's that going to work you have a singular Consciousness ah the pineal gland there's only one of those that's where Consciousness enters the body and the thing is if he had had good microscopy he would have looked in that pineal

01:51:31

gland and you said oh my God this thing has you know millions of cells in it and if you looked at inside one of those cells you said whoa and this thing has a huge amount of molecular networks and and and whatever there is no single

01:51:44

anything anywhere it's all it's all made of Parts until you get down to well I don't know some sort of particles or something uh and and so yeah all all intelligent agents are made of parts and it's always got to be a story about how

01:51:56

those parts integrate into a a coherent agent that's that's the oh that's our goal here is to tell a story of scaling up well as we continue to scale up and you look at artificial intelligence continuously growing is there any way

01:52:11

you'd like us to perceive this problem moving forward and and just trying to work together with artificial intelligence because it's obviously getting better it's a different type of intelligence but yeah closing remarks on movies

01:52:24

feature intelligence um I mean I guess I guess the the big thing I can I can say or is just that or the most General thing and I'm going to write something about this soon is that

01:52:36

I I think most of our concerns about modern AI are just re-warmed over uh sort of uh restatements of problems that have been

01:52:48

with us all along and that it's just people just you the average person is just now realizing that that these are issues but philosophers have known and and even so you know so so so this idea

01:53:00

that uh in the few that that we're going to give rise to something that makes us Irrelevant in the future like I mean that's that's cool having kids right when you have kids you produce something that you work at least some of us work

01:53:13

our butts off to make sure that they're better than we are and you don't know and in fact one of the kind of like standard existential fears is that yeah the the in their world we are going to be irrelevant all the things that we worried about it's like hey old man you

01:53:26

know stuff you're talking about is nonsense where where we care about other stuff now and so um right this is this is I mean ever since who was at Aristotle or somebody you know would write that ah the Youth of today you know they don't you're

01:53:37

right and that was you know back in the classical great day so so we of course we're going to give rise to something that thinks were a bunch of dummies and and is going to do something different uh and and I think all of that is is

01:53:49

what just about all of the concerns we have about AI are are basically just echoing issues that have always been with us and uh you know and I don't know what the answer is except uh all I can

01:54:02

say is from a personal perspective I I'm I'm not super tied to the idea that the Earth has to have a bunch of human DNA uh running around it I'm not tied to the fact that we have to be these uh uh you know uh organisms that that are

01:54:15

susceptible to a million different diseases and die when you know in in a few decades um if we can make ourselves better great and and let's let's spread let's let's enlarge our cognitive light cones or let's enlarge our capacity for

01:54:28

compassion and and uh you know whatever embodiments people want that's what they should have well Mike I mean it's always such a pleasure to chat to you thank you so much good to see you thank you so much it's wonderful and um when I chat

01:54:41

to Mark next week I'll definitely bring up some of these these aspects of the conversation into it is there anything else as we go um yeah ask him ask him uh why let you know

01:54:54

do do to him what uh what what people do to me and email ask him ask him for the meaning of life see what see what he says he might actually have a decent answer you know he's a psychoanalyst he might actually have an answer I don't have an answer but but he might so yeah

01:55:07

I'm 50 bring that up thanks but anything any final words Mike anything you want to leave like you've said it all um no the only thing the only thing to say is that uh I will soon uh um they're spinning up a WordPress site for me

01:55:20

that's gonna have a bunch of stuff that uh doesn't go on my official academic site uh so you know essays and other stuff so so keep an eye I'll I'll I'll advertise it on Twitter and then there will be a sign up for you know registration thing for people to get

01:55:32

notifications and so on right is there working a link at the moment a URL there isn't it's it's a few days that they tell me it's a few days away so so I can I can send it to you and then yeah I'll definitely put a link to that for this episode thanks so much Mike once again

01:55:46

it's a pleasure thank you great to see you take it easy [Music] thank you [Music] foreign foreign