❶ Polycomputing (observer-dependent) 1:59 Outlining the discussion 3:50 My favorite comment from round 1 interview 5:00 What is polycomputing? 8:50 An ode to Richard Feynman's "There's plenty of room at the bottom" 11:10 How/when was this discovered? Reductionism, causal power... 14:40 "It's a view that steps away from prediction." 16:20 From abstract: Polycomputing is the ability of the same substrate to simultaneously compute different things *but emphasis on the observer(s)* 17:05 What's an example of polycomputing? 19:40 They took a different approach and actually did experiments with gene regulatory networks (GRNs) 23:18 Different observers extract different utility from the exact same system 26:35 Spatial causal emergence graphs (determinism, degeneracy) | Erik Hoel's micro/macro & effective information 29:25 Inventiveness of John Conway's Game of Life ❷ Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere 34:20 Tell me 3 things to determine intelligence (ball vs mouse on a hill) 39:50 Jeff Hawkins' Thousand Brains Theory 41:05 Agency is not binary, continuum of persuadability 44:50 Where's the bottom of agency? Plants & insects far off from 0 46:55 What is the absolute minimum amount of agency? Some degree of goal directed behavior & indeterminacy... 51:05 Life is a system good at scaling 51:41 "To me, our world doesn't have 0 agency anywhere." 53:50 As an engineer, what can I take advantage of? 55:00 Surely you don't think the weather has any intelligence to it... ❸ Attractor Landscapes 58:35 Homeostatic loops, morphological spaces, attractor landscapes 1:00:35 "Of course we're living in a simulation!" 1:06:45 Attractor landscapes, topography, anatomical morphous space (D'Arcy Thompson) 1:12:28 Planaria stochastic, probability of head shape proportional to evolutionary distance between species 1:15:15 What is the secret of the universe? Attractor landscapes, quantum fields, black holes 1:19:05 We need a new system of ethics for unconventional minds
At 1:47 he just explained exactly how my brain works, I cull as much information about something I'm interested in and then assess the changes in relationships between everything they effect and I get left with a whole new understanding. I have reached a point in my life where I no longer call it a life, it is now an understanding
Using papers as a focal point, accompanied by relevant graphics, takes the discussion to a deeper place. The level of detail is somewhere between a pre-planned talk and an academic paper. Perfect for those of us who want to know more but are not experts or academics. Well done!
7:20 "... the computation is in the mind of the observer, or multiple observers, more than it is a feature of some set of physical events" I think this is really perfect and clarifying! So many people try to define something as being a computation objectively, which I think is logically problematic.
About 15 minutes, letting go of predictive processes, sounds like what they're doing with large language models. 16 minutes, and levels and dimensions, understanding not just the static phase but, the movement as well. If you really want to be predictive, motion has to be part of the entire structure under flex. 30 minutes, whose flying the glider? 31 minutes state, I think refers to understanding the motion of a living thing at every independent point through its movement in relation to its environment. Don't mind me, just commenting as I go, Thank you both very much for allowing us to follow along on this exploration Michael and Carlos. It really sounds like the parameters of morphological space and the ability to use and manipulate this space in a well, defined and cautious manner so like ai we don't create something we won't be able to control in a safe manner. Peace
"Who's flying the glider" - I'd say the dual relationship between glider and environment is what is flying it. There's no single "controller", the "flying" is the emerging observation of the relationship between the two.
I came back to this video thinking I understood something more about emergent properties. I'd love to see another video on Spatial causal emergence graphs
I have a question as to whether we are actually limited by what we would consider to be our 5 censory inputs on the or whether there is potentially other senses that we, as humanity as a whole, do not generally recognize, and maybe undeveloped, or simply underdeveloped, due to the general teaching mainframes that we experience what during our upbringings. He mentioned the ability to measure blood chemistry, but most human beings can sense whether their blood sugar is lower high or not they can absolutely tell whether they are low or high in sodium, or high or low in water intake, it just takes some degree of knowledge as to what those inputs feel like, within their body. We have absolutely, in my understanding, a significant amount more of a sensory input than we give credit to falma it just requires a degree of knowledge that we are not taught about the same way we are taught about responding to visual or auditory stimuli, being the main to, and it is not nearly as directly obvious as our tactile stimuli
If DNA creates life forms to fill niches (problem space) and in the process creates a more complex niche (Scaling) as well as more observers, so in turn it can create more complex life forms to fill the new niche, adding more observers than we live in an intelligent system.
True, but also intelligence in this sense could than be seen as an expected emergent property of things happening - as he states, he expects actual "zero intelligence" things in this sense could only exist if nothing were to ever happen
Observer dependent computation!?!? I'm in! I've been struggling to articulate why I believe there is no objective information out there in the physicality of the external world. I bet this will help. Edit: Carlos, in your conceptions, do you think about a difference between "observer dependent" and "subjectivity dependent"? Is there any difference beyond semantics? For some reason I lean toward subjectivity because it feels more neutral. Edit 2. The anecdote about empirically training the weather was mind blowing. It's hard to realize that we can or should get up from the armchair sometimes. I wonder why ML is hesitant about going to the same lengths for spirit or maybe soul?
I think its worth drawing attention to the fact that, inherently, all our experiences are subjective, and even if beings can agree that certain things happen within certain parameters, That's still subjective, with the Parameters, as well as the 3 special dimensions plus 1 dimension of perceived linear time. Beyond that,, the only thing that could truly be objective would be the everything many spiritual traditions define as the creator, which is, functionally speaking, identical to nothingness, as, in order to be aware of anything, we must percieve the thing as lacking the opposite of the qualia we are experiencing, as that dichotomy is what allows us to experience anything in a meaningful way. Since that creator would necessarily contain all opposites, it is not even able to be experienced. That's why I think it chortle to manifest within existence, which I think is a necessary quality of consciousness anyways, as, Since consciousness is defined by having experience, conscious being were to cease to have experience, it would no longer be classified as conscious
@@sethrenville798 I'll have to read this over a few times to understand you clearly. It seems that we agree on some ways. However my gut tells me we might disagree about space and time. I support Bergson's conception of time as a fundamental flowing process which may embed durations, while space might be holographic in nature.
imagine a gene affecting 3 different things imagine looking at 2d picture of 3 dimensional movement imagine how wave moves when you try to assess objectively any decision or occurrence you assume knowing the dimension while there is always a possibility you don't see another movement happening so guarantees your wrong assessment.. is it going slower? or maybe it speeds up on different axis you didn't considered being part of element observed just a thought
@@szymonbaranowski8184 interesting. Are you familiar with the measurement problems? I sense that your three imagine statements have significance. I'm not sure I understand what you intended. Is it that our observations are inherently limited?
Woooow. Beautiful and totally cutting-edge stuff!! Totally love this guy!! A bit of a random thought, but doesn´t it seem like the universe might be building a model of itself through the information picked up and integrated by each one of the organisms it has ever created? There seems to be an exploratory drive, in the way it develops different types of receptors to populate the boundaries between the self (i.e, the order?) and the non-self (i.e., the caos?), and in the way in which the same information can be integrated into infinite forms (i.e., an ant has a very different integrated representation of a photon than that of a human...). If it is really building a model of itself, we could maybe infer that no life, not even that of the mosquito that I ruthlessly killed the other day, is meaningless, for they all contribute to building the ultimate model.... Did I maybe smoke too much weed? heheheh
Recognition of causality requires a computation. Lifting time references, we compare before with after. Where qualities or the nature of things remain the same, we recognise the context of change. A thrown brick causes a window to break. Before: one sheet of glass. After: many shards, each with the same qualities of part of that sheet. We must lift time references to be able to compare before with after while accepting the validity of contradiction. (Necessary to be able to reason). The process of lifting time references is key to the creation of consciousness. (Glider- "not a real object but a consistent physiological state"). He appears to complicate what is quite simple. A real object does not have to be physical. Everything is part of reality, even the immaterial. Putting up divisions creates unnecessary problems to understanding
When Michael mentions hacking the development with bioelectricity he says that it tends to revert to the most recent evolutionary version. The way I would think about this is that perhaps the system realises there is a fault and to correct the error it resets to an earlier version, similar as to how if a new software version is released and goes wrong they might revert to a prior version.
11:30 That reminds me of Gibson's theory of affordances in ecological psychology. Could we then say, any bodily constitution opens up different affordances? 49:00 Don't you need a Markov blanket to do active inference/VFE minimization? Where did that blanket come from?
Hello Carlos, I really appreciate these videos and have watched many at this point. I just thought that I would raise a topic which might be a bit forward. When I first found this channel, I was off-put by seeing "the truth" in the podcast name. I noticed that you had good guests and eventually pushed past that. I'm not suggesting that you change the name just because of my little comment, but maybe this is something to think about. I'm putting this in the comment section so that maybe others can contribute, tell me it doesn't matter, whatever. It's not that I don't like truth, it's that people throw the word around too casually. Also, this podcast is often not claiming to have "the truth" but is instead "striving to the truth." Many of your guests are not claiming to have the truth, but just putting forward their interesting, yet unproved, ideas.
His idea of the network of cognitive agents interacting with one another in a input-process-output strategy is very similar to Hoffman's model of conscious agents interacting in a vast social network and creating bigger conscious agents via their interactions. Hoffman's agents are out of space and time and at the base level they generate the virtual interface of space-time with its subatomic particles, while Levin's are a mathematical modelling of biological cells. But considering the fractal nature of the conscious agents, I would infer that cells are what higher level, more complex conscious agents look like in the space-time virtual interface. This means that a human being (or any plant or animal) is generated by the social interaction of billions of small conscious agents, each one not realizing they are contributing to the existence of a higher level conscious being. So it's not crazy to think that we ourselves, via our social interactions between other human beings, animals and plants, are contributing to the existence of a higher level conscious being, which sees us as nothing but microscopic cells that are part of its body. Which is exactly what all religions have always said.
Would calling polycomputing polyprocessing be better because it seems like Dr. Levin is saying there is one computation but different personalities looking at the information differently and the ways of looking at it differently are the poly part while the computation is mono.
I think the term is in the sense of it being possible to "perceive" multiple different things as being computed, or to "use" a single given process as a way to compute different things, depending on perspective. So in that sense I think polycomputing would be better than polyprocessing. Not sure if was clear at all : p
i like levin's hacker mindset regarding biology not the evolutionary storytelling mindset though. but we all know that evo storytelling/storytime is necessary for getting funding
also not a fan of his ethics rewrite proposal. all these hacking tools ought to be used for the flourishing of us image of god bearers and the environment that we were given. levin's mindset ought to be "shut up and hack". leave ethics and history to the right worldview, namely, christianity.
At 56:40, Dr. Levin mentions a new publishing. Could you give us the name of the publication in the description? Warm regards. Ps. Your work is equally important to Dr. Levin! Without your interviews, I would not have come across, let alone understood, his gems.
' . . depends who is observing them', or What is-observing: thinking of the economic superorganism ('it's lookin out through both yor eyeholes (at, say, the electic car) and it dont know yor name' (russel hoban))
What's funny is that every observer of this video will get something different out of it. I'm working on my own project and my current question was 'which came first, the chicken or the egg'. The answer is obviously the egg.
Actually manipulation of the weather is already a real thing. Think of the rockets that make it rain. I think training it might be possible too maybe El Nino is a computational behavior?
evolution haha *wink. Carlos could perhaps place his screen a little off to the side next time, this way the observer does not get the light reflex from his screen.
Interesting definition of computation. I think the requirement that it must be useful for something is important. Otherwise it is too vague and not useful as a definition.
Wouldn't starting from the notion of a universal existence predicated on mind rather than matter, make understanding theses principles easier to explain and understand?
I have an impression that continuous references to unseen audience and commenters kind of breaks naturalness of the conversation. Sounds somewhat awkward to me. Best podcasts I've seen are always done like two people just talking together. This creates, I suppose, a kind of connection and enables natural conversation flow.
But surely the biological space can only be full upto to the submolecular level if you assume that the physics at the say quantum level isn't playing a part in influencing the system. This would add a further level of complexity that we even less understanding of at thus time. At the level of cognition, an example of this might be the existence and effects of PSI?
Michael really sees it I call it umwelcartography. he found the species operating system for the biosphere. Please tell him to be gentle with it's biolelectric field.
I’ve met many of the entities that are running these systems within ourselves. They are beautiful magical entities, and they want to serve us as best as they can as long as we honor/love them and honor/love ourselves. There is a meta-consciousness inside our self. We can access it in a beautiful relationship with, and that will relax our whole system and make it move more in harmony. We have music and make musical instruments because that’s probably closer to the true nature of what we are. Vibrating harmonic Waves of energy. When different chords or parts of ourselves are disconnected and not being retuned for the system, that’s when we experience disease, and suffering
why body after years of bad diet and selfinflaming diet changes gene creating histamine intolerance and making more than half of food a hell for own body? is there a above unit mechanism of sacrificing unit decreasing it ability to reproduce, shorter it life or terminate it for good of system/group? like apoptosis of cells in situation of stress and lack of oxygen, which is related also to stopping division of cell and protective from cancer dividing and spreading would unit be aware of other units on biological level and it's own function and some higher goal of wider group survival?
The human brain is composed of two minds; one independent mind in each hemisphere. One can be an ID and wildly creative and often fearful; the other a totally technical Ego and focused on the minutia required for external interactions. They interact like the Super Ego and combine their shared specializations. Why not use this strategy to bring AI under control???
@7:20 nice try. But no cigar. If you want computation to be in the realm of mathematics then it has to be formally defined. So cannot be observer dependent. It can be axiom dependent. Bringing an observer into the frame is just saying some process may look like a computation to them or not, when they compare their observations against axioms. That could be useful for things like sociology of science, but it is not science. If you stick to clear observer free definitions you won't go wrong unless your logic sucks.
Not entirely sure, but I suspect Levin and others don't understand relativity and general convariance. In special and general relativity there is no conscious or sentient observer. "The observer" refers only to a spatiotemporal reference frame. There is no concept of any 'being" involved. "The observer" could be empty space.
Hasn’t the latest discoveries in Quantum experiments already created fundamental issues for relativity? Nobel prize was won last year from a team who had some great breakthroughs.
@@TerminallySerious There is no observers or objects being observed but agencies intra-acting with each other. Nothing like objective reality that you can measure, the moment you measure is the moment you creat a cut, and it’s only through that apparatus cut that we can measure at the quantum level. Knowing relativity without acknowledging its paradoxes with quantum mechanics seems like a very personal an anxious ideology, while claiming the opposite.
And who creates the axioms? who defines the frames? I think his point is that computation can only occur if an ‘observer’ adopts the defined reference frame, and that we can change the computation by changing the frame even when processing the same information
Gosh, there have to be more examples in these talks. I’m good at math but I’m an Economist so I’ve taken advanced calculus, econometrics etc. I’ve read a ton of evolutionary biology and psychology, game theory, and the like. Yet this to me is like in Russian. Is this talk definitively not for me?
a tit overrated (reminds me too much of the Reihman hypotheses), but blessed shall be the ones pushing the envelope within their niche (with extra kudos of finding them)
Losing your job to ai agents is unacceptable. Ai Jobloss is here. So are Ai as weapons. Can we please find a way to Cease Ai / GPT? Or begin Pausing Ai before it’s too late?
Or we could adjust our economic and political systems to take advantage of the new AI Industrial Revolution underway and empower humans to stop needing to participate in economic slavery and begin living creative experiences to feed ideas and imagination into the AI systems which can then process and manifest them for us. 🛸 I’m keen for everyone to have their own personal AI model, secured via blockchain so it is possible to be 1000% sure no one has interfered with our own choices of modelling. Then we can use that assistant to keep us safe and effective in the crazy years that have just started.
I disagree with the whole zero doesn't exist part... Just because we're tweaked to experience one side of zero (the positive side) as non-zero, doesn't mean that the other side (the negative side, which brings the system to a halt) doesn't exist!
Imagine what our environment would look like if someone invented glasses that give us the ability to see only bacteria and viruses in real time. We would look like blobs of multilayered, multicolored, colonies of vibrating and fluctuating waves of influence and tendencies randomly moving towards some unknown goal. They say we can't see parallel dimensions. Invent that and you'll see for yourself our strange neighbors live in, on and around us at all times.
❶ Polycomputing (observer-dependent)
1:59 Outlining the discussion
3:50 My favorite comment from round 1 interview
5:00 What is polycomputing?
8:50 An ode to Richard Feynman's "There's plenty of room at the bottom"
11:10 How/when was this discovered? Reductionism, causal power...
14:40 "It's a view that steps away from prediction."
16:20 From abstract: Polycomputing is the ability of the same substrate to simultaneously compute different things *but emphasis on the observer(s)*
17:05 What's an example of polycomputing?
19:40 They took a different approach and actually did experiments with gene regulatory networks (GRNs)
23:18 Different observers extract different utility from the exact same system
26:35 Spatial causal emergence graphs (determinism, degeneracy) | Erik Hoel's micro/macro & effective information
29:25 Inventiveness of John Conway's Game of Life
❷ Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere
34:20 Tell me 3 things to determine intelligence (ball vs mouse on a hill)
39:50 Jeff Hawkins' Thousand Brains Theory
41:05 Agency is not binary, continuum of persuadability
44:50 Where's the bottom of agency? Plants & insects far off from 0
46:55 What is the absolute minimum amount of agency? Some degree of goal directed behavior & indeterminacy...
51:05 Life is a system good at scaling
51:41 "To me, our world doesn't have 0 agency anywhere."
53:50 As an engineer, what can I take advantage of?
55:00 Surely you don't think the weather has any intelligence to it...
❸ Attractor Landscapes
58:35 Homeostatic loops, morphological spaces, attractor landscapes
1:00:35 "Of course we're living in a simulation!"
1:06:45 Attractor landscapes, topography, anatomical morphous space (D'Arcy Thompson)
1:12:28 Planaria stochastic, probability of head shape proportional to evolutionary distance between species
1:15:15 What is the secret of the universe? Attractor landscapes, quantum fields, black holes
1:19:05 We need a new system of ethics for unconventional minds
Ll pay
I mean... prof.Levin is at the absolute cutting edge of the mainstream biology today.
reality itself even
Cutting edge… cutting planaria!
I don't think it's mainstream yet - but I sure hope it gets to be!! He asks better questions than 99% of science...mind BLOWN.
Fr.
@@Carlos.Explains :)
He's remaining humble even though he's sick on the bongos. Mad respect
It looks like he pissed in the corner.
@@EricDMMiller lol
At 1:47 he just explained exactly how my brain works, I cull as much information about something I'm interested in and then assess the changes in relationships between everything they effect and I get left with a whole new understanding. I have reached a point in my life where I no longer call it a life, it is now an understanding
Can attest to the same method of mental existence, if I may summarize it as such.
This is a dense topic. I think it is going to take a couple of views to digest it all. Nicely done!
Using papers as a focal point, accompanied by relevant graphics, takes the discussion to a deeper place. The level of detail is somewhere between a pre-planned talk and an academic paper. Perfect for those of us who want to know more but are not experts or academics. Well done!
7:20 "... the computation is in the mind of the observer, or multiple observers, more than it is a feature of some set of physical events"
I think this is really perfect and clarifying! So many people try to define something as being a computation objectively, which I think is logically problematic.
Michael you found the force from Star Wars
it exists. We all wanted to believe. Thank you for proving it to the western rational mind.
Fantastic
Thank you so much for sharing your time and energy, this is incredible. I'm drawing so many novel insights and perspectives from this.
Grateful to Mike, for sharing your work and ideas!!!
Thank you Dr. Levin
About 15 minutes, letting go of predictive processes, sounds like what they're doing with large language models. 16 minutes, and levels and dimensions, understanding not just the static phase but, the movement as well. If you really want to be predictive, motion has to be part of the entire structure under flex. 30 minutes, whose flying the glider? 31 minutes state, I think refers to understanding the motion of a living thing at every independent point through its movement in relation to its environment. Don't mind me, just commenting as I go, Thank you both very much for allowing us to follow along on this exploration Michael and Carlos. It really sounds like the parameters of morphological space and the ability to use and manipulate this space in a well, defined and cautious manner so like ai we don't create something we won't be able to control in a safe manner. Peace
"Who's flying the glider" - I'd say the dual relationship between glider and environment is what is flying it. There's no single "controller", the "flying" is the emerging observation of the relationship between the two.
I came back to this video thinking I understood something more about emergent properties. I'd love to see another video on Spatial causal emergence graphs
the light of Levin's gray wizard eyes shineth down good fortune upon all haha 🙂
From the participant observer to the participant designer! 😊
Can’t wait for round 3
I have a question as to whether we are actually limited by what we would consider to be our 5 censory inputs on the or whether there is potentially other senses that we, as humanity as a whole, do not generally recognize, and maybe undeveloped, or simply underdeveloped, due to the general teaching mainframes that we experience what during our upbringings.
He mentioned the ability to measure blood chemistry, but most human beings can sense whether their blood sugar is lower high or not they can absolutely tell whether they are low or high in sodium, or high or low in water intake, it just takes some degree of knowledge as to what those inputs feel like, within their body. We have absolutely, in my understanding, a significant amount more of a sensory input than we give credit to falma it just requires a degree of knowledge that we are not taught about the same way we are taught about responding to visual or auditory stimuli, being the main to, and it is not nearly as directly obvious as our tactile stimuli
If DNA creates life forms to fill niches (problem space) and in the process creates a more complex niche (Scaling) as well as more observers, so in turn it can create more complex life forms to fill the new niche, adding more observers than we live in an intelligent system.
True, but also intelligence in this sense could than be seen as an expected emergent property of things happening - as he states, he expects actual "zero intelligence" things in this sense could only exist if nothing were to ever happen
Oh my god he mentioned Giordano Brüno. My man
Not since Dawkin’s “Extended Phenotype” has there been such a successful mainstreaming of novel biological ideas
Observer dependent computation!?!? I'm in! I've been struggling to articulate why I believe there is no objective information out there in the physicality of the external world. I bet this will help.
Edit: Carlos, in your conceptions, do you think about a difference between "observer dependent" and "subjectivity dependent"? Is there any difference beyond semantics? For some reason I lean toward subjectivity because it feels more neutral.
Edit 2. The anecdote about empirically training the weather was mind blowing. It's hard to realize that we can or should get up from the armchair sometimes. I wonder why ML is hesitant about going to the same lengths for spirit or maybe soul?
I think its worth drawing attention to the fact that, inherently, all our experiences are subjective, and even if beings can agree that certain things happen within certain parameters, That's still subjective, with the Parameters, as well as the 3 special dimensions plus 1 dimension of perceived linear time.
Beyond that,, the only thing that could truly be objective would be the everything many spiritual traditions define as the creator, which is, functionally speaking, identical to nothingness, as, in order to be aware of anything, we must percieve the thing as lacking the opposite of the qualia we are experiencing, as that dichotomy is what allows us to experience anything in a meaningful way. Since that creator would necessarily contain all opposites, it is not even able to be experienced. That's why I think it chortle to manifest within existence, which I think is a necessary quality of consciousness anyways, as, Since consciousness is defined by having experience, conscious being were to cease to have experience, it would no longer be classified as conscious
@@sethrenville798 I'll have to read this over a few times to understand you clearly. It seems that we agree on some ways. However my gut tells me we might disagree about space and time. I support Bergson's conception of time as a fundamental flowing process which may embed durations, while space might be holographic in nature.
imagine a gene affecting 3 different things
imagine looking at 2d picture of 3 dimensional movement
imagine how wave moves
when you try to assess objectively any decision or occurrence you assume knowing
the dimension while there is always a possibility you don't see another movement
happening so guarantees your wrong assessment..
is it going slower? or maybe it speeds up on different axis you didn't considered being part of element observed
just a thought
@@szymonbaranowski8184 interesting. Are you familiar with the measurement problems? I sense that your three imagine statements have significance. I'm not sure I understand what you intended. Is it that our observations are inherently limited?
@@S.G.Wallnertime is an illusion that results from the boundary between entropy states.
Round 3 soon? Great stuff
Different interpretation of the life form/machine is all kinds of Noetic Institute. good stuff.
Great. Video
Woooow. Beautiful and totally cutting-edge stuff!! Totally love this guy!! A bit of a random thought, but doesn´t it seem like the universe might be building a model of itself through the information picked up and integrated by each one of the organisms it has ever created? There seems to be an exploratory drive, in the way it develops different types of receptors to populate the boundaries between the self (i.e, the order?) and the non-self (i.e., the caos?), and in the way in which the same information can be integrated into infinite forms (i.e., an ant has a very different integrated representation of a photon than that of a human...). If it is really building a model of itself, we could maybe infer that no life, not even that of the mosquito that I ruthlessly killed the other day, is meaningless, for they all contribute to building the ultimate model....
Did I maybe smoke too much weed? heheheh
Recognition of causality requires a computation. Lifting time references, we compare before with after. Where qualities or the nature of things remain the same, we recognise the context of change. A thrown brick causes a window to break. Before: one sheet of glass. After: many shards, each with the same qualities of part of that sheet. We must lift time references to be able to compare before with after while accepting the validity of contradiction. (Necessary to be able to reason). The process of lifting time references is key to the creation of consciousness. (Glider- "not a real object but a consistent physiological state"). He appears to complicate what is quite simple. A real object does not have to be physical. Everything is part of reality, even the immaterial. Putting up divisions creates unnecessary problems to understanding
When Michael mentions hacking the development with bioelectricity he says that it tends to revert to the most recent evolutionary version. The way I would think about this is that perhaps the system realises there is a fault and to correct the error it resets to an earlier version, similar as to how if a new software version is released and goes wrong they might revert to a prior version.
Goal directed behaviour within the constraints of system and environment.
11:30 That reminds me of Gibson's theory of affordances in ecological psychology. Could we then say, any bodily constitution opens up different affordances?
49:00 Don't you need a Markov blanket to do active inference/VFE minimization? Where did that blanket come from?
If I wanted to get to the point where your comments made sense, what stuff should I read?
Hello Carlos, I really appreciate these videos and have watched many at this point. I just thought that I would raise a topic which might be a bit forward. When I first found this channel, I was off-put by seeing "the truth" in the podcast name. I noticed that you had good guests and eventually pushed past that. I'm not suggesting that you change the name just because of my little comment, but maybe this is something to think about. I'm putting this in the comment section so that maybe others can contribute, tell me it doesn't matter, whatever.
It's not that I don't like truth, it's that people throw the word around too casually. Also, this podcast is often not claiming to have "the truth" but is instead "striving to the truth." Many of your guests are not claiming to have the truth, but just putting forward their interesting, yet unproved, ideas.
Thank you for sharing. I agree with you and a rebrand is coming soon!
In what way would you classify light as factoring into the "the universe doesn't have zero agency anywhere?"
i just got to hear the Levin Family's extreme home office bongo noise
His idea of the network of cognitive agents interacting with one another in a input-process-output strategy is very similar to Hoffman's model of conscious agents interacting in a vast social network and creating bigger conscious agents via their interactions.
Hoffman's agents are out of space and time and at the base level they generate the virtual interface of space-time with its subatomic particles, while Levin's are a mathematical modelling of biological cells. But considering the fractal nature of the conscious agents, I would infer that cells are what higher level, more complex conscious agents look like in the space-time virtual interface.
This means that a human being (or any plant or animal) is generated by the social interaction of billions of small conscious agents, each one not realizing they are contributing to the existence of a higher level conscious being.
So it's not crazy to think that we ourselves, via our social interactions between other human beings, animals and plants, are contributing to the existence of a higher level conscious being, which sees us as nothing but microscopic cells that are part of its body.
Which is exactly what all religions have always said.
Would calling polycomputing polyprocessing be better because it seems like Dr. Levin is saying there is one computation but different personalities looking at the information differently and the ways of looking at it differently are the poly part while the computation is mono.
I think the term is in the sense of it being possible to "perceive" multiple different things as being computed, or to "use" a single given process as a way to compute different things, depending on perspective. So in that sense I think polycomputing would be better than polyprocessing. Not sure if was clear at all : p
i like levin's hacker mindset regarding biology not the evolutionary storytelling mindset though. but we all know that evo storytelling/storytime is necessary for getting funding
also not a fan of his ethics rewrite proposal. all these hacking tools ought to be used for the flourishing of us image of god bearers and the environment that we were given. levin's mindset ought to be "shut up and hack". leave ethics and history to the right worldview, namely, christianity.
At 56:40, Dr. Levin mentions a new publishing. Could you give us the name of the publication in the description? Warm regards.
Ps. Your work is equally important to Dr. Levin! Without your interviews, I would not have come across, let alone understood, his gems.
I'm thinking it might be "Collective Intelligence of Morphogenesis as a Teleonomic Process," please let me know!
Levin ftw
Maybe we can think of the particulars of the Interface (of a computation) that determine the perspective?
Calling Don Hoffman
' . . depends who is observing them', or What is-observing: thinking of the economic superorganism ('it's lookin out through both yor eyeholes (at, say, the electic car) and it dont know yor name' (russel hoban))
Hey, Carlos! Loving your channel so far! Thanks for the great interviews! Is there a good way to get in contact you directly?
What's funny is that every observer of this video will get something different out of it.
I'm working on my own project and my current question was 'which came first, the chicken or the egg'.
The answer is obviously the egg.
Observer being any embodiment of a theory I think.
Actually manipulation of the weather is already a real thing. Think of the rockets that make it rain. I think training it might be possible too maybe El Nino is a computational behavior?
WHat is the name of the painting at 11:17?
Hey Christopher! It's from midjourney. :)
evolution haha *wink.
Carlos could perhaps place his screen a little off to the side next time, this way the observer does not get the light reflex from his screen.
Just got non-reflective glasses yesterday! Hope those'll help with the glare. :)
Interesting definition of computation. I think the requirement that it must be useful for something is important. Otherwise it is too vague and not useful as a definition.
Wouldn't starting from the notion of a universal existence predicated on mind rather than matter, make understanding theses principles easier to explain and understand?
I am not sure how new this is to molecular biology or computation / function theory.
Weather the intelligence of the hydrological cycle.
The corollary to prediction would be Preemption.
I have an impression that continuous references to unseen audience and commenters kind of breaks naturalness of the conversation. Sounds somewhat awkward to me.
Best podcasts I've seen are always done like two people just talking together. This creates, I suppose, a kind of connection and enables natural conversation flow.
But surely the biological space can only be full upto to the submolecular level if you assume that the physics at the say quantum level isn't playing a part in influencing the system. This would add a further level of complexity that we even less understanding of at thus time. At the level of cognition, an example of this might be the existence and effects of PSI?
Vestigial Bongos
DNA Signal Evidence Now, Consciousness
Michael really sees it I call it umwelcartography. he found the species operating system for the biosphere. Please tell him to be gentle with it's biolelectric field.
I’ve met many of the entities that are running these systems within ourselves. They are beautiful magical entities, and they want to serve us as best as they can as long as we honor/love them and honor/love ourselves.
There is a meta-consciousness inside our self. We can access it in a beautiful relationship with, and that will relax our whole system and make it move more in harmony.
We have music and make musical instruments because that’s probably closer to the true nature of what we are. Vibrating harmonic Waves of energy. When different chords or parts of ourselves are disconnected and not being retuned for the system, that’s when we experience disease, and suffering
How did you meet the entities?
why body after years of bad diet and selfinflaming diet changes gene creating histamine intolerance and making more than half of food a hell for own body?
is there a above unit mechanism of sacrificing unit decreasing it ability to reproduce, shorter it life or terminate it for good of system/group?
like apoptosis of cells in situation of stress and lack of oxygen, which is related also to stopping division of cell and protective from cancer dividing and spreading
would unit be aware of other units on biological level and it's own function and some higher goal of wider group survival?
The human brain is composed of two minds; one independent mind in each hemisphere. One can be an ID and wildly creative and often fearful; the other a totally technical Ego and focused on the minutia required for external interactions. They interact like the Super Ego and combine their shared specializations. Why not use this strategy to bring AI under control???
Why is the music in the background?
It's only for the highlight at the beginning, post 2:00 there's no music.
Stephen Wolfram covers some of this content from a different perspective.
Stephen Wolfram is one that I have to keep circling back to...
rabbit hole incoming
OMGOMGOMG :D
Does ChatGPT believe in gliders ?
Sounds a lot like Dawkins’ “Extended Phenotype”, but applied to observers rather than environments
Hummm...very exciting new ideas to integrated if by brain can....i hope my 120 IQ will be enought..??? Thanx for your good videos. Peace & love
@7:20 nice try. But no cigar. If you want computation to be in the realm of mathematics then it has to be formally defined. So cannot be observer dependent. It can be axiom dependent. Bringing an observer into the frame is just saying some process may look like a computation to them or not, when they compare their observations against axioms. That could be useful for things like sociology of science, but it is not science. If you stick to clear observer free definitions you won't go wrong unless your logic sucks.
Not entirely sure, but I suspect Levin and others don't understand relativity and general convariance. In special and general relativity there is no conscious or sentient observer. "The observer" refers only to a spatiotemporal reference frame. There is no concept of any 'being" involved. "The observer" could be empty space.
Hasn’t the latest discoveries in Quantum experiments already created fundamental issues for relativity?
Nobel prize was won last year from a team who had some great breakthroughs.
@@TerminallySerious There is no observers or objects being observed but agencies intra-acting with each other. Nothing like objective reality that you can measure, the moment you measure is the moment you creat a cut, and it’s only through that apparatus cut that we can measure at the quantum level. Knowing relativity without acknowledging its paradoxes with quantum mechanics seems like a very personal an anxious ideology, while claiming the opposite.
And who creates the axioms? who defines the frames? I think his point is that computation can only occur if an ‘observer’ adopts the defined reference frame, and that we can change the computation by changing the frame even when processing the same information
It gets gloopy glibd
Gosh, there have to be more examples in these talks. I’m good at math but I’m an Economist so I’ve taken advanced calculus, econometrics etc. I’ve read a ton of evolutionary biology and psychology, game theory, and the like. Yet this to me is like in Russian. Is this talk definitively not for me?
It the ❤️ heart 💜 beat y do u 🎿 mixx when My ⛵ baby kixxix me knitting needles wool socks 🧦🧦
If you cannot identify the initial conditions of a system then you cannot claim to fully understand it.
We are God experiencing itself 🤔
a tit overrated (reminds me too much of the Reihman hypotheses), but blessed shall be the ones pushing the envelope within their niche (with extra kudos of finding them)
Why couldnt this idea of agency just be an open set? No absolute minimum, fuzzy at the bottom open at the top?
Losing your job to ai agents is unacceptable. Ai Jobloss is here. So are Ai as weapons. Can we please find a way to Cease Ai / GPT? Or begin Pausing Ai before it’s too late?
Dune series is a prophetic book 😉
Or we could adjust our economic and political systems to take advantage of the new AI Industrial Revolution underway and empower humans to stop needing to participate in economic slavery and begin living creative experiences to feed ideas and imagination into the AI systems which can then process and manifest them for us. 🛸
I’m keen for everyone to have their own personal AI model, secured via blockchain so it is possible to be 1000% sure no one has interfered with our own choices of modelling.
Then we can use that assistant to keep us safe and effective in the crazy years that have just started.
I disagree with the whole zero doesn't exist part... Just because we're tweaked to experience one side of zero (the positive side) as non-zero, doesn't mean that the other side (the negative side, which brings the system to a halt) doesn't exist!
Imagine what our environment would look like if someone invented glasses that give us the ability to see only bacteria and viruses in real time. We would look like blobs of multilayered, multicolored, colonies of vibrating and fluctuating waves of influence and tendencies randomly moving towards some unknown goal. They say we can't see parallel dimensions. Invent that and you'll see for yourself our strange neighbors live in, on and around us at all times.
What's with the annoying background music? Oh, good. It went away.
Please. Lip smacking sound is very irritating....
Kindfully timestamp the lip smackings and I will edit them out.
What's with the music? distracting.
Thanks for the feedback. My attempt to give the intros more pop. I'll exclude music in the future.
By changing the algorithm, you can vacuously compute any output from any input.